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Young Writers Society


YWS: Cassini Updates Thread



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Fri Feb 12, 2016 4:43 pm
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Nate says...



How YWS has responded to Leaderboards changes

Thought this chart of pageviews for the Leaderboards pages was mildly interesting, and it may interest others as well:

Image
Dates covered: November 1, 2015 - February 11, 2016

I've marked most of the peaks in the chart. I'm not sure what the peak on YWS' birthday is about, but I think the rest are mostly self-explanatory. Whenever there's a Review Day, there's a small bump. Whenever there's a change, there's a big bump followed by a sustained increase in the average number of pageviews per day.

There was a very high sustained rate following the January Review Day, and that's probably because on the day after, I began asking about changing the Leaderboard rankings from # of reviews to points.

In November, the max was 97 on Nov. 14 (YWS' Birthday), and the min was 13 on Nov. 27.

In December, the max was 336 on Dec. 18 (added as tab), and the min was 10 on Dec. 4.

In January, the max was 203 on Jan. 12 (tab icon changed), and the min was 39 on Jan. 11.

In February (so far), the max was 465 on Feb. 9 (re-designed), and the min was 66 on Feb. 6.

There so far appears to be a higher sustained rate from the re-design too, but it'll be a couple weeks until I know for certain.
  





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Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:03 am
PenguinAttack says...



Yo Nate, did you change the colour of the header? :o
I like you as an enemy, but I love you as a friend.
  





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Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:09 am
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Nate says...



PenguinAttack wrote:Yo Nate, did you change the colour of the header? :o


Naw ;)

Or, to be slightly more accurate, yeah. Just testing out a new color scheme. Decided I didn't like it enough to change from the current one.
  





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Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:20 am
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PenguinAttack says...



When it went back just then I was like "omg no, quickly delete your post, you blind bat!" cause I thought I mistook the colour. So tricky!
I like you as an enemy, but I love you as a friend.
  





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Wed Feb 17, 2016 8:45 pm
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Nate says...



Well, a few updates to be had.

YWS Upgraded to PHP7
Well, the YWS server is now running on php7, and the site is running ever so slightly faster with the average page download time falling by 50%!

Although, 50% in this case means from 0.23 seconds to 0.11 seconds, which is not a really noticeable difference. That just refers to the download time of the page itself by the way; that doesn't include things like graphics, JS, and CSS files, for which the download time will vary according to your distance from the server (located in Newark, New Jersey).

Besides speed, the main benefit of switching to php7 is just that the old version of php (5.6) is starting to be phased out this year.


New Chatbar
While the upgrade to php7 was relatively smooth, there were some bumps; the biggest of which was that the old chatbar ceased to work.

As such, I've upgraded the chatbar to a new version of it that has a nicer, more modern look. The upgrade didn't go smoothly, but I think I've ironed out the biggest problems with it (most notably, the who's online list was initially not working correctly).

Also, only those who have completed 5+ reviews are able to view the chatbar.


Hide chatbar
One downside to the new chatbar is that when offline, it doesn't hide itself as an inconspicuous button like the old one did. So, I've added a new option called 'Chat Bar Visibility' to Settings (gear tab) ->> Board Preferences ->> Edit global settings.


Roadmap
More updates coming down the road! Here's the current roadmap:

Publishing Center
This is a huge overhaul, and I want to make sure I get it right so this is still going to be a while. But, it's getting closer to complete everyday. When completed, the publishing center will be a lot easier to use, and there'll be some new features for literary works like saving a literary work to read later.

Updates to clubs
Sticky topics, sticky wall comments, edit topics, edit posts, and some bug fixes.

New statistics area
View it here: statistics

Right now, only the Reviews section works (minus the summary part). The rest will take a while.
  





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Wed Feb 17, 2016 8:54 pm
Rydia says...



New statistics area, yes please!
Writing Gooder

~Previously KittyKatSparklesExplosion15~

The light shines brightest in the darkest places.
  





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Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:16 pm
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Nate says...



All Review Day trophies have been awarded through the last Review Day. No PM was sent, so if you didn't receive a PM about your trophy, no worries -- the trophy should be in your trophies tab. Of course, if it's not there (or you have one you're not supposed to have), let me know.

Also, fixed a bug with the Featured Member Hall of Fame that was preventing new featured members from being added. Thought I had fixed this a while ago, but I made a dumb mistake in the code. Fixed it, and tested it. Also added all old featured members.
  





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Fri Mar 24, 2017 10:18 pm
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Nate says...



WriterFeedPad has been migrated to a new server with twice the RAM of the previous server. As the previous server had 1GB RAM, then (if my math is correct), that means the new server has 2GB RAM. That's 2 rams!

In all seriousness, 2GB may not sound like a lot, but WFP used to run on 512MB. Had to upgrade to 1GB a few years ago as it started crashing a lot (practically once per day back then), and it ran fine again until this past January when people started using it more once chat was removed. With 2GB, there should be no more downtime, but time will tell.
  





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Sun Mar 26, 2017 1:11 am
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Nate says...



HTTPS is now fully enabled on WriterFeedPad. Had a go at this a couple months ago, but couldn't make it work after several hours of trying. Then gave it another go with fresh eyes this past week, and very quickly figured out a way to make it work. Go figure.
  





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Thu Jun 01, 2017 2:47 pm
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Nate says...



WFP's uptime issues should now be greatly alleviated. Originally thought it was a problem with not enough server memory, but the issues continued even after doubling the server's RAM (though they happened a lot less often).

I think now there's simply a bug in the application used to power WFP (EtherPad) that causes the CPU to go into overdrive under certain circumstances, which isn't surprising considering that the application has not received any development since 2012. That leaves three possible solutions: (1) kill it, which some similar sites are doing; (2) migrate to EtherPad lite, which doesn't have some must-have features; or (3) a band-aid solution.

For lack of better options, I went with number 3 and applied the band-aid solution of simply rebooting the server whenever the site crashes. This is a terrible solution, but the alternatives are worse and it does the trick. Thus, if/when WFP does crash, it shouldn't be down for any longer than 5 minutes at most from now on.
  





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Sat Sep 29, 2018 4:56 am
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Nate says...



Has it really been nearly 16 months since I last posted here? That's not to say there hasn't been some updates in the meantime, but wow...

Anyways, got a few updates:

Chatroom

Chat is now open once again, but with private messaging disabled. I only recently discovered this was possible, which alleviates many concerns I had about a real-time chat. But in addition, it's become clear YWSers will seek out a real-time chat regardless. Better that be here where it's moderated than elsewhere.


Minor sidebar edits

The forum is now shown in "New Posts" and "Hot Topics." That should reduce confusion particularly on the Storybooks tab. Thanks @Omnom for the feature request!


Genders

If your gender is listed as "other," you can now optionally choose to replace that with your choice when selecting a gender in the Settings ->> Profile ->> Edit Profile area so that when someone hovers their mouse over the gender icon, they'll see what you chose.


Emojis on the People tab

Emojis now work in the People tab. They'll be coming elsewhere soon! Note that this is because currently when posting to YWS, if you include an emoji, that post submission will fail. This is something I only recently learned. Thus, I have to enable emojis...


More to come?

I promise that more updates are on the way. The next big update will be an overhaul to the settings dashboard to make it easier to navigate, as well as more useful. In conjunction with that, expect some changes to the literary area as well (subscribing to works, follow a novel, better chapter selection, etc.).
  





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Tue Oct 02, 2018 1:06 pm
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Nate says...



Emojis Everywhere

Starting in 2013, I began receiving emails about once every two months from users saying their review did not go through. Instead, they received a strange error message, which asked them to send a copy of the error to webmaster@youngwriterssociety.com.

For years, I could not figure this error out. It happened rarely, or so I believed. Thus, I figured it was probably a character encoding issue, but the offending character was a symbol in another language. Turns out, it kind of was.

When I saw someone post that they couldn't use emojis in comments a few weeks ago, I finally put everything together. Looking into it, I found out the character encoding YWS used (utf8) could only store characters up to 3-bits long. Emojis are 4-bits, which is why the post submission would fail. Resolving this meant converting the necessary database tables from utf8 to uft8mb4.

Fortunately, doing this was pretty straightforward. Still, I tested it out on the People tab first just to make sure nothing went wrong. After I was satisfied, I set a date, and finally did the conversion for the other tables last night.

So, now emojis are enabled everywhere, by necessity! Reviews, posts, and comments should all go through fine now (literary works themselves were unaffected).


Next Up

Probably no more updates for at least a couple weeks. Instead, I'll be updating the settings area so it's easier to use and not such a confusing mess.
  





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Thu Oct 04, 2018 4:08 am
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Nate says...



Improved Spambot Protection

Replaced YWS' aging spambot countermeasures on the registration page with the reCaptcha checkbox. This should hopefully reduce the number of spambots successfully creating user accounts, but only time will tell.


/roll returns same value for everyone in chat... mostly

In the chatroom, typing /roll returns something like this:

Nate rolls dice! Lands on 7.

I just recently learned that the number it lands on though is different for everyone, which is something I should've realized a long time ago. It happens because the random number is calculated in the browser rather than on the server.

Fixing this 100% is difficult. But, I've managed to get most of the way there by using the current timestamp as a seed for the random number generator. This works for the most part, but the timestamp value can still vary. In testing, it worked about 75% of the time, which is much better than 0%.

However, it only ever works for people currently in the chat session. If you join chat after someone has rolled the dice, it will show a different number fo you because you're using a different timestamp. Same if you refresh chat after someone rolls the dice.
  





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Thu Oct 04, 2018 7:24 pm
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Nate says...



Team Tortoise Rankings Fixed

On the Leaderboards page, the Team Tortoise rankings have been wonky for quite a while. For one, the months are only correct for one month out of the year! For another, the previous month's rankings never worked.

This has now been fixed. Also, the Team Tortoise rankings are shown in the sidebar as well for the Leaderboards page.
  





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Tue Oct 16, 2018 3:39 am
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Nate says...



X users have logged onto YWS in the past 24 hrs

At the bottom of the 'Forums' page, there is a listing of who is currently on the site. This also shows some statistics, such as the number of posts and the record number of users online. In addition to these stats, you can also now see how many registered users have logged onto YWS in the past 24 hours.

As a quick note, the "record number of users" stat should be ignored, and I should probably just get rid of it. That "record number" includes guests, and whenever we get a spike in traffic from guests, it's always due to bots. So, that record number is mostly just bots. I should probably just get rid of it.
  








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