And the first "Comment of the Ambiguous Time Period".
Dionysus has been having some fun with one of today's quotes from Today Christian here:
http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=102144&Page=1#1687158
I've been snickering at his first answer for a while now. Good read for anyone who needs a laugh out of this place. Plenty of other good ones in there too, but nothing else has stuck with me quite so long.
For those that don't know, the earlier revisions of FSTDT had a few issues. Not little ones either, effectively one person had gone through and set everything to do with quote approvals and the top 100 and it wasn't the Administrator or the Programmer of the time. This is why public admin is as locked down as it is now, and why it will accuse folks of cheating from time to time, it's also why we have such massive quote archives back in 2008. I've been able to re-work the ranking system and undo the attempts at manipulation of the top 100, but going over just shy of 10,000 quotes to see what does and doesn't suck(and really the rest of the archives) is a rather daunting task.
So I've been working on a solution, one that could more or less integrate into public admin and let us police the quality of quotes actively from this point forward. Simply put, it would be a 'Flag this quote for review' system. I'd take volunteers and set them up with the ability to set quotes up for review and create Issues to detail just what is wrong with the quote. If it would need whole scale deletion or some corrections. Once marked it would enter a separate public admin queue where all flagged quotes are brought to the attention of the volunteers for voting and commentary. Since they would all have noted problems I'd handle final changes myself.
But that's not the part that I've been kicking around lately, right now I'm thinking of changing out the Issues we have(a text box entry that's displayed in public admin) and replacing it with a more detailed change recommendation/tracking system in which the person entering the Issue would be able to make specific alterations to parts of the quotes, and those alterations would be what people vote and comment on rather than the general idea the quote would be reviewed. If someone finds a bad URL, or a wrong attribution, they submit a corrected version for people to review along with any comments. As it cycles through public admin people select which changes they approve of and the approval vote counts as an endorsement of the changes. Which would save me the work of parsing through hundreds if not thousands of comments over time to identify the needed changes. It'd also be more complicated than anything else I'm working on at the moment, but staring at those archive numbers I think it'd be worth it.
As a note on system development, actually being familiar with databases... LINQ isn't worth the ones and zeros it's printed on for DB access. Be nice to leverage that knowledge against in memory objects, but for all the resume polish in the world it's not worth dealing with on the back end of this place. I'm going to be bringing down a local copy of the site to let me re-engineer the database for the new version and will probably make a number of random comments that make little sense to those not familiar. If anyone is interested I can detail a bit of what I'm doing, some is damn useful if you're catapulted into taking care of a database.
Oi hoy,
Working my way through more quotes now and I've nailed the blatant spam. That said we get a shitload of comments a day, if you guys catch something report it here for me. Odds are I'll be cleaning it up regularly for a bit until the spammer realizes I'm back. I'll include old spam in this too, can't hurt to clean up the site a bit, just give me a day or two to deal with it.
And a did you know, only 28.58% of the use of the word penis since June first has been contained within spam, when we have a penis enlargement pill spammer. Just saying guys.
Vacation got a tad more vacationy than expected. Getting the quotes out now. Expect a deluge.
Think I have a fair grasp on my audience now, I'll keep the tech heavy bits out unless they're particularly interesting from here on out. But right now I have a bit of a time and at least one thought worth discussing.
Poe as a tag. Up to this point I'd only spelled out what I'll call the core tags, the ones that are required for a quote to be approved, but I want to expand them so that they indicate content to some extent, but a Poe tag is a tad different. There are a fair number of quotes that get approved which people either refuse to believe are real or wind up being able to prove really where faked, but typically they're pretty damn funny to get approved anyway.
So, adding it as a tag rather than removing the quote. It would let us indicate that "Yeah, it's probably fake" without completely losing the amusement of what was said. Of course, there's also the problem of keeping people from labeling every quote a Poe, what with the law and all. But that's a problem for something I'll detail later.
Alright, I've largely settled into the backend needs and high level design for most of the site so it's time to do a check on another suggestion. Making the site open source, I'm not opposed to this, but as with the community articles I would want at least some commitment before I post the code somewhere. Heartbleed and other recent issues should highlight some of the issues with open source, but frankly there's about three places that need security on the site and I'd take all the help I can get with anti-spam and other measures. So, if I get some hands up from people who are already familiar with the tech I'll do the extra setup involved, otherwise I'll get cracking in about two weeks.
Backend Tech I'm talking about, C#, MSSQL, most likely featuring entity framework, MVC and Linq. Honestly the last three are resume padding and not that difficult to get your mind around, so the using C# for web development and MSSQL would be helpful backend. Frontend is most likely going to be jQuery with some more recent CSS and HTML. Very much open to UI design suggestions even if you don't know your ass from your elbow in terms of website design, but I have a core of ideas to work.
The other big decision I'll need to make prior to putting the new site anywhere live is the host. I have a contender but I'm still wide open to suggestion. I'd need .Net hosting for asp.net 4.5 and MVC, a few gigs of available database space and a significant amount of bandwidth. Let me know if anyone has good or bad experiences with a given host.
As a note, I'm going to be a tad busy the next two weeks so I likely won't have time to do another post till after the 4th. But when I do it'll involve something to do with actual development of the site.
Been rather busy, but have two thoughts to bounce off folks.
I'd mentioned a header with access to the existing pages and few other bits of functionality. Well, the one big bit in my mind would be keeping current archive prominent on all pages, as well as allowing people to change archive at any given time and remain on the same page. All seems reasonably useful. Well, the recent fix to the Random page brought up at least one point where people like to see quotes mixed together, so I'm very seriously considering an 'all archives' selection. Perhaps even making it the default instead of fundies. Thoughts on what the default should be?
Public admin and the handling of new quotes has been another issue that's come up and it occurred to me there's a pretty simple answer I could build into the new system since it allows for voting on 100% of quotes. As soon as any quote hits the approval threshold it's shunted into one of two categories, either approved or final admin. Final admin only applying to records which have noted issues on them and everything else appears on the main page immediately after the last vote to approve. With enough people in the admin queue it'd drastically reduce wait times and the work I have to do to keep the site running. If anyone sees a hole in it let me know before I get my hopes up. Only big difference I can think of is that quotes would appear throughout the day rather than a whole bunch once a day.
Lastly, I've seen some off hand complaints about the submission page, but nothing specific. It's my next thing to poke at design wise, so I'd love to have some detailed feed back on what people do or don't like about the current submission system.
Submissions for Community Articles is now open. To submit an article please do the following.
Send the following to Submit@fstdt.net
* A short intro about yourself and why you are part of the community.
* If you have any links that you want included please make note of them, I have little issue with cross posted material.
* If you wish to have the article linked to your account be sure to note that, I can get that setup.
* If you wish to remain anonymous as of the publishing note that and I will withhold all details, but I'm not doing completely anon submission. I want at least a name(real or used on the site) so I can have a private record.
* If you want editorial review indicate such and I'll see what I can do.
* Then the article as text within the email. I'm not doing attachments, it's all becoming HTML anyway.
Currently I have zero limits on topics, but do ask it be some how related to the site, it's topics or be particularly interesting.
I'll reply with any editorializing I would do on an article in my return message confirming the submission will be published and will wait on approval of my own comments before publishing.
Currently I'm the one and only person involved in reviewing articles, I will check with the author before sending the article to anyone else for review. Should an article be rejected the reasons will be noted in the response. If there is a significant number of submissions I'll make a note of it in the community channel and it may wind up in a holding pattern for a while.
Once an article is approved for publishing and I've confirmed the authors approval of my own comments I'll feed the article into a queue. Depending on how many submissions I get will influence how often it's posted, but right now my goal is one per week, most likely on Monday or Friday.
This post will be modified to be up to date with any changes in policy or requirements and can always be found as the first post in the community channel.
Greetings commie mutant traitors!
Or at least I'm reasonably sure we've been called all of those at one point or another. There's a charity bundle going for the RPG Paranoia which is about as close as you can come to actually living in CSTDT.
You live in alpha complex where friend computer has selected you and a number of others to be granted red security clearance to help root out the mutant commie traitors. Friend computer does not tolerate failure in it's directives, nor does it tolerate the presence of subversives. Which is a slight problem as each one of you happens to fit every last one of those categories, will be given orders that are above your security clearance to read, but will result in your death if you fail them. Lie, cheat, back stab and straight up murder your way to being the lone survivor to ensure the correct story gets told in scenarios of equally absurd premise and difficulty.
Having read through the main book of a friends some time ago I'll be getting this. Any system that has rules that get you shot for mentioning the rules is perfect to me. Even better, 10% goes to a good cause(beyond getting yourself cheap RPG books). Half goes to Electronic Frontier Foundation and half goes to Human Rights Watch. If this doesn't strike your fancy you might want to keep up with Bundle of Holding anyway, they've had a lot of great packages in the past that at the very least make for very interesting reading material, and 10% of all sales go to charities selected by the publishers.
The major aspect lacking from the last Development post was the complete lack of interface styling, and I want to make sure my opinions aren't off base.
I'm not particularly fond of some modern interface design, I think the strengths of what the site has lie largely in the simplicity of the layout and the fact it'll use the majority of the screen space it's allotted. After buzzing over a fair number of interfaces I'm seeing a lot of overly complicated designs that result in significant waste of screen space once you're past the menu and/or ads. Another bit I don't see the point in is the endless scroll interfaces, I get that people don't always want to click pages, but we have some massive archives and I'd much rather keep my place in them as I read through. So unless someone tells me otherwise I'm going to say the general layout is more or less acceptable and what the site needs is a general application of style and perhaps some tie-in functionality.
That tie-in functionality is where I'm most interested in looking right now. Things like a proper Archive and User header added to the site, along with a nicer styling of the existing menu. Still up top, out of the way, and not wasting massive amounts of screen space, but actually telling people what part of the site they're on and who they're logged in as. Another rather common bit of functionality I've seen and debated is the "repost this elsewhere" link set many blog/quote sites have, hit a button and repost/link to the material on any of a number of services. If people think they'd find it useful it's something I'd work in.
But, I do have one massive exception to my 'same layout' theory. Making comments, some way or another I will be finding a way to disassociate this completely from the page refresh. Right now I'm thinking a nice little pop up panel from a reply option that's processed asynchronously. What's that mean in normal people speak? You can hit refresh without double posting. One of my key goals, and frankly not that hard so long as I don't use any of what currently exists.
What would people like to see added to the site in such a capacity? Am I wrong on hating endless scroll? Let me know what you think. Also, yes I am skipping out on writing up submission guide lines, I'll do that this weekend.
I have a bit of a different post today. One of the things I've wanted to try and do is to give at least some kind of voice to the community beyond snarky comments. I know there's a great deal of experience out there on this site and I'd like at least some of it to actually get heard. As such I'm proposing a Community channel within this blog. Community members could submit articles and so long as it passes basic scrutiny I'd post one or so a week. Opinion pieces, stories, letter to the editor kind of things or anything that contributes to the FSTDT community. I know there's interesting discussions on here and some epic take downs hidden in the comments, we had one just the other day over here where a commenter by the name of Jaye does a point by point take down of one of the odder recent submissions. What I'm offering is the chance to do so in it's own main page spotlight, and not necessarily in response to quotes.
I'd have relatively few requirements on submissions, but I would hold final approval. Given I'm willing to post something by His4Life with relatively few reservations it'd take a fair bit to get rejected out right. However, what I don't want to do is start one, get all of one post and then have it peter out. So I want to know just who if anyone would be interested and if enough people are I'll setup the base rules and a submission process. So make some noise in the comments here if you're interested writing. WTF! the quote if you think you'd be interested in reading.
Alright, have the basic mockup together. Now that I have it I'm not entirely sure why I thought I needed pictures, anyway here goes.
When you enter public admin you would be presented with a listing of quotes as shown below:
image
For every quote currently displayed within your public admin filters you'll have one of those.
Mostly what is shown on any given quote page today in a slightly crapper format, excepting the currently suggested tags and the Admin Panel. Well, the format will definitely be better when I spend more than 20 seconds on it, but the black boxes should give any aspiring designers an idea of my general div layout. More partitions can be added as needed, but that's my basics. The suggested tags do a quick show of any tags that have already been selected for the quote and when complete the admin panel will have one of those nice "I'm expandable push me" arrows in it's left corner.
When you push said not-yet-existent arrow the panel for the current quote will expand and display the following:
image
Giving all the current Admin details for the quote and supplying a method to enter any of information you need to enter.
Issues cover any general observations of a quote, be it corrections that need to be made, or reactions to the quote to explain your vote. In this case we have one person having had a slight overload and noted such. Any text entered into the issue will be saved when the admin changes are submitted, and will be displayed to anyone who examines the quote after that.
Our new big feature, Tags are the next major section. All tags are followed by their current vote count, any tag with a vote count of 1 or higher is selected automatically. If you wish to add a new tag all you need to do is select it, as I have with 'Scary' in honor of the guy in the comments of this quote who seems to think it involves a dead waitress, when the admin changes are submitted it will increase the tag's count from 0 to 1. The remaining tags would increment from 1 to 2. If you disagree with an existing tag, unselecting it will cause you to vote against that tag being included. If a tag is at 0 already, leaving it unchecked won't push it down any farther.
The last section is the quote approval selections, with effectively the same three options we have now along with tracking on how many time each has been given thus far. Approve, Reject(I like it more than Delete) and Abstain. Hitting the Submit Admin Changes button will pass this selection and any other admin panel data to the system through an asynchronous call. What this means is you get a little spinning wheel only on the one quote and can still play with the rest of the quotes you have displayed on the page and the quote will be completely removed from your public admin access. Once the call completes you will receive a notice that your changes have been submitted, and there shouldn't be any conflicts if multiple submissions are made in a short time frame.
What this gives us is the ability to look at all the quotes available, let people ignore certain quotes and continue out of order, not cause anyone to miss quotes if they check into public admin regularly and in the case of duplicates select the best one rather than the first one.
The potential problems would be voting 'irregularities' which I have a real simple plan to get around. Rather than incrementing the vote when a public admin vote is pressed, the entire vote will be recalculated using the most negative vote on record for all voters. Even if someone breaks the system their vote will still only count once.
The undecided mostly consist of the 'Public Admin Filters' I hinted at up above. Right now my plans for those would be having a day by day selection for public admin quotes. You pick a day and you have all of the quotes submitted that day are presented to you. But I'm open to more ideas on that, particularly any that would be useful for identifying duplicated quotes.
It's June 1st and the blog's getting a bit of a make over.
It is now publicly accessible, has it's own image and has a new name, Distind Says the Darndest Things. The image is a laughing Father Jack that happened to strike my fancy. If you're reading this and don't know who that is, find a way to watch the linked show. We'll see how the blog being public goes, but so long as the signal to noise ratio stays reasonable it'll stay that way.
If you've been following along already you'll know I owe everyone a mock up of a new public admin interface, but right now I owe myself some freaking sleep that illness has ensured I didn't get. There's an outline together but a visual representation will be better for showing the points I want feedback on.
I've been kicking around a public admin design I'm going to post at least one mock up of this weekend, and in doing so I think I have a good start. I also realized I have a few core tags I know I want to have.
Funny, Stupid and Scary.
These three tags could go a long way in picking out quotes you'd rather see at the moment and if a quote is submitted and doesn't hit one of these three we know off the bat to dismiss it.
Beyond that I've been going back and forth with the idea of making the archives themselves tag based. Having Fundie, Conspiracy and Racist tags and rather than doing some separate archive plus tag setup, the site would be able to generate an archive for any given tag. Perhaps even combinations of them(this'd be more of a pain in the ass). On the upside this would allow for multi-category posts to be tagged as such clearly, on the down side it would mean they'd show up multiple archives and I'm not sure how well having the same quote in multiple places would go over.
Things to ponder while I try and figure out how I got a cold in May.
Having done my serious review of the code, I'm going to bump the full reworking of the site up rather than trying to get a handful more features added into what already exists. The code works, but that's about the extent of it, aside from search which I've completely re-written and some of the core quote retrieval code there's little to salvage in what I have.
But, the bits of good news:
*User accounts won't be removed, I have control over the data and can port accounts to whatever I need to.
*I'm going to do some improvements to general lay out, but I will keep the relatively simple layout because it works on damn near anything. Just some rounding or nicer menus. Maybe even a "Change your archive" selection that's actually visible.
*Friendlier URLS will be a thing, and I'll do my damnedest to continue to support core existing URLs. I don't see any reason I can't keep them as of now.
*The crux of my implementation is going to be tags, particularly in seeing if I can get them to work along with some of the key technology improvements I've been eyeing.
There are a few other smaller bits that I'm looking at working in based on people's suggestions, and I intend to have at least a high level specification for what I'll be producing for public consumption and critique before I start getting into the heavy lifting. But the core of this is, unless it's a bug fix it'll come along with the new version. I'll take reports of bugs and deal with them as they come up, but I've been fighting the urge to make myself a cone of shame as I looked over what I'm working with after four years of professional development, so it's not getting any more work done for it.
[Admin Note 6/1/2014: Public Admin requests are currently closed, will be opened in a new post later.]
Public Admin for those not aware is the process used to approve quotes for the main page.
In theory the system can be self sustaining, members vote their way through the quotes in queue, 15 up votes and it goes live, 5 down and it's dropped from the queue. Right now I have just under 10 active members in public admin and I'm following the queue at about a week delay to allow members time to vote on quotes and note any issues they find to do final approvals since there aren't enough to get an approval through on just member votes.
Which brings me to two points,
Leaving them up for a week ensures that the members get a chance to see them, but leaves topical quotes seven days removed from being news. I'm considering shortening that, but I know we don't get a whole lot of votes on a few days of the week, so the most I might narrow it down to would be two days.
I'm looking for more members interested in joining public admin. Right now if you can see this post you're signed up with an account, if you express interest in the comments I'll do some checking up on your site activity and most likely bump you up to public admin status. I'm not going to demand quotas, but a few minutes a day can go a long way in streamlining the process, particularly if you pick up on issues for me to correct before the quote goes live.
Number one request right now is tags, which has been for quite some time. Which has the slight problem of directly conflicting with how the archive displays work right now. All of the displays on the site take advantage of ASP.NET databinding, which most simply translates as one row of data is one row on the display. When a page of the archive is called up the site goes and gets a set of quotes as rows in a table, each row is one displayed quote consisting of a number of set fields that always exist.
With tags I don't have a set number of fields. I have however many tags as I need to apply to the quote. Which is rather simple to track in the database, but the current display mechanism simply doesn't support it. There are a number of methods I could use to attempt and integrate into the existing display mechanism but it would violate the only worthwhile principle built into the code to do so and create more problems in doing any further modifications later.
That said, in the last four years I've dealt with this kind of problem a number of times elsewhere and have some reasonably solid solutions that could function, if I completely re-write the core mechanisms of the site. At which point I may as well overhaul the entire thing, keeping the handful of things that really do work well and drag the site into some semblance of modern interface design while I'm at it.
Which is pretty much what I plan to do as I snag a few more books on subjects I'm less familiar with than core applications development. Over the next few weeks I'm going to start working out exactly what I can implement in a reasonable time frame and what I can't and lob out questions on just what people are interested in seeing but for today I'm going to start with the details of what people want to see from tags.
Should tags be relatively simple, relating to any aspect of a quote, or should we have sets of tags relevant to who's being quoted and what the quote is about? Beyond that, just what set of tags would be sufficient to cover the quotes as we have them? I've watched what happens with open tag creation, and the merging and hacking of tags that goes on, so I'd much rather have a defined set of them to select from. But too large a set and they're difficult to use, too small a set and they don't cover much.
What are people's opinions on tag handling? What tags would you want to see?
Search has been overhauled, and it may or may not be noticeable.
The two big notable changes.
First, search no longer assumes the page will persist on the initial search, which means the page doesn't load the results, it kicks you to a new page that does, and if you back up to that page it will always have the first page of results available. Thanks to Goomy pls for pointing out the issue.
Second, you can now filter by archive if you wish.
The backend has been completely replaced, actually split into two pieces so that the majority of cases can run a simpler request which should run faster than the old system. Bit of an adventure getting everything to work, but everything you enter will go in to further refine your search. That said, adding to this would be dead simple compared to the old setup, if anyone has requests they'd like to see for search let me know.
Getting myself a new desk and playing carpenter today, but I will get some details on tags up by mid week. Specifically why they're a pain in the ass, and where I could use community help.
I have a few features I said were coming ages ago which I want to see if anyone still cares about. If you have any particular interest in the following vote the post up and if it's a single item on the list mention it in the comments:
* Quote Submission Tracking
** See what your Quote status is
** Possibly get notifications through email of approval
* Submitted quote management
** Manage submitter display
** Claim quote submitted under your email
* Marking Favorites
** Creating your own personal archive
None of these would tie up Tag implementation any longer than it's already going to be. Which I'll start running through the details of next week once I finish off the reworking of the search function this weekend.
Welcome observant members and URL hackers, Distind here. This is the FSTDT dev blog entitled Distind is a Lazy Bastard.
I've been tooling around the site's code again and finally implemented a few of the things the site's needed for the last four years. We now have an Account Recovery system linked off the login page and if there aren't any quotes for the archive you're viewing the page will actually tell you that. (Edit: I found the damn edit bug! delayed release a day but I fixed the stinking thing) Also did some tidying around the archive mechanics while I was setting up DIALB. I have a few more items on my to do list before particularly long and I actually have time to get them done.
That brings me to the reason for this bloggy thingy. I'm a lazy bastard. It's right in the name. If left to my own devices I wind up doing work that doesn't even merit a note on the update page, I want to stop doing that. I want to know what people would want to see out of FSTDT. So from time to time I'm going to post thoughts, updates or what have you in here and see reactions. Further, if anyone has something they damn well want to see, say something. Pretty much anything short of more Archives is fair game, including major reworks of the FSTDT interface.
I may bring up a few other uses for DIALB should I get a particularly amusing legal threat, or find any interesting and unloved quotes in the archives, but right now it's all about making the site better.
For now this bloggy bit will act like any other archive, so if you want to head back to the other quotes hit the main page and select your archive, but any feed back is better than the odd legal threat I get over the admin mail now.
The 2008 Fundies voting
1) Fundie of the Year for 2008
A) David J. Stewart
B) ><>Karatemum<><
C) Garvan Ellison
D) HeartBrokenBrad
E) Raani Starnes
F) Jayden's Mommy
2) Life Time Achivement award for 2008, Fundie followed by achivement title
A) Troy "Ultimate(over 9000) Spam Troll"
B) SuperSport "Excellence in pursuit of ignorance"
C) BigChrisFilm "I Ain't Breaking No Rules"
3) Fundiest Board for 2008
A) Rapture Ready
B) Gaia Online
Voting's all over folks, but I'll open up the comments
Distind
And the results are in!
Fundie of the Year for 2008: David J Stewart
Life Time Achivement award for 2008: SuperSport "Excellence in pursuit of ignorance"
Fundiest Board for 2008: RaptureReady
