TribalWar Blog

Registration Enhancements

2008-02-05T17:47:00.000-08:00

Added some bot-prevention to registration. Should see 99% drop off in automated posting and registration.

TribalWar.com: Quotes

2007-12-28T07:31:00.000-08:00

One of the past times of the TribalWar sites was the ability to submit quotes that show up on the site. These were usually funny and/or relevant to the site, gaming, or Tribes. Since the redesign we haven't had the ability for users to submit quotes.

This has been added back, and we've done one better. In keeping with the new theme of user submission and ranking of news items, we've done the same with our quotes database. Over 8000 old quotes are available to be rated and new quotes can be submitted. Currently quotes with a rating higher than 0 (zero) will display on the site.

Get started with the new quotes system

2007-06-05T15:32:00.001-07:00

I fixed an error that was preventing users from activating when using the front page to register.

High priority issues:
username search
HTML filtering for contributors

I am Smarter than Yogi

2007-05-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

I don't get to say this often, but I am in fact smarter than Yogi on this day. It appears there was a mistake in some SQL queries that was causing a problem with the news forum and news comments. I corrected the issue and everything appears to be ok at the moment.

You have to love trying to customize vBulletin integration. Anyway, to Yogi... Neener neener.

Search by Username

2007-04-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

I am currently investigating outsourcing our username searches to boardtracker. Supposedly the service works, although the searches are slow.It's better than nothing.

I'll keep Sphinx going for fulltext searches with and without username, but boardtracker will replace the 'find all threads by ..' in the profile link and 'find all posts by ..' in the pop up menu on the postbit ..

I will probably put a link on the current search page to the BT page that will search for usernames without a keyword -- I can't test it until they approve the site though, so once that happens I will update you.

AdBrite is Incompetent

2007-03-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

Over the past 24 hours many users have had AdBrite NETWORK BANNER ads redirect them to sites like errorsafe.com, drivecleaner.com, and systemcleaner.com. REDIRECT. This is not the first time we've had this problem with them unforunately.

I have contacted customer service and its been over 24 hours, so I have no choice but to remove them from the site and replace them with AdSense. They have very slow support and I have no faith in them to fix the problem.

If you are an AdBrite publisher, I recommend you remove them from your site to send them a message that dealing with shady advertisers and allowing them to redirect your traffic for 0.10 CPM is unacceptable.

Fuck you, Adbrite

Forum News Ticker

2007-03-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

We have finished adding a little ticker in the forums for news items. You can see promoted and upcoming items that will scroll in a little section at the top. This gives quick access to news items for those who don't typically venture on to the front page.

New Bump Control

2007-02-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

Xionic put together a new bump control for the front page. The HTML is a bit more streamlined and there's a nifty new feature: When you mouse over the bump control and someone on your friends list has bumped an item, a little box pops up showing you which ones did so.

Embedded YouTube Videos and the People That Hate Them

2007-02-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

Beren implemented [YOUTUBE] forum bbcode last night that will take [YOUTUBE]whatever[/YOUTUBE] and turn it into an embedded Youtube video link. They don't autostart, you have to click them, but it does show a small preview of the video.

I went in and cleaned it up so worksafe template users won't see the embedded video and see links instead. I figured I would hear some bitching about video on the forum because some people would rather click a link, some just want to see it on the page.

I went through and added a new profile field that let's you choose. By default, it is ON and you will see YouTube code. If you'd rather see it as a link, just uncheck this box and you'll see a link instead.

You change this setting under your power ignore setting in the 'Edit Options' section of your user control panel. Here's a link: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/profile.php?do=editoptions

Forum Search Update

2007-02-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

I've been working on search for vBulletin extensively over the last week.

I have made notable improvements in the keyword search; I have moved to a search daemon called Sphinx which operates outside of MySQL and does not lock the post tables, which was a big problem. This allowed me to turn down the time between searched from 120 seconds to 5 seconds.

However, Sphinx could not deal with searches for threads or posts by user. It CAN do posts by user if you specify a keyword, but not everyone specifies a keyword.

Colosus and I decided searching threads started by user isn't the end of the world if we turn up the search time. This was increased to 20 seconds today to balance things out.

What I wanted to do next was allow searching for posts by a user, but only if they specified a keyword, so it would use Sphinx and not lock the post table. Searching the post table - which is several gigabytes in size and contains about 8 million posts - is a disaster. It can cause the site to lock up for anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes.

After looking at the code, I was unable to find where it determines when a search is made to find all posts by user without a keyword. I wanted to hardcode that out, then add javascript to the search form to tell users they MUST enter a keyword if they want to search the post table. Because I could not discern the two things apart in the vBulletin code, I disabled search for all posts by user completely for the time being. Search for all threads started by user is currently inefficient, but not bad enough to cause a problem (I think) so it is still working.

The next step is to talk to people who know more about vB search than I do and find out how to disable a search server side if it is for all posts by a user and does not contain a keyword. Right now, I can't tell.

Current Features and Upcoming Work

2007-02-07T13:16:00.000-08:00

By now you are all well aware of the major change to the front page. We've adopted a Digg style community submission and voting system. We have our own publishing algorithm that determines when a news item is ready to go on the front page. Our method differs a little from Digg's. One that you may notice is that once news makes it to the front page it has a chance to stay there. That is to say a popular news item may actually leapfrog an item that was published later. This ensures really popular news gets maximum exposure.

The algorithm will continue to be tweaked over the coming weeks and months.

The other difference from Digg you will notice is not only do news items go into categories, but like everyone else going into the Web 2.0 world, we also have tags on news items. Most should be familiar with this and its benefits which I don't believe I need to go into now.

Currently we are working on bringing the forums and front page closer together. You'll start to see that stuff over the coming weeks. One feature is the comments will be displayed with the news item on the static news page (posting will happen here too). This will lead to a change in the new forum.

We're also playing with the idea of automatically creating a thread link in General Discussion automatically if the popularity on a news item reaches a certain threshold. Still early in discussion on that one.

Stay tuned for updates.

Welcome

2007-02-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the TribalWar Blog. This is where we'll put news items relating to the site as a whole or just editorials that are too long for the front page. Thanks Xionic for the wonderful design.