billythekid's blogshares blog

There’s long been a bit of a problem at Blogshares surrounding moderating votes. People are understandably eager to get to the magic 750 karma to get double arte usage and moderating perks. The trouble is when you are voting with <750 karma you need to have your vote positively moderated to make it count towards your karma.

This means that even though you might well have >750 votes logged, if they’re not moderated you can’t get your perks. You need active moderators.

The thing is though, everyone is in the same boat with moderation, here’s a screenshot of the moderation page for those who don’t yet have the moderating privileges…

There are over 6,000 votes needing moderating in there, how do you make sure your ones get modded first? Well, let’s have a look at the page in the screen shot. There are 9 different blogs there for a start, that’s 9 different blogs a moderator has to visit to check. Here’s a tip… get as many votes on a single blog as you can, moderators much prefer when a mod screen has only 2 blogs!

*GOLDEN RULE* Less work for the mod, more chance of a mod! Vote as far as you can on each blog.

There are 3 votes in this screen for non-demographic industries. When you mod demographics you do it like this…

1. Check the blog is actually a blog
2. Check it’s alive
3. Check it’s written in English(for example)
4. Select “Approve”

Now, that takes all of about 10 seconds, less even. Moderating some non-demographics can go like this…

1. Read the industry description so you know what to look for in the blog
2. Check the blog is actually a blog
3. Check it’s alive
4. Open up your translation tool, hazard a guess at the language, select japanese
5. Paste the first post into your translation tool from where you can read the first post
6. Read the second post
7. …
8. Read posts until you find enough content to verify the blog belongs in the industry being voted
9. Select “Approve”
10. Find a second vote for the blog for Korean
11. Go to 4, select korean for your translation tool and repeat…

OK this is a bit extreme, we use better tools for translation etc. but the point is that this takes time… Mods are often trying to build their karma too by modding. Mods won’t take the time to mod these votes. It’s harsh but true.

*GOLDEN RULE* Vote demographics, seriously, this can’t be stressed enough.

The main problem though is that your votes are lost within the moderation system. A corp-mate can’t pick and choose easily your own votes. The only way is to load a moderating screen, check the blog’s game page for who voted it, then mod those. This is not going to happen unless you’re in a corpwar and your corp-mates need your artes!

…that is, until now.

You see, in an attempt to help those trying to build their karma but being faced with the problem of noise in the mod screen I’ve created some in-game functionality. At the moment we are still testing this within the roled players, particularly for the IMs who are in among the blog pages all the time. So what is this tool?

Here’s a screenshot of a blog’s general table, you’ll see it’s one from the moderation screen above…

Within the “Industries” section we are being notified that this blog has an outstanding vote needing moderating. (If the blog had more it would tell us) This allows us to click through to a page set up to help us moderate this blog…

So here we are presented with a similar mod page to the previous, but only showing unmoderated votes for the blog itself. This also has a preview frame that the blog is loaded into to help quickly see it. (This doesn’t load twitters, they don’t like frames! This is unfortunate as twitter demo votes are the single best way to get your karma up! A mod can do most of them right there on the front page!) This means you can just keep track of the blogs you’ve voted, send the game URLs to your corp-mates and have them mod all your votes for you, essentially skipping the queue.

Don’t forget to follow the golden rules above mind…

Once we’re sure that all the bugs are ironed out (I had to clone the moderation code, then tweak it… they never guessed modding would be done outwith the mod page I guess!) we will be rolling this out to players who qualify(are able to mod)

I developed a new minigame this week for blogshares based on the old card game of top trumps. I’ve been toying with ideas like this for a while and have developed, with lots of help from Rob and JT, an API-style functionality to create player (and blog and industry) objects. This is just the first use of this API – at the moment it’s only available internally but I hope to open it up for approved external use at some point. Using it in-game allows us to get some initial data on it’s affect on the server. The database calls are pretty complicated, really because the database itself is fairly complicated…

So how does the blogshares top trumps game work? Well.. the game creates a list of all players who have logged in within the past 2 months and from this list selects 2 opponents at random. It then displays a list of opponent attributes and asks the player to select the attribute from either opponent  that they feel is more powerful than the other opponent’s.

For example, a player is presented with the opponent names billythekid and Miss Melville. The player knows from experience that Miss Melville is currently ranked as number 1 in the composite table so selects “Composite Rank” on Miss Melville’s side of the table. The game then creates two of these player objects internally and makes a decision based on the comparison of each object’s composite_rank attribute. The decision is coded according to the category chosen, in this case the lower number wins (as a lower number is a higher ranking).

There are only two possible outcomes of blogshares toptrumps, win or lose… there is no draw. When you pick your category you are stating “This opponent has a more powerful xyz than the other opponent.” If the opponents have the same level (for example if both were unranked) that’s a draw and you lose!

It’s one chip per play and a win refunds the cost of play and awards you one chip extra. Simple right.

I’m always open to ideas for little things like this so if you have an idea for some functionality based on player/blog/industry comparisons talk it over with me and if it’s doable I’ll take it on.

So I’ve applied for and been accepted into the GIC officially now. I’m still finding my way around the back-end of the site but they’ve trusted me with access to just about anything I like. There are a huge number of tools I had no idea were in existence! So now that I’m here, what do I see as my role in the GIC?

Well, I am a bit of a codemonkey, as long-time readers will know. I love to sit in code making new toys etc. So I think it will be primarily code based. I’m not huge on maths (OK I have a uni certification in it but tbh, I retained very little!) so the theory behind how things work is beyond me. However Ken is just about autistic about maths so that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m happy to use his numbers in my tools! I’m quite excited about opening up other web provider’s tools to our game…

So far I’ve made a button that allows you to claim your twitter blogs directly from your blogs page using Twitter’s API. This means that although you can’t post a traditional claim-code on a twitter for our spiders to see, you can allow us to access your twitter account in the same way you’d allow tweetdeck or any other twitter tool, and we can verify you own the twitter blog in question that way. The game doesn’t retain this access at this time, we log out as soon as we realise the account is yours. If you remove the blogshares app from your twitter connections page your claim will still be applied.

Just for some fun and to let the game know I’m here, I created a contest for chip rewards in a treasure-hunt style. Players look around pages of the site to find “lost hats” of various values. I’d like to do more little games like this in future.

I’m going to go through the player’s suggestions forum and see just what I can start to put in place from those. I think it’s important that we evolve as a game as there’s been a bit of a decline in play that would be good to reverse. If I can help make that happen then I’m all for that.

In other news I’ve made a tool that’s supposed to help voting. In practice it’s been working as a kind of dead-blog-finder however. Now that I have access to game functions though I might see if I can refine it for an official game version. We’ll see…

Yes, after a long holiday from the game I’m back doing a little bit here and there. I’m trying to make a dent on the almost 300 new artefacts that have been introduced since I was last ‘active’. At the time of writing this post I have 225 to go.

How do I go about collecting my artes? Well, firstly I create this sort in the ideas page to let me see what artes I need in ascending price order. This is simply a preference of mine, snag all the cheap artes first.

Then I load up my text editor and Stud to get some linking done. Hovering over the industry name on the ideas page shows me the industry ID. I type this ID into stud’s listmaker box, choose “hidden” from the buttons and then click on the word “Listmaker” (the cursor changes to a cross). The wait image comes on and when it goes away I have a link saying “Click Here For Your List For The XYZ Industry.”

Clicking this link takes me to a page(example) where I am presented with a list of links to all(up to 100) blogs in that industry. I copy this list into my text editor and start again with the next industry.

Soon I have a big text file full of links to all the blogs in industries I want for their artefact. I can then paste this link into any blogs I have in the game and reindex them, making all the blogs in the list have incoming links. I then reindex outgoing on any of my blogs holding the list.

To wait on the drop I sit on this page which will show me when there are ideas available in industries for which I don’t have the artefact, yet.

Hi anyone! In doing the changeover I’ve managed to break a few things. Like the blog finder tool, it’s all screwed up!

There are also going to be broken links throughout the site, which I’ll attempt to repair as I find them, if I’m able to do so… There’s every chance that the places where the links point could be dead as well as the, very real, possibility that I’ll just neglect to do these. I’ll strike through any broken links I find that I can’t repair as I go along.

Please feel free to inform me in the comments here as to any you particularly want fixed…

Thanks

Ken’s working on trying to get something working on this problem. I suspect Immunis will soon release a lot of blogless artes just to spite us! The problem is that the machine which handles blog additions is down and needs hard-rebooting or something. I think they need to get blogshares into the clouds, don’t you?

In other news, this blog is not dead yet!

I’ve put this blog on a new home, as part of the love-pain blogging network. Makes sense right? ;oP
I encourage you all to join the lovepain network and get blogging! (about anything, not just blogshares!)

I’ve been playing with the Twitter API recently to make a blogshares web-app for posting various events to twitter to help publicise the game and perhaps attract new players. In the process I had an idea of making a script that’ll autmatically identify if a twitter is dead or alive, based on the 6 months posting rule. (In blogshares if a listed blog has had no new posts in 6 months it is considered a dead blog and can be removed from the game).

So I made a script that did that, then I thought, well, “what other APIs are available to me while I’m at this?”

First port of call for all things web related of course is Google, who I know have a whole host of APIs available for the things they own, youtube, google charts and most importantly for our reasons, Blogspot/Blogger. So I added blogger blogs to the script. Then I headed off to a B$ voter/moderator’s nemesis, Windows Spaces Live blogs. Wouldn’t you know it, they also run an API.

So I added those to the script too. I put them all together in a nice, no-frills, php script at http://blogshares.the-kid.org/bs/doa.php but don’t get too excited just yet. This post is to tell you about a greasemonkey script that’ll partner it in the game.

Load up any blogs.php page and the greasemonkey script will hit the php script on my blogshares site and return the information to the blogs.php page below the “General” table…

The advantage of this script is that it actually hits the blogs themselves and does a comparison before reporting them as dead or alive so it’s 99% certain a dead here is a bona fidé dead. If you hit a non-blogger/twitter/livespace site it’ll just send back a message you can ignore.

You can also manually check blogs by putting the URL on the end of http://blogshares.the-kid.org/bs/doa.php?URL= (which is all the greasemonkey script really does, just a bit fancier)

Please note that the twitter API limit is returned and if it’s showing none left(I’ve asked twitter to increase it but we’ll see if they actually do) please don’t hit twitter blogs until the time stated, cheers. Post any bugs here or in the forum post accompanying this.

you’re looking at it!

Get it here

I’ve finally gotten round to porting the majority of stud’s list makers into his new web interface. You get up to the top 100 blogs in the industry with links in the old plain/dropdown/hidden formats for your blog linking fun and games.

I used this kind of tool to get my artes back in the day and it’s great for linking up a whole industry then reindexing outgoings on your own blog to drop loads.

Play nice now…