D is for Distind the drama lama #announcement fstdt.com blog
Hey volunteers, a few things have changed hit the subreddit to catch up.
Hey volunteers, a few things have changed hit the subreddit to catch up.
Rolling along with some parallel projects at work. I have the basics of the current iteration of .NET Identity working, and frankly don't need half the additional features at work, so I'm going to use that knowledge to build out the fuller version for the site including registration, password recovery and basic user functionality as I have time. Which should let me give people public admin access to see what I have, and then blow time on some admin interfaces before coming back around to do the interface cleaning. Depending on what time I have when I'll be in and out with updates.
That said, I have something resembling a personal life which is making this rather difficult to focus on so I'm glad I'm down to more bite sized chunks.
Right, said I was going to post one of these each day. Well, I'm moving on to the vote counting part of the system which has some interesting bits, and aiming to get the user admin stuff done by the end of the day. I hope folks check out the preview build of the site that's out live, but right now let's talk about the vote system and old abuses.
If you look at the archives 2008 looks like a banner year, right? Maybe? Not exactly. The software that was in use at that point was kinda ass and someone more or less hijacked the public admin voting and the top 100 voting to organize the site as they wished by exploiting a few loopholes. I hacked closed the loopholes, booted the responsible party and recalculated the top 100. It was a pain in the ass and rather embarrassing that I only caught on when the top 100 had the top 5 items separated by single digit votes.
That's not going to happen again. The new voting systems are designed to ensure that it is not possible to vote more than once, like literally I cannot record more than one vote from a given IP on an account. But how does that stop them from running up the value and not being recorded? Simple, I'm not incrementing on vote, I'm counting up all the stored votes and re generating the score when a new vote is added. I've finished the public admin voting system yesterday and pretty much need user admin working before I can open it up publicly, and there's a thing with login not triggering or redirecting properly that I need to sort out before it's usable. But, what's important here is the design works and I'm already largely done with the ass end of the public rating voting, it's a matter of getting the front and middle parts working and hopefully deployed sometime this weekend for you all to abuse.
On a note, anyone have opinions on changing the Vote tags from "WTF!" and "meh"? I still like them a bit, but simple up and down or + and - seem more intuitive. Or does the content of the site lend itself to those reactions?
Anyway, assuming I get user admin done today I'm going to say it was good 30 hours of work on the site this week and screw off tomorrow, maybe doing a bit more this weekend, but I have some things going on. That said, I do have another week of vacation and no significant plans. Sure as hell won't be spending another full week on the site, but I should have plenty of time to get things handled, particularly with the help volunteers who have stepped up to take over the place.
Sample Site is out!
Only took me three days longer than I hoped, and I just dicked around another half hour tuning the Latest Comments a bit, but here it is:
Note the data is over a year old, and any submissions to it will be tossed with the test data. But if you want to see what I'm planning for an interface, or just want to select random fundie quotes from every month of may the site has had, it can do that. Click around a bit and yell at me if you break something, I've left the error messages full, so just give me the whole text in a comment here.
Alright, today's goals are reasonably simple, get Public admin working, then look at quote rating voting. I think what I'm going to do is get a basic mechanic working now, and pile on ajax versions later. If I have spare time today I'm going to work on User Management and do some cleaning on the existing code. Assuming I finish this today the rest is improvements and admin functionality. Which is the easy shit since it all ties back into display mechanics I already have and 90% of the work is SQL that I can rattle off quickly.
That said, it does look like I'll have some work to do after the week is said and done. But this stuff looks manageable in shorter periods of time rather than being the kind of things I actually need a day for.
Having re-redisposed of routing, I've also tackled the quote admin page which leaves me looking at the comment admin page and then the submission pages for quotes and comments. Which will be interesting.
Today I plan on working on:
Comment Driven quote listings
- Latest comment and any similar listings
Finishing user authentication by hooking into the database
- Cleaning up user DB while I'm at it
- Figuring how to migrate folks to a better password encryption
Quote and Comment Admin Edit pages
Review go to latest comment functionality
Review needs for Quote and Comment submissions
- Largely the edit pages, only with less security and more anti-spam and hand holding.
- Get, Redirect, Profit
Review needs for Comment Administration pages
- A generic listing mechanism would probably be useful here
Evening folks, thought I should announce I'm going to be a bit more active next week as I've taken next week off to work on the site. My intention right now is to make a post in the morning with my todo list for the day and mark things off as I complete them. So, after getting off my ass and delivering the wife to work I'll make a post and get on my merry-ish way getting the site upgrades done. That said, I've been doing some work this week already to give myself some basis to star with and assuming I don't end my day in a complete shit place I'll be updating FSTDT.org with any changes I make. Right now I have a list of core features which I'll detail as I'm working on them. Once I have those done, I'm taking a slacker day, I took a week's vacation for fuck's sake. Assuming I have some time left after that I'll be back with some of the more requested options I've had on the backburner, or get requested here.
I will note, I'm still watching the volunteers email and had someone volunteer this morning. I'm debating cutting it off, but I honestly don't see the point. If you want to help, hit that email.
Last call on volunteers, hit me at volunteers@fstdt.net for details.
Folks will be getting setup shortly barring a sudden pile of volunteers.
Organizing! I'm working on it now, I've sent out emails to those who have them on their accounts here and none of them looked particularly disposable, but, if you don't have access to the email you registered with or just generally don't even have an account email me at Volunteers@fstdt.net
Let me know who you are and I'll fire off the community details I'm getting together.
What the balls is this about? Well check out this post for more. If anyone else is interested in volunteering I'll happily add you to the list.
(Edit: New Post on Volunteering read if you want in)
Alright folks, I'm looking for people to replace me and make sure the site keeps going now since I'm not hanging around for too much longer. Frankly there's a lot to do and I've neglected a fair bit of it for the sake of personal life and it hasn't done the site any good.
I figure a team of people would do a better job and make one person leaving a little less traumatic. If you want to help but aren't sure how, here's the kind of people involved in keeping the site:
Owner
* Who's paying the domain name and hosting charges. Hosting runs about ten bucks a month, registering the .com domain name is 10.29 a year and .net is 12.08 a year.
* I'll help you out with domain registration and have a few recommendations for hosting(including NOT arvixe)
* As a note, the site has never turned a profit and donations don't often make a dent in hosting costs, be prepared to pay the lot of that.
Developer
* This is what scares most people, working with the code and doing work to improve the site's speed and functionality.
* We've got a volunteer for this already, but if you're interested offer up, more eyes is better.
Quote Admin
* Take the time to curate quotes, this means you approve them, make corrections and generally keep up the quality of what's sent to the main page
Quote Volunteer
* Vote on which quotes will make it to the main page and help catalog things that need to be corrected.
Community Manager
* Spam hunting mostly, you skim comments for spam and excessive trolling
* Read and respond to Admin email, let developer or quote admin know about issues outside your scope.
Odds are you could take a few of these, but doing all of it is pretty pain in the ass.
I'm not going to ask too much from those who pick up the site after me, all I'm going to ask is whoever winds up with the rights to the domain name itself makes sure it moves on to someone else when they move on from the place.
What else I will do is work on finishing up the code for the new revision of the site(soon as I get the host for it straightened out). Either by myself or in concert with any new volunteers. I'll follow up with what needs to be done if folks are interested.
Had intended on doing a public announcement on getting work done and switch over, only I've blown half my fucking day trying to ahold of someone at my alternate webhost to pay them and get this bill out of my face. Now my wife is telling me she's found things saying the company is more or less dead after acquisition and all of it's employees fired a week ago. Which would all explain quite clearly why in the balls I didn't get my "Hey pay us" email a week ago.
So yeah, don't host with arvixe right now. Probably never again, this is disgraceful.
See Distind tweet for the third time ever!
Warning, edit rant inbound.
ONE FUCKING MINUTE, I SPENT TWO FUCKING HOURS ON THE PHONE AND THE FUCKERS TAKE ONE FUCKING MINTUTE TO RESPOND... now the wait for someone to actually do something. Seriously, I edited this and they'd responded.
Further edit confusion:
Five minutes after the twitter complaint I've got a response to my ticket. I think I'm officially into twitter now. Here's to hoping it actually works. Also holy shit it's horrible this is what it takes to get service, I've hit literally every real access point they have, it takes bitching publicly on my clearly highly followed, rated and prized twitter account to actually get a response.
Lots of ways to say it, lots of things I could rant on about, but long story short I think I'm about done with my tenure as admin of FSTDT. I don't have the time or interest to keep up with administration and development without taking time from my personal life, which has been my priority these last few years.
But, sky isn't falling, I'll keep the place propped up for a while yet and see if anyone is interested in taking over. I did it five, six, actually I'm not sure how many years ago now, so I'd like to find someone new to take things over before I have a day where giving the site the boot becomes particularly appealing. Don't know much about coding, websites or all those scary things? Not as big of a problem as you'd think, the site itself is pretty simple and if you show interest sooner than later I'd be willing to walk you through the redux code and either finish it or teach you how to.
I knew about half of what I needed to when I picked this place up, a few months I wound up re-writing the site in a day and a half in on my own. The site still largely works off that code. I wanted to make sure the community stuck around and had the time to spare to make sure it happened, that's all you need as I am willing to help you through the technical aspect. At least at the time being, give me a few more months and I may not have that left in me.
Anyway, if folks show interest I'll toss up some communication lines and we can chat. If there are a number of people we can work that out, it may actually work out better with a larger crew running the place, smaller upsets when one leaves. If you're interested in making sure FSTDT continues, drop a comment below.
Updated tor exit node list again after jackassery of an impressive variety.
Going to hold off the rant till October.
It's a tad ugly but I have a standard solution to that I'll be bringing over when I get onto more of the panels.
Use guide, enter your text plain and it searches for all of the given words in all given fields. If you want to search a specific phrase put quotes around it "like this". If you want to do some wild card searching put * at the end of the word or phrase and it should work. Anything more complex won't work, but it is entirely possible I could do more additions later.
Now, what's left to do for quote search is actually rather complicated. To search the comments and display matched comments along with their quotes I need to search a second table for matches and correctly display at least one of those matching comments along with the related quote. if I hard coded the search it'd be rather easy, only as I've mentioned before I can't hard code the method I'm using. So instead I'm working out something I've been idling on at work for a while now, searching multiple tables and handling the output gracefully. I'm pretty sure I have the search part down, and the display may be a rather simple matter if I don't over complicate it with functionality, but once I have something working I'll go more into specifics on what I can and can't do easily.
Also, if you're regularly annoyed with the current search and want me to update the data on the test site kvetch in the comments and I'll dedicate some time but I should mention it's a couple hour process which is why I don't do it regularly. The glory of cheap webhosting.
Oh, and this version is a little old since I have it torn apart on my dev machine, if you put in a double quote without a match it will error. Should be fixed next update.
What I could do and what I've done are a tad different. I have a bit more testing to do before I release it but I have a quote search together than handles words, phrases and postfix wildcards. Should be able to put it out this weekend and I'll rattle off what else there is to do in a longer post this weekend, though I will say comment search is coming, I just intend to do it well rather than quickly.
So I have a much more solid idea of what needs to be done for the search since I've been actively playing with the mechanics involved. I've found something suprising, it actually works better than I expected.
Say I search for David J. Stewart. The new functionality I'm using would find that term, or David J Stewart or David Jay Stewart. The new search functionality i'm looking at has some built in thesaurus comparisons it will make, while it won't automatically look for everything starting with a J, it will look for anything that actually sounds like J. And this is all accomplished using one of the simpler syntax possiblities.
Which brings me into the next part, the differences between what I can do and what I probably should. This is the definitions for the term I'm using, you may note it's a tad complicated and well it gets a whole lot worse with more search terms. If I took the time and had the knowledge I could setup all kinds of potentially useful syntax to the search page. Except I'm a lazy git despite having changed the name of this little bloggy bit.
What I'm most likely going to do is setup the search interface so that the given search parameters are handled appropriately based on the type. Which is harder said than done. For instance that David J. Stewart example above has some problems depending on the syntax used, if I search for all three parts of that separately by sending in '"David" AND "J" AND "Stewart"' into the contains function, so it will try to find each word in the author field, it returns nothing. Still figuring out why, but if I just search david and stewart it returns everything, this was a few hours of my week. But oddly enough, if I send in '"David J Stewart"' I get the results I mentioned above, where it checks thesauruses and is generally really bloody useful.
But there's still a catch there, all that nice functionality, yeah it involves very carefully deciding how something is searched. When I send it all in wrapped in "" it's looked for as phrase, fine for authors or sources, maybe even URLs, but completely useless for searching the content of quotes. Wait, it gets even better, this search relies on full word matches unless explicitly told what it is receiving is a prefix, and then requires that it MUST be a prefix or nothing will be found. Send in Test* and you get back Testing but not Test. Which has all been fun to play with, but frustrating to figure out how to really implement.
What I could do right now is just always assume people are searching for phrases, but I know that's not true. I do keyword searches regularly and I know a few others did back when search worked reliably. What I need to do is figure out how I'm going to parse what is received in a quote or comment search and best instruct the search engine to handle it. I doubt people want to have to figure out this syntax for themselves, so I'm going to do what I can to simplify it a bit and take care of assumptions. This is my project for the next few days, and I'll poke my head back up when I have something to mention.
Ok, been busier than I guessed so my search details are sitting here in a jumbled notepad file. But I do have something to say.
FSTDT is not a news aggregator. It does not need full news articles submitted to it. In fact posting these articles is a remarkably bad idea as there is legal precedent(set against FreeRepublic of all places) saying doing so is grounds for various types of infringement. It's one thing to quote people who have posted something, or even parts of an article that are specifically quotable, but the entire thing is just not what should be submitted. We link to the whole thing so people can read it while we give them the mind bending parts.
I may look at setting up a place where people could share related links without submitting quotes, but at the moment this isn't that place and I don't have one to recommend off hand.
Hey folks, largely finished with that moving business finally. AC is wonderful, now I just need to figure out what to do with a dozen empty totes and I've got some shit to sell.
While I was moving a few ideas were floated for new Archive Icons and I want folks opinions. I've never really come up with anything better than Shotgun Jesus, but I have someone who is interested in doing a redraw of it at some point, which got us to talking about the others. CSTDT, I think we have a good one, an alien, wearing a tinfoil hat, while hosting a radio show. I think this is gold, better than what we have gold, and the artist is interested as well. RSTDT I have something to float but it's an old in joke and I'm still trying to make it work, a neo-Nazi singing I feel pretty. I'd need an iconic image from the musical to pull it off, but it's my favorite idea so far.
Anyone have opinions or thoughts? Assuming I get this done it would make fundie merch possible.
Site dev is on hold at the moment while I move, when I move I will have central air and no more of this sweating to death in my office business. I have to be out half way through next month, trying to get out earlier. If I have time I'll write up a bit about search, it's turned into something interesting, which while bad for time lines is great for learning.
That said, I've found something I'm actually interested in commenting on. I'm sure most everyone who is on here has heard of Josh Duggar recent revelations and the rather disturbing show of support he's recieved over this. Well, I caught wind of someone actually willing to call him and the conservative christian media on it's handling of the situation. Michael Reagan wrote quite the article over on cagle that I want to support because it supports people doing the right thing regardless of if they happen to agree with the man's politics, questioning the integrity of those who are giving Duggar a pass on this. Read the article, it's worth the couple minutes.
Since I'm a left leaning asshole I'd also like to remind our side not to give people passes just because they are popular political figures who are on our side. We do it too, and we shouldn't. Just because some people on the other side are assholes does not grant us the moral right to do the same. And that's true in all kinds of things, take it from someone who's been amusedly poking at both "sides" of gamergate for a while. And pair of equal and opposite assholes do not cancel out, they just make things worse all around.
Search is progressing, the query powering the new search page is remarkably fast, I now know we have over 11,000 comments using the word 'Moron' and I can return the lot in under a second. Except the syntax involved doesn't let me do one of my standard shortcuts to use fewer lines of SQL to do more work. I need to invest some time in ensuring I can dynamically create the query without leaving it open to security holes, which I plan to do over the course of this week.
For those who didn't notice in the comments of the last post I have the sample site up. Check it out, give me some thoughts, once I have search working as intended I'll be moving on to getting archive selections working somehow, which will be interesting.
In utterly unrelated news, the new Mad Max movie is a good movie. People calling it feminist are making a bit of a leap as it's not exactly new territory, but people jump the gun on this kind of thing all the time. It is however an excellent follow up to the road warrior and does a few things that actually make the third movie suck less. Max is Max, cars are cool, explosions are awesome, world is fucked.
If it isn't one thing...
Ok, so I've cleared up the paging issue and have a viable sample to post and show off the fact you can page through over 1500 pages of FSTDT content without any trouble. So I want to FTP it up to the new host... it doesn't fucking work.
I'm hitting them with a support ticket and see how it goes.
That all said, I managed to get it working by effectively pre-populating any possible combination of filters rather than ignoring turned off filters. I thought this would be a huge amount of data, and for this place it is. But it's size totals out to all of 8 megs of a table including an index that restates the content of the table in the order I want it to... so yeah, that's a wonderful damn thing right there. Almost no size for a damn nice improvement in speed. For reference the similar index on the current site is around 250 megs, but it has to include a great deal more data to offer anywhere near the same amount of speed.
Next stop after cursing support out is playing with the search functionality, even if I'm not going to renew with these guys at the end of the month I can get some testing done.
This is not my week.
Car may be on its final bork so I may be blowing significant amounts of time looking for a new car, preferably something I actually fit into the passenger side of. Time may be limited for a bit, I'll know Wednesday.
Edit:
In the mean time I'm mucking about with what looks like a solution to the paging issue I had. It's called actually doing the optimization. Found a better set of tools than I had to figure a few things, went from a ten minute and stop it query to under a second WITH full diagnostics running. So. Those things are looking up, hopefully I can get this working like this for a test site this week.
Alright, sorry about the delay on the quotes had a real Monday. This last one was impressive so I figure it's a good place to hold till tomorrow morning.
Dev work has moved right along, I have a few finer points to decide to run with or scrap before launching anything but both quote and comment pages work. Which is a good place to start when the site consists of only those things.
What I need to do other than the fine points, get hosting setup, get the database setup, get the data transfer to the database and make sure nothing explodes when I try to combine everything on the server. Odds are this is going to lag a bit beyond this weekend, as unless the paging on tags issue clears up I have some shit to deal with before I want to launch it as I don't want to annoy my host within the first day with a few dozen hung page requests.
Right, this is a thing, sorry it's been a really nice day and I've been enjoying the hell out of it.
Did a good bit of work yesterday, fixed one of the issues I'd been having and should be able to get to work on the comments page next time I have time free. After that I'm going to get the base of the search page together, if you've been following I mentioned I wasn't able to test the improved search functionality because of my local SQL server version, well, once I have it to a testable point I'm going to be setting up a FSTDT test site where people can take a look at what I'm doing while I actually test the improved search on a system that can do it.
If nothing goes wrong I want to have that up by the end of the month, it'll just be display and it won't be the live data, but it's better than the nothing I have out there now.
Running a tad late, but I got the pager together and I'm now focused entirely on unfucking my choice of controllers. Or at least one part of it, I may do more changes later but these are actual functional problems I need to finish clearing up.
Got the pager logic done and I have a notepad file full of arguing with myself over how to fix an unrelated problem. Also annoying myself with the filters selection mechanism and it's propagation. But again, actual progress. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong I should have something worth showing folks in the next few weeks.
As opposed to the things my wife sends me that I'm going to show off now, this just seemed a bit fitting for this place:
image
From an Art blog found here
Sorry for going quiet, been sick and not getting much done anywhere.
That said, making up for quite a bit today. Links now actually go to things, found an unexpected pain in my ass to clean up there. Have Standard, Random, Latest Comment and Top displays functioning no problems. Still need to do the pager, but I want to clean up my stupidity based issue before I bother with them.
Going to come back to what I have again tomorrow to make up for lost time after spending a while thinking on the problem and how to best integrate the pager data into the rest of my back end data.
In utterly unproductive news, I've found War Thunder. TANKS! Absurdly realistic damage model tanks. It's free and I've been having a good bit of fun when I was able to stop hacking. If anyone else is into it let me know, could use some folks to pal around with while I go tank hunting.
Ok, that was unexpected.
Apparently white supremacy asian porno tumblr accounts are a thing and we've had a few submissions. Someone was trawling through them and had some bad links, which lead me to trying to hunt down the actual posts, only to get a slight surprise after reading about Asian women who refuse to date Asian men.
Which leaves me with two questions, what level of pornographic content should I start finding ways to flag(and trust me some of this ranks up there) and exactly what does it take to start filing someone under racist when they're rattling off experiences with their own race? I'm leaning toward having warnings in context links for now and adding tags for it in the new version of the site, the rest I'm not sure I want to touch.
And now I understand why I've never replaced the old BBCode engine that Yahweh wrote ages ago. Finicky does not begin to describe some of the engines out there, but I have one up to the same level of functionality the old engine had, and there's no longer the random # breaks links error.
The good:
Tags are up to snuff
Tags can now use # to link to anchors on a page(like specific comments on quote comment pages which has apparently never worked)
There is a quote tag, and I can add them on a whim.
The bad:
That took me about twice as long as I normally devote to development in a week due to switching out a couple candidates and the darnedest error in parsing I've seen due to ordering and an errant Boolean.
Still less time than writing it up from scratch though. So next week's work is going to revolve around pagers and all around getting links to plug into pages correctly.
And for everyone's reference a list of the BBCodes to be available, this will be in the new site's FAQ:
b Bold
s Strikethrough
sub Subscript
sup superscript
i Italics
u Underline
img Image
quote Quote
list Define a list
* Define a list item
url Links, without the damn # problem.
Looking into login mechanics found an interesting set of options for me, I can either go whole hog with .net Identity or implement the entire thing in 4 lines of code. But if I use .net Identity I would have most of the user admin functionally together and could allow people to use facebook or twitter log ins, which may be the stupidest thing I've ever considered around here, or it might be mildly interesting to people. Effectively any Open ID login could be used if I set it up properly, if anyone is interested let me know, otherwise I'm going to take the short way around and implement the user admin stuff based on code I already have.
Right now I'm working on BBCode handling and getting a pager together. With those I'll be at the point I could put a sample site out there for people to try and break. Even if it doesn't have user functionality.
Right, so I'm alive and I've actually accomplished a few of my goals in the code, and then promptly didn't give enough of a shit to write up a proper rant. Basic routing works, I have tags displaying without duplicating quotes, and I need to start seriously looking at user based functionality(Quote submission is tied up in that since I do verification on member comments and quotes).
I'm saving a rant point for now, may wind up unloading it into the general direction of hashtag activism before too long. But, actual progress occurred, and I'm going to keep at it.
Going to pull a change of format in here. I'm going to start allowing myself to rant on here each time I finish some meaningful part of the code. I'll do a quick run down of what's been done, and then let myself take aim at something that annoys me. I'm somewhat open to requests but I think I have three to hit before I'll consider much else.
Used this idea to drive myself to do some of the basic overhaul I needed to do any more progress and I got it done in no time. Also have floundered my way through most of the godforsaken problems (I think) MVC can throw at me, which means I'm not going to be delivering on the public admin queue exactly as advertised, but will at least eventually work. I'd describe the problem but it boils down to me trying to do something MVC simply isn't intended for. Or at least doesn't cope with very well. I also tend to get side tracked with streams of obscenity when I think about it.
Anyway, first goal is getting the basic routing straight. Now that I have backend SQL that works correctly with the filters(don't ask) and the display already works reasonably well, it's a rather major component to get right. After that will be displaying the tags, then submission. If I get myself to buckle down I should be able to blow through the lot of them in relatively short order, but after those I have the joy of authentication and authorization to deal with before I move on to anything that cares about which user is involved. So find something else that annoys me so I have motive to make a fourth post, it can't be that hard my wife says I'm typically annoyed with something.
Also considering an alternate reward to myself of buying Darkest Dungeon, then possibly doing a stream of it as I fail to manage anything in it.
Votes are tallied and the winners are in.
With 85% of the vote we have Wulf Ingessunu with Best Cult from an 80s TV show and has had this fact immortalized as an award on the quote itself.
W. F. Price is the Pseudo-Intellectual of the Year
Patrick Scrivener is the Conspiracy Theorist of the Year.
Anna Diehl is the Fundie Of the Year.
Our Quote of the Year is... almost certainly satire. Quote #102138 is easily the most amusing thing submitted last year even being satire. So I should mention that AV1611VET's Quote #100557 is likely out legitimate quote of the year. That said, if the person who made the post quoted in #102138 wishes to claim the title of funniest satire submitted this year drop me a line and we can honor you appropriately. If you said it and you where serious, go see a fucking doctor.
Fundie of the Year voting is over folks, doing the counting today.
Fundie Of the Year
The big one, selected from the top ranked fundies of the year we have three options that I figure almost everyone has to know.
Options:
1: Anna Diehl
The sinner in the hand of a vengeful god, and apparently quite content with that. Easily our most honest and disturbingly coherent fundie in years. A sample of her work:
Of course all of these theories are based on a refusal to accept that God could find true delight in torturing people. Well, tough. HE DOES. Are we really so arrogant that we think we can define who God must be, or that we can change truths about Him simply because we don’t like them? If our Creator gets high off of torturing His enemies for eternity—which He clearly does—then we need to face this fact square on and ask the Holy Spirit to help us deal with it. ...
2: CAAMIB
And more other accounts than I even care to name, this guy... I actually feel kinda sorry for if his world really looks like that to him. But I sure as hell wouldn't let him inflict that on others.
I have and I still believe I'd have sex with a woman against her consent. The difference now is that when I wrote that I thought that rape is forceful sex against a woman's consent. I was wrong, since I didn't know enough history and was brainwashed my feminist propaganda.
Full Text Found Here
3: David J. Stewart
One of our more prolific fundies, both in what gets posted here and what he writes in general. Quoted in all three categories this year and frankly could have been nominated in either of the ones I'm doing awards for, but thankfully not quite all three categories on the site. I checked.
Religion is the WORST thing that has ever happened to this world; Countless Billions of souls have been doomed to Hellfire by false religion. Learn what the Bible has to say on the matter. I expose many false religions... not to be unkind... but because the truth has been hidden from the world's masses. Just remember, religion didn't die on the cross for you—Jesus Christ did!
Full Text Found Here
Conspiracy Theorist of the Year
It was a good year for insanity, and certain efforts should be recognized.
Options:
1: Anonymous Cowards, of GodLike Productions
I'm cheating here, but they're also the group with the highest fundie index on CSTDT for last year. The anon comments over on GLP are amazing, not always in a good way, but amazing.
I have recently had an epiphany about dinosaurs that makes perfect sense! You would have to be spiritual minded to see it so I suspect many scientific minded people will tell me I've lost it...that's okay.
Here was my idea, just as the fallen angels have manipulated with genetics to claim their own creations (and to piss God off), I suspect they took God's creation of birds and genetically altered them to make their own creation. That is why scientists claim dinosaurs evolved into birds because so much of the genetic code of birds is in them.
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2: Patrick Scrivener
Someone who tends to run the lines between fundie and conspiracy theory, but I think conspiracy wins out on his top quotes. Special thanks to Yossarian Lives for bringing us so many of these.
Before the advent of MI6 sponsored communism in Russia, the Orthodox Church completely rejected the heliocentricity of Galileo and the evolutionary myth of Druid Charles Darwin. They also rejected the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX which completely condemned all scientific progress—except advances in spying and cryptology.
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3: Wiley Brooks
Odd one out, as he's only had one approved quote, but it was pretty amazing. Still not sure what if anything it means, so let's all stare in mild confusion.
In order to understand why I have chosen these foods you must first know how the human bodies descended into the 3rd dimensional world in first place. This is not our natural home. Being here as long as we have been was not intentional. We didn’t plan to stay here permanently. You could say it was purely by accident that we ended up getting stuck in this 3d world. The Earth, without a doubt, is the most beautiful planet in the Milky Way galaxy and that is why it was "the" vacation spot of the galaxy for millions of years. There was always a constant stream of visitors coming here from Worlds and Galaxies far and wide.
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Quote of the Year
A new hit from an old favorite, a disturbing conspiracy and the funniest damn thing I saw this year. These are the top quotes from each category, which is the best?
Options:
1: AV1611VET, from Christian Forums
I hadn't seen much from him in quite some time, but he came back strong with this one.
First of all, up until the Tower of Babel, they had to speak some language.
What language was that?
What's the best candidate?
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Thus we have all peoples, nations, languages and tongues, standing before the Judgement Seat, being read to from the KJB.
Thus if they speak Jacobean English in Heaven, I assume they spoke it on earth at first.
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2: Diana Napolis
I honestly have no idea what to say here, but entirely believe every WTF?! was warranted.
The Enemy has been busy forcing others to have sex with them. They have a method of copying sex responses and placing these responses within penises and artificial vaginal canals. They copied my vaginal canal and orgasmic response, and placed that response into other artificial canals so that the enemy could insert it into themselves.
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3: white male, from Beyond Highbrow
It won an award within 30 seconds of me starting to read it and has given an entire demographic a bad name. I don't really even need ot quote that much of it to show why it's here. Poe or not, funny shit.
um nope. I am a proud white male with an 18 inch cock, thicker than a gallon milk can. I have a pedigree going back 10 thousand years to the Aryan-Teutonics of Asgard and Atlantis, and the government is so frightened of my innate caucasoid potential that they made me file a non disclosure agreement of my superior white male dna supreme genetics.
You see white men are actually from the distant island of atlantis which was floating in the tuberclizician Stratosphere of Earth, which Gulliver christened as Laputa.
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Best Cult from an 80s TV show
This is a special request I could not help but follow up on. And as a single nomination vote you can enter 1 to vote for it, or 0 to vote against it and tell us if the following is the Best Cult from an 80s TV Show.
Option:
1: Wulf Ingessunu
Woden's Folk is invariably criticised and attacked by those whose aim is to discredit anyone who opposes the Global Order.
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One of the main targets has been The Hooded Man Prophecy since this is an easy one to get at since it has no 'historical' authenticity - so we are led to believe.
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Firstly, yes this does come from the TV series Robin of Sherwood and was no doubt made up for the series. But that does not invalidate this as a prophecy, but we can only recognise it as such through the knowledge of what its hidden meaning is.
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In order to understand that The Hooded Man Prophecy is valid you need to understand the above ideas clearly, because without a knowledge of what an avatar is this will never be understood. Only through recognising that a god can actually incarnate in the flesh will we be able to understand what I am trying to say
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Pseudo-Intellectual of the Year
We had a few nominations for this request, but remember if they are not worth the honor you can always vote 0 to deny it to anyone.
Options:
1: John C. Wright
Despair is the key. It explains nearly everything that is so puzzling about the madness of modern life, the pack of self-contradictory dogmas that make up the default assumptions of the Dark Ages in which we live.
They have nothing else. No wonder they are bitter. No wonder they are irrational. No wonder they lie like dogs. No wonder they boast. No wonder they are full of envy and malice. No wonder they kill babies in the womb and fete socialist dictators and mass murderers. No wonder they love death. No wonder they admire, protect and love Islamic terrorists. No wonder they admire, protect, and love sexual perversion.
It is because they have nothing else. They live in a world of darkness, without hope, with nothing but their seven great friends to sustain them: pride, which they call self esteem; envy, which they call social justice; wrath, which they call activism and protest; sloth, which they call enlightenment; gluttony, which they call health food and legalization of recreational drugs; greed, which they call fairness in taxation; lust, which they call sexual liberation.
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2: W. F. Price
As for young women, higher education is an enormous waste in most cases. They spend their time learning from lesbian pornographers, drinking, whoring and learning to look down on their male peers even as they debase themselves. The old idea that it will help them find a suitable mate is so outdated as to be laughable, but it’s what keeps parents paying for college tuition for their daughters: they hope that daddy’s little girl will get hitched to some conscientious beta male instead of knocked up by a hoodlum. This is the single biggest reason parents send their daughters to college, and it’s a gamble that will only pay off about half the time these days as the female to male ratio approaches three to two at universities (not all college-educated men marry college-educated women, or marry at all). Not a good bet for roughly $100k, but it supports legions of hard-left ideologues, which explains the enthusiasm for the failing system in mainstream media outlets.
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I feel compelled to note, lesbian pornography was involved in my college experience, but not in the way Mr. Price is concerned about it. Funny story actually. Anyway, This year's voting form:
FOTY [X]
COTY [X]
QOTY [X]
BCF80TV [X]
POTY [X]
Submit the above as your comment, replacing the X with the number you vote for in that category. If you want to vote against the existing options enter the number 0, if you don't want to vote at all either leave the X or erase the line. Counts will be done at the end of the month.
Phew this is long, don't forget to check below for FOTY nominations, they're still open for the next week.
Routing, mentioned it before and most people probably have no clue what it means, so while I'm sorting it out I'll explain what I'm up to.
The last preview I posted requires a URL like this: http://localhost:60349/Quotes/Index?TagID=2&Year=2008&Month=12&Page=3 Very nice and clean looking right? Well, that's because I haven't handled a damn thing beyond the basics in the routing configuration.
I'll break this down real quick.
http://localhost:60349
This is just my local webserver, funny looking but keeps me from having to publish things to someone else's server
/Quotes/Index
These are the basics of the MVC routing system, /{Controller}/{Action}. I have a controller named Quotes to display the various quote listings and since I'm a lazy ass my default action within the Quotes controller is Index while I get things working. Later I'll be swapping out Index for the type of quote listing you're receiving since I need to make entirely different calls for the same controller depending on the request made. So eventually that portion will look like /Quotes/LatestComment, /Quotes/Newest or /Quotes/Random and each of these would take you to the first page for that particular listing. Notably, this arguably isn't exactly what actions are for as they are supposed to be distinct actions, but given the rather significant differences in calls and otherwise uselessness of doing otherwise I'm using the action to do this split.
?TagID=2&Year=2008&Month=12&Page=3
This mess, actually not too different from what we have now, but it's what I can do to the routing engine that is worth talking about. I cant take the above and turn it into this:
/2/2008/12/p3
Easily, with a bit more work I can do this:
Conspiracy/2008/December/p3
Which finally gives you a real idea of what page is coming up, it's the third page of CSTDT for December 2008. Only backwards because I have not yet been assed to consider routing validation that would let me swap the place of month and year. What sense does that make? Well, if I setup the routing well enough I can make sure it knows what to assume when part is missing so that this:
Conspiracy/2008/December/
Takes you to the first page for December or this:
Conspiracy/2008/
Takes you to the first page for all of 2008 or finally this:
Conspiracy/
Just takes you to the latest quotes in that tag.
So, routing lets me go from what we have today:
http://www.fstdt.net/QuoteArchives.aspx?Archive=2&Date=2008/12&Page=3
to
http://www.fstdt.net/Quotes/Newest/Conspiracy/2008/12/p3
Cleaner looking huh. Especially without the month getting converted to text, odds are I'll wind up supporting both number and text representations both at the same time with a bit of work on the routing system. Complex crap to make simple URLs without any of the things you don't have a clue what they are in the URL. It's all stuff that looks like it belongs there.
How this helps me handle the filters, well, what I'm looking at doing right now is having a little pop down menu where you go in and hit the tags and dates you want to read through and immediately take you through to the right page. If anyone cares about the loss of easily visible month numbers let me know, I'm still poking at this.
And a last thing, this also means with some more routing work I can support all of the old URLs you already have favorited. Relatively easily in comparison to what I'm pulling now.
I'm pulling my standard individual quotes now, but any specific nominations folks wish to make, exemplary quote in a category, exemplary Fundie in a category or a custom award for a quote or user that you've been sitting on all year.
I'll select nominations and put quotes up to a vote on the 18th, so let's have em.
As a belated Christmas gift to the community I give you the very first quote properly rendered through the new site:
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DOOMED He tells us! DOOMED!
And here I nearly updated the database before keeping development rolling. Nope, that's the perfect quote to keep me amused while I get things done.
Of course, I still need to get Routing, BBCode, Tags and a whole bunch of other things working, but once I get a few more bits of middle ware sorted out those will be my biggest problems.
Head's up while the quote flow is a tad low, start thinking about Fundie of the Year nominations. I'm going to run nominations through the first half of January after pulling the best rated for the year as my default nominees. Voting will be the second half of January and I'll make this all quite clear with titles when the official posts roll around.
The things I've been studying are finally sticking since I have something to apply them to. I have a significant amount of reading to keep pounding through, but I believe I have a solid basis to do some real work on tomorrow. I'll see what I actually get done. For now I have a pair of questions for the readers:
Anyone have any personal preferences between Ninject and Unity for DI containers, or am I listening to these people entirely to much in using dependency injection in a project that will never actually need it so long as I'm in control of it?
Also, the header with all the filters in it. Did anyone actually like that? It's wearing on me and the details of it's implementation aren't working out. Not fond of the space it takes up and all of the information would be immediately visible and clear in the URL. Working on figuring a replacement, but for right now I'm just focusing on generating the quote listings and shooting them out to the page.
Alright, now that the server is unfucked I can post something.
I've gotten some work in on the site, exploring the mechanics of an entirely new architecture is interesting, but not particularly quick. At the moment it's clear to me without a serious goal I'm just not getting much done, so I'm aiming for a first pass of absolutely basic quote retrieval, hopefully by the end of the month. In good news, I have a work project that's using the same tech so I'm learning it faster than I otherwise would. From what I'm seeing once I have things together(properly) taking those things and reorganizing them as needed should be pretty simple. Assuming I get the basic quote retrieval done, I should be able to take all the same elements, feed them into a few different templates and the biggest development effort will be in properly organizing the data for the elements. Should. I've been wrong before.
Also, thanks to the server dropping out on me a fair chunk of today's queue was skipped over, so I'll be approving all of those tomorrow.
In the process of doing a serious quote backlog purge, should be plenty of quotes to go around shortly. Sorry for the delay.
Rather busy at the moment, but I've been taking the chance with the new version of .NET to familiarize myself with MVC more. I'm still not horribly fond of some of it, but.. it's so stupidly easy I may well work with it. Assuming you haven't done anything wrong, which is where planning comes in to make sure you're not doing things wrong.
What I intend on doing is taking what I've generated for the mockups and my test database, getting a working MVC version of at least a few of the pages and then see about doing some serious testing on them. No time line yet, but I don't think it would take particularly long. I already have the layouts, I just need to get to work on the display logic. From there I can actually screw with it and see how it scales.
Well, good news for myself and any other hobby programmers, Visual Studio has released a community edition of it's current tools! What does that mean? I means no more fucking express versions which involve four installs to have full functionality. It goes along with their opening of .NET's source and their preview of the next version of Visual studio they're working on.
What that means, I don't have to pay $50 a month to do competent dev work on the site. I'm still hung up for the rest of this month and it takes about four hours to install, but it means I will be reasonably happy with the tools I'm using. If anyone else out there want to tool around with it now's a great time to start. Let's hear it for dragging your feet folks, wait long enough and what you want may just happen.
Or you spend your live yearning for something that never happens. But this time it worked.
And I forgot to post this yesterday, the comment page mock up!
Or for fucks sakes my FTP isn't cooperating, wait there it goes.
There are a few important things to note here beyond round corners. The title is the same as the top page, which is intentional, this is intended to be another level of consistency within the page. The title and all of the selected filters would appear on this page, and they modify any of the relevant fields in links going outward from this page.
Further the 'write comment' link rather than the post box that has been here forever. Simply put, it's a anti-double post measure. When you hit the write comment link it will either create a javascript pop box to enter your comment in, or if javascript is disabled it'll route you to a page to submit your comment which will process on that page and then separately re-route you to the quote comments page. A bit complex for what it does, but I think we're all sick of double posts by now. It'll also mean that all my comment logic is in one place so I can very easily make modifications.
I'm happy with the comment header bar being a one stop shop for important links and think the hide link is more intuitive than just clicking on the header like it works now. There are a few other things that have come up over time that I'm still looking at, but right now I'm focused on the core functionality.
I'm also running low on excuses not to start coding, but I have one that carries me through the end of the month.
Mid week thought, I'm rather fond of the image I've used for DSTDT on the main page and part of me thinks it embodies a fair bit of the site. Which makes me want to ask what others think of the idea of using it was the FSTDT logo.
image
Humor, religion, bit of madness to it. I just like it.
Perhaps more importantly, I believe I can actually secure the rights to the original and might get myself a shirt made even if no one else wants one.
As to the classic shotgun Jesus, I love it, I've found higher quality versions of it that attribute it to a Mustafa(or something along those lines, found it ages ago), but I've never been able to track it to an origin point. Without the artists permission I'm unwilling to merch it in anyway, so if anyone knows who it was let me know. Would love to get a hold of them.
Messing about with comment layout and such, just not a whole lot worth looking at yet. Back at it next weekend.
Since it is bugging me, general thought on patterns of clicking through a page. Centralized location for likely places to click, or spread out across the page?
Futzing about with the controls layout for clarifying the fact you can hide entire comments, and considering putting that near the permalink and edit link. All on left of the same line in the title bar. That or I'm going to put the hide/show button on the other side of the header and see where the edit link falls.
Hey folks, another bad weekend for work on the site. Big pile of hobby material and a new CIV game have arrived, my wife will be lucky to see me. That said, I have something that just started folks might be interested in. Should be getting back on track next weekend, particularly as a great deal of vacation time to blow before the end of the year.
Paranoia Kickstarter! I posted the bundle of old material a while back and just caught wind of this kickstarter. I'm seriously considering backing it, but remembering the conversion from pounds to dollars is a tad painful. Still, 30 pounds for a box set of one of the more interesting games I've ever come across may well be worth it. If not 10 for a PDF copy of the rules will be. Given it's already funded I'm far from alone in that thought.
Tad short on time this weekend, also into the middle layer/presentation tier stuff which is boring as sin to talk about. The big thing is the voting mechanism and making it work without all the ugly it has now, making an actual AJAX call out of it. Which is to say, you hit the button and it sends a call back to the server to figure out what to do without involving the rest of the page. The upshot to doing it this way is that I don't need to worry about security holes from four different implementations of the code, down side is I need to make sure the html around the button is consistent or otherwise easily dealt with.
Having most of the basic pages sketched out is a good starting point, I figure I need to get my tools collected and start choking on the 50 bucks a month for a newer version of visual studio. Which I am somewhat hesitant to do, but if I don't there's not a huge point to the re-write.
Anyway, the last post had some people mentioning issues with the mobile site. I can take into account mobile devices in the new layout, but I'd need to know the exact problems and I don't actually have a smart phone. So consider this the mobile complaints department and I should be able to setup the mobile layout to accommodate them all.
