Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Yeah, Amazon's entire US-East region was pretty much down: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247307

That's where the Guild's servers are hosted. Seems resolved now.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri Can you provide an example of the sort of markup you wish you could write?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Hmm, the bbcode parser definitely is trim-happy where string.trim() is a function that removes all leading/trailing whitespace with impunity including newlines and tabs.

Sometimes when writing post, our whitespace is intentional, but sometimes we use whitespace/newlines only to organize our markup visually and we don't intend all of it to be translated literally. The parser just isn't very refined enough to tell the difference in many cases.

I will experiment with relaxing/removing the trim logic, but the ideal solution is to write a string.smartTrim() function that can recognize the sort of whitespace we add only to make the actual markup aesthetically pleasing.

For example, I want to write this:

[h1]My Title[/h1]
                       <-- Aesthetic newline
Here is my post.

instead of this:

[h1]My Title[/h1] Here is my post.

to get the spacing I want.

<Snipped quote by Mahz> By behaviour, yes. As the last edits dictate, though, the cookie has an expiration date in 2016 ... it simply isn't respected. Tried several times to make sure it was not a browser update or similar one time occurrence messing with it, but no, it keeps happening, and only for RPG. All other cookies seem to work as intended. (FF 40.0.3 for Ubuntu canonical 1.0, at the time being.)

@Shienvien

Thanks for the info. The guild's remember-me cookie expires in one year because apparently one year is the smallest maximum that works in most browsers on most OS. Maybe it isn't working for you because it expires in 365 days + the remaining fraction of the current day. I'll change it to a 300 day expiration to rule out that hypothesis once and for all.

Goodbye to #roleplayerguild IRC chat

I changed the topic title from "Goodbye to #roleplayerguild" to "Goodbye to #roleplayerguild IRC chat" to ward off confusion.

I've lurked in the chat since around the time it was created, and I've always appreciated the IRC channel's important role as a place to hang out that was distinctly separate from the Guild. I've often used the channel as a place to touch base with people without having to put on my admin hat, login to the forum, and catch up on actual work.

I appreciate the time and effort of Harsh and everyone else that kept the chat alive over the years. For instance, Harsh is responsible for putting in the nag effort that's often required to get me to do basic things like update a link on the homepage.

It's nice to see @Akami post, finally filling in some history/trivia that I've wondered for years.

Anyways, I see this announcement as an end to the more active and deliberate operation of the channel, not the end of it all. I'll still lurk there.

Writing up an extensive murder scene for a roleplay like

When I made and RP about the wars between Early Islam and the Romans, I got a little nervous because I kept researching shit about Islamic theology and jihad.

@Vilageidiotx

Then you went and posted on some sort of sick, text-based, alt-reality jihad simulator with the other terrorists.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Thanks. Looks like two of the guild's servers were down briefly until they realized they had to reboot. Many people didn't encounter an issue because they were routed to one of the servers that was still online until the others became available again.

On another note, @Mahz, the logout issue is back...

@Shienvien

Thanks for the report. Is it the exact same issue you were having before, how "Remember Me" just doesn't seem to do anything? Anything smell different from last time?

Erh... I don't like the idea of mandatory introductory posts. There are a few reasons why I never make them unless I absolutely have to, and generally tend to consider "Introduce Yourself" subforums spam. Did bots get better than humans at captchas and other anti-bot measures already?

@Shienvien

The spammers are actually cheap human labor.

My first priority on the spam front is to create a Report Post system and improve the mod tooling. I'm unlikely to do anything more until it turns out that the Guild's spam problem is growing, but for the most part it seems to just come in waves.

Strange Message Alert

Thanks for the report.

I looked at the server logs and apparently two of the guild's three servers ran out of memory which soon triggered their auto-reboot procedures. Nothing critical, just routine temporary downtime.

Looks like it lasted for no longer than 15 minutes and many people never noticed it because they were being routed to the third server that was still online.

Mahz's Dev Journal

The Guild is fluctuating from being down to being up. It's down about 50% of the time, enough for me to not risk switching my account.

@Webmaster

Weird, the server reports zero downtime over the past 24 hours aside from one automated reboot.