ID:2425649
 
Brr!

This week development has continued its split between 512 and 513, but with a little more focus on the latter. I have a few bug minor fixes in place for 512, and I think I might do a release either later today or maybe over the weekend.

The Unicode stuff has been progressing really well. I'm not into the stage where I make changes on the backend language stuff yet, but I'm very close. This week I had to change the skin parser because winset commands couldn't handle Unicode (sent to the backend and back to the frontend via UTF-8), had to make changes to the HTML parser, had to run a bunch of experiments on the output control, and also required research.

The output control was a pain because Microsoft's richedit control is apparently buggy when it comes to certain characters. Trying to output an emoji caused the font to change if any text followed it, and subsequent lines would print every character as a line break instead of a real character, causing blank space to build up, until some styling changed a couple times and text reappeared. I had to go to great lengths to deal with that.

But the good news is I have emojis appearing in the output control, and I was able to set a label to use an emoji in its text via winset. The bad news: they're in monochrome. Apparently I have to use a different method of text rendering to display emojis in full color, so that will have to be a later upgrade (probably during the 513 beta, not after) once I've done the necessary research. The bigger deal is supporting other languages' characters, anyway.

For remaining frontend stuff I've just made some changes to the syntax-highlighting editor control in DM to be encoding-aware, so that has to go through some testing, and then I think I'll be ready to move on to some compiling tests, pager tests, and finally the backend.

Thanks everyone who pitched in in January to help support BYOND, whether as a Member, donor, or via Patreon. Also it seems SubscribeStar is finally ready to go, so if you'd rather use that that works too. I'm doing more of a short-form journaling approach with my posts over there.

Are you ready for some football? I don't have a party to go to this year so I'm gonna live it up at home. This means there won't be as much food, but oh well. I'll be rooting against the Patriots as usual, because screw the Patriots. And watch out tomorrow for repeating time loops; if you get caught in one remember to learn and practice everything you can, so when it spits you out you're awesome.
Next up, emoji support for the web site. 🏈🏈🏈🏈🏈
lummox youre a shitty dev
Hey I don't know if it's weird caching or what but when I'm not logged in there's still a post on this thread throwing shade at you Lummox.


On the plus side, at least you Bills fans have some hope in Josh Allen?
In response to Airjoe
Airjoe wrote:
Hey I don't know if it's weird caching or what but when I'm not logged in there's still a post on this thread throwing shade at you Lummox.


On the plus side, at least you Bills fans have some hope in Josh Allen?

Pretty sure this is a global forum thing. All shadow banned users are visible to people logged out - for some reason.

In response to Crazah
Crazah wrote:
Airjoe wrote:
Hey I don't know if it's weird caching or what but when I'm not logged in there's still a post on this thread throwing shade at you Lummox.


On the plus side, at least you Bills fans have some hope in Josh Allen?

Pretty sure this is a global forum thing. All shadow banned users are visible to people logged out - for some reason.


Shadowbanned users and guests can see the posts of shadowbanned users, but regular users are graciously spared from their garbage. The very few people who are shadowbanned live in their own world anyway, so it doesn't hurt to let them live in that world together. It's mostly the same user that has been persistently doing the same thing for going on a decade and a half now anyway, so basically even then it's mostly just that user yelling to nobody in particular.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
Crazah wrote:
Airjoe wrote:
Hey I don't know if it's weird caching or what but when I'm not logged in there's still a post on this thread throwing shade at you Lummox.


On the plus side, at least you Bills fans have some hope in Josh Allen?

Pretty sure this is a global forum thing. All shadow banned users are visible to people logged out - for some reason.


Shadowbanned users and guests can see the posts of shadowbanned users, but regular users are graciously spared from their garbage. The very few people who are shadowbanned live in their own world anyway, so it doesn't hurt to let them live in that world together. It's mostly the same user that has been persistently doing the same thing for going on a decade and a half now anyway, so basically even then it's mostly just that user yelling to nobody in particular.

The unfortunate side effect is that nobody registered knows what a guest may see when viewing a topic. It can make for some poor community optics.
In response to Crazah
Crazah wrote:
Ter13 wrote:
Crazah wrote:
Airjoe wrote:
Hey I don't know if it's weird caching or what but when I'm not logged in there's still a post on this thread throwing shade at you Lummox.


On the plus side, at least you Bills fans have some hope in Josh Allen?

Pretty sure this is a global forum thing. All shadow banned users are visible to people logged out - for some reason.


Shadowbanned users and guests can see the posts of shadowbanned users, but regular users are graciously spared from their garbage. The very few people who are shadowbanned live in their own world anyway, so it doesn't hurt to let them live in that world together. It's mostly the same user that has been persistently doing the same thing for going on a decade and a half now anyway, so basically even then it's mostly just that user yelling to nobody in particular.

The unfortunate side effect is that nobody registered knows what a guest may see when viewing a topic. It can make for some poor community optics.

To play devil's advocate, it's better to see a community with a bad egg or two than see a community constantly derailed by their shenanigans.
you don't have a god damned community
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
To play devil's advocate, it's better to see a community with a bad egg or two than see a community constantly derailed by their shenanigans.


Yeah but surely it'd be better to see neither? I don't understand why this (i.e. anonymous users being able to see shadowbanned content) would be intentional.

It also had the unintended effect of me calling it out, and now the shadowbanned users are aware they're shadowbanned.
In response to Airjoe
Airjoe wrote:
Ter13 wrote:
To play devil's advocate, it's better to see a community with a bad egg or two than see a community constantly derailed by their shenanigans.


Yeah but surely it'd be better to see neither? I don't understand why this (i.e. anonymous users being able to see shadowbanned content) would be intentional.

It also had the unintended effect of me calling it out, and now the shadowbanned users are aware they're shadowbanned.

They've been repeatedly shadowbanned for about 2 years now. They've jumped accounts over and over again to try to avoid it. They typically get given a second chance to be civil, fail to do so, then wind up shadowbanned again after they resume the same antisocial behavior that got them shadowbanned in the first place.

Part of the reasoning for why guests can see it is so that they can't just log out of their account to confirm that they are shadowbanned. Someone else has to explicitly tell them they are shadowbanned. This is usually not something that happens because the kind of people that tend to get shadowbanned don't have someone elses that tell them anything helpful.

The people you called out are keenly aware of the system, being the reason that those features exist in the first place. It was intended to slow them down a bit on the constant creation of new accounts and the harrassment of just about everyone in the community with ungrounded, paranoid garbage. It worked. It helps keep the site from being dominantly about their grudgewanking.

One of the two users in question is banned from using the software at all, I believe because of chargebacks. So really, the whole thing is moot. Whether or not they are aware of the system, it works. We go entire months now without having to think about them, rather than having to deal with them every few days for weeks at a time until they lose interest for a little while.

The other user is notorious for sockpuppeting and creating multiple accounts to argue with himself in public to make the people here seem even more dysfunctional than they already are. The shadowban system works as intended, as demonstrated by the user's lack of change in behavior despite being very effectively seen out of any actual conversation until which time we wind up having to justify the reason for the existence of the features that keep him in permanent time-out.
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
<snip>

tbh my favorite part of the whole thing, is that several shadowbanned users just talked to themselves for months without realizing no one was replying to them.

I'd rather they be banned or completely hidden. Or their post be modified to show that it's from a banned user. Guests will believe the shadow banned user because he is being ignored by the community/mods/owner and hence give the community a wrong impression.

Heck, some times I have asked something and didn't get a reply, was I or am I shadow banned? It's a really sick system.
Let's provide some clarification. I was not given a "second chance", Lummox was and repeatedly so. And I'll explain more in a second.

The only thing "shadowbanning" users does is add to user confusion, it dirties up the site to anyone that isn't logged on, and it's just goes to show that the entire software and website is managed awfully. It also comes off as a petty jab with a small pint of sadism. Also the 0.0001% of my time spent on writing a post every now and then doesn't impact me in any way.

I think Lummox is one of the worst programmers and software developers I've ever seen. I think his mismanaged his software is completely unfair to everyone that's using it. I've been developing a full suite alternative to replace BYOND for years, using the same syntax but with improvements, that is thousands of times better built and managed the right way.

And so the second chance that was ruined, is just that. Lummox has lost his chance to keep his customers and keep up this lie. He'll be outcompeted to the ground.

Thank you all for keeping the SS13 fanbase and a few others alive so I could completely absorb them and create my own profits. :)