The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

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baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

This is the 8th sandcastle type thread, for those keeping track.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 12:32

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:42

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Oops, my bad. I reset some credentials last night and I thought I checked everything. I forgot the sslptest had a separate db login.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2016 08:08

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

It also shouldn't be loving 90MB of PNGs. Convert them to JPGs and it'll be a fraction of that size.

One of these is 1.6MB, one is 143KB:

# ¿ Oct 27, 2016 17:37

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I wrote this user script for Proteus over 8 years ago (_{gently caress me}) because he was just as lazy about clicking once and looking. I updated it to work with the new forums layout and also removed some video hosts because I don't think anyone is hosting on gamevee or google video anymore.

It adds an ask/tell style second tag to the forum list which defaults to something generic, to avoid spamming the forum with requests. If you click once it will try and guess the type by whether there are more links to video hosts or forum posts, and updates the tag. You can then click it again just to toggle locally between if you want.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2016 10:40

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I've been staying within a couple of weeks of my queue these days, so that's not it. I only pay attention to requests from authors though, because I want to make sure they're OK with their thread being posted and so that I know if there are any edits/layout tweaks/whatever then it's gotten the greenlight from them. I think everyone knows about the archive so if the author hasn't requested it then that's a sign that maybe they don't want their thread up.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2016 14:09

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

It was tinypic:

Lustful Man Hugs posted:

Obong-Ni Ridge: Turn 2

Our Machinegunners and Snipers are capable of stopping the visible North Korean infantry formation. Ideally, during this mission, you fight the enemy to a standstill during their turn and repulse them during yours.

A mortar barrage is lined up, which will hopefully supress the initial charge to the point where an initial lucky charge is impossible.

You may also notice that there are fighter sections available. This will be useful once push comes to shove and we want to rake the entire North Korean force in one blow.

One of our snipers takes some return fire when he tries to fire at the North Koreans; he doesn't fire again for the turn, but this still turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Not only was the sniper not hit (the attack percentages were all 1-5), but a few North Korean units revealed themselves while attacking.

An 82mm barrage hits the Marines on the central ridge. I don't believe there are any casualties but they have their heads down (rallies were mostly successful though).

This bombardment was a herald for the arrival of the T-34/85's. The tank assault wasn't very successful though; not only were all of the tanks buttoned repeatedly, but none of them got an attack off, and while firing a BAR at the northern T-85, some stray shots caused seven casualties to a sapper section that was hiding near it.

The North Korean infantry force looks like it's slowly dissolving in some sort of acid (and the acid is bullets).

A huge part of this battle comes down to whether we can eliminate the first wave of tanks successfully. One or two of them already narrowly avoided shots from M20 bazookas, so I think we should destroy at least one next turn. I'm still quite concerned about the precision of that 82mm barrage; I'm worried if the enemy can repeat that kind of luck.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 01:10

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I was out of action pretty much all of december because I was moving cross-country. Unfortunately now that I've I arrived it's taken longer than I hoped to get internet hooked up, so I'm still on tethered mobile.

Once I'm able to update, I'll catch up. There's only ~30 or so in the queue right now so it'll only take a weekend or so.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2017 21:42

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

Which reminds me, I noticed someone hotlinking images off the LP Archive on these forums recently, which didn't load correctly over HTTPS, because the LP Archive certificate only lists baldurk.org as a valid domain. Assuming hotlinking Archive images on the SA forums is okay, could you fix that?

Right I don't have an SSL cert set up for the archive since it doesn't really need one on its own. I didn't think of people linking images from the forums though, so I can set one up soon.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2017 23:12

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

FYI I've cleared out my inbox - everyone who'd sent me an email about archiving should have a reply by now.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2017 22:10

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

The archive is 10 years old today.

I've given the archive a bit of a retro feel for a day, to celebrate!

# ¿ Feb 2, 2017 01:02

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

baldurk posted:

Yeh I updated to HSTS on lpix last night, I forgot about the uploaders that might barf instead of picking that up.

For sharex I think it's a simple fix, just update the config to point to https. When it POSTs to http://lpix.org/api it redirects and only does a GET to https://lpix.org/api which is why it fails. I updated the config if you want to copy paste.

For rightload it's more of a ball-ache. It ships a version of curl, but rightload is so old that the curl dll is from 2008 (!) and can't handshake, and the cert bundle it includes isn't up to date. I've updated the plugin but the install is more involved now since I have to include an updated curl + openssl + cert bundle. So when you get the zip, there are two dlls to put in the root of rightload's folder alongside the exe, and then a plugins folder where you copy the stuff in from there.

Also I make no guarantees that the rightload poo poo is safe/secure, only that it seems to work for me when I tested it. Fun fact: if I return https as the URLs on lpix from the plugin, the bbcode stuff completely breaks and just prints "{Unknown URL}" because it doesn't understand what to do with https. So I had to return http anyway and rely on your browser to do the right thing. The fix for that is to stop using an old abandoned program, I guess.

FYI.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 15:05

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

ivantod posted:

Hey baldurk, is the API at https://lpix.org/api actually documented anywhere? Since these automatic uploaders all seem to be for Windows so I wanted to put something together that doesn't need Windows (unless somebody knows of a similar program already existing for Linux or MacOS)?

Also, let me add to the appreciation of the time and effort you spend to maintain all these services!

I added some simple documentation in if you just visit the API url. It's fairly simple/self-explanatory.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 15:46

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Side note, I've also now configured https + HSTS on lparchive now, so that should all work fine with linking and image hosting from the forums.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2017 15:59

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I forgot baldurdash was still using flash. I switched over to <video> tags, should work now.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2017 13:18

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

What exactly is slow? Uploading from the website, from a program like sharex or whatever? Browsing your galleries? Just loading images embedded in a thread?

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 12:19

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Should be fixed now. Sorry about that, I had a calendar event in to renew the certs back at the start of the month but it didn't have an actual popup set so I completely forgot.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2017 08:58

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

FYI I'm going to be moving the lparchive/lpix/etc server to a new host on saturday morning my time - so somewhere between 1am-4am US time most likely.

It should be fairly transparent, I'll close lpix for uploads on the old server, make sure any recent uploads are transferred, then swap the DNS. After a few hours the new server should be responding to all queries and everything will go on as normal from there. If you find anything that's broken or whatever just let me know, I think I checked most things but I probably forgot some little thing somewhere.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2017 10:01

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Switchover is done, DNS propagation seems to be pretty much sorted now although there's always a handful of slow holdouts.

Let me know if something is busted.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 12:56

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Really Pants posted:

It looks like some unicode characters aren't working right in the screenshot tester. ♪ gets turned into a question mark, for example.

I think I've fixed it, try again now.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2017 16:19

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Dreamhost is being DDos'd leading to DNS resolve failures.

You can hosts file it temporarily to 209.133.211.153 but remember to delete it after things are back to normal.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2017 19:25

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

FYI for anyone doing SSLPs, if you haven't before then please read r1ch's image format guide or whatever modern equivalent. In particular please don't host GBs of png screenshots of a modern 3D game, it's a pain in the rear end to host and it's wasteful for everyone else's bandwidth too.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2017 00:26

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Also none of those images should be PNGs. One of these is 50% the filesize of the other:

# ¿ Nov 12, 2017 12:17

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Yeh I'm dead.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 11:14

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I've cleared out the archive queue, if you haven't been emailed then drop me a line.

Side-note, do people not use the master list anymore? I found that a large number of the LPs didn't have entries there and I had to add them manually.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2018 23:28

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

It's not part of the public lparchive, it's only for the benefits of this forum, but it used to be that pretty much every LP would be in there. Either added by OPs themselves or someone else. Hell there used to be slap fights over the reservation list before LPs were even started (high five old LP peeps)

# ¿ Feb 5, 2018 01:11

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

nine-gear crow posted:

or at least culling a lot of the ones that are still up there that are long since finished or abandoned.

Please don't do this - they have ongoing/finished/abandoned status for a reason. I was asking because I pull from the master list for the metadata when archiving threads.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2018 10:29

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I've cleared out the archive queue. If you haven't gotten a response, send me another email at admin@lparchive.org.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2018 18:07

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I generally don't allow embeds for this reason. I have it turned off in my forums options when fetching threads, but I guess I didn't for some threads.

I can probably fix it but sorting out tindeck poo poo is more time-sensitive.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 21:28

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I believe I got all the tindeck audio backed up from archived LPs this weekend. They're available on lpix with a substitution of https://tindeck.com/listen/<id here> → https://lpix.org/tindeck/<id here>. So for example https://lpix.org/tindeck/gpqj.

About 100 files have been deleted from tindeck, not much I can do about that, but there's ~9500 that seem to have fetched fine.

I'm going to double check I've got everything now and then replace the links in archived LPs sometime soon. If anyone wants me to backup any tindeck links in LPs that are still live then please email admin@lparchive.org with the subject "Tindeck backup" and with a list of tindeck URLs you want me to fetch & store in the text of the email. I'll run the script on any I get and they'll be available the same way as above.

Note though I'm not going to mirror/regenerate the image link things. Archived LPs already have them fetched, but live LPs are on their own. I'll sort out some kind of substitute for future archiving of LPs with any tindeck links that didn't get fetched.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2018 10:09

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

lparchive can host MP3s if they aren't too big; I forget what the size limit is. There's no player widget, but if I recall correctly most browsers should have a built-in MP3 decoder so you don't have to save the file to disk to listen to it.

There's an <audio> embed if you just go to the file's page: https://lpix.org/2541457/Maid%20with%20the%20Flaxen%20Hair.mp3

quote:

.. Project Wonderful ..

Yeh it sucks

. I'm not going to replace it since there's no other good ad network anymore. The archive will be fine though, no need to worry.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2018 12:11

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Whenever someone uploads multiple-megabyte PNGs to lpix that should be JPGs I die a little bit inside.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2018 16:23

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Works for me uploading on the site itself and via sharex. Maybe a bug with the rightload response parsing but screw fixing that, the solution is don't use rightload.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2018 01:50

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

The recent drought is certainly my fault, I apologise for that. The excuses are pretty much what you'd expect - life getting busy and not having as much time to dedicate to this, combined with just putting things off. I kept thinking I would find the time sometime soon but that's easier said than done as I never found a weekend to catch up.

The main issue I have finding time is that while some LPs only take a couple of minutes to process, others can take an hour or more. That means I get blocked on a particularly time-consuming LP even as a backlog of 'easy' ones builds up, and I don't want to queue-jump because I know if that happens then the difficult LPs will just get continually deferred and never processed.

The bottleneck is me doing manual edits - I've got the scripts to the point where most things are automated for an LP in an ideal format. Where it falls down is things like an LP with an inconsistent or badly formatted TOC, posts in the thread that aren't linked or are linked outside the TOC, generally anything that doesn't fit the regimented format that the scripts expect.

In the past I've tried to be really generous about manually massaging an LP on behalf of authors into the right form out of whatever is in the thread, but that's what takes the bulk of my time. Being realistic that's going to have to change because I clearly can't afford to do that anymore. I'll start pushing back that work onto authors - asking them to make changes in the original posts to align to what I need to be able to run the scripts, at least when those changes are non-trivial. Similarly with any formatting/spelling/grammar fixes.

About people helping out - my concern in the past has been that this is how the archive used to work years ago, with people encouraged to run the scripts themselves and gather the thread for their LP or someone else's LP. It was a nice idea but in practice it ended up being more work to correct any mistakes and double check the contents (since with a zip of html it's hard to know if something somewhere got broken) than it was to archive the thread myself. If I'm pushing more of the work back onto the authors to edit in their threads then it's something that people could help out with, but it'd need the authors to share their posts onto the sslp test poster somewhere and ask someone to help with that.

I will go through the backlog this weekend and clear it out. After that I'll post guidelines on what will make my life easier - it's going to seem picky & anal in places, but I guess it's better to be picky and active than tolerant and go ages without updates.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 10:17

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Don't thank me just for apologising and promising to do better, wait 6 months to see if I'm doing a better job

oldskool posted:

Is there anything financially we can do to help support the archive (Patreon, donation link, etc.)? I don't know how profitable the Project Wonderful ads were to begin with, but surely they were worth more than the $0 of ad revenue the archive has made since PW shut down back in August.

Money isn't the issue, I can keep the server running at least for the foreseeable future if not indefinitely. It's more about my time as a bottleneck, and if I can put more strict requirements on authors submitting LPs for archive then that helps.

Carbon dioxide posted:

That sounds like a good way to go about things. Thanks!
Just one point of note: with this approach you are somewhat condemning yourself to respond to authors within a couple of months of them submitting a thread, because if they need to go back and make edits, that can only happen before the thread gets locked by the forums for forum archival.

This is certainly true, and there'll be a bit of a transition period with all the old LPs in the queue at the moment. I'm hopeful that if I just stop doing anything that takes more than 5-10 minutes for an LP then I can keep on top of the requests that come in in a timely manner.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 18:52

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

With threads that have fallen into the forums archive while I've been backlogged I'll do any manual edits on my side, it's not that big a deal if I spend an afternoon/evening on saturday one last time finishing up and then put in new requirements for any requests that come in after this weekend.

They'll likely evolve organically a bit, though the biggest thing is having a consistent & accurate TOC in archive order. But if I run into something where I go "oh, that's way too hard to deal with" I'll feedback and add a new guideline.

Jamesman posted:

I just really appreciate the communication and having an understanding of what's currently going on with the Archive. I think a lot of times, people get nervous/anxious because we have no information and are left to our own assumptions, hence why every few months someone ends up asking if the Archive is dead.

It's no secret I don't post much on the forums anymore. PMing me or posting here is probably not going to get my attention, and the archive email unfortunately gets a lot of spam so unless an email comes in with a thread link there's a good chance I'll miss it. Emailing me directly at my personal email or a twitter DM is a better bet of getting a hold of me.

I'd seen the odd post in the past but like I say I never had any intention of abandoning the archive so it didn't make much sense to post "I'm still here I'll try and get to it soon". Someone pointed out to me that there was posting here with concern I'd disappeared for good which was the kick in the pants I kind of needed.

IGgy IGsen posted:

Some of us being willing to support you in running the archive isn't necessarily about just covering your costs but more about just giving back a little. Just archiving these LPs, even the bad ones, has more value than most people might think. And you do it all, essentially, for fun.

I got into LPing some time in 2009 or so because of the archive and I found many hours of entertainment just by browsing the place and got inspired to make my own. Getting an SA account was out of the question at the time because I wouldn't get a credit card just for that so having a place where I can essentially read LPs without having to sign up or be paywalled was the best.
Whether you want that or not is up to you but based on some peoples responses I'd wager there's more than just one person willing to throw in a buck or two.

I appreciate the thought but really I think it'd have a negative effect if anything. I don't expect or want anything in return for running the archive and financial incentives no matter how well-intentioned can affect things on both my end and users end.

baldurk fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Apr 5, 2019

# ¿ Apr 4, 2019 23:59

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Geemer posted:

Hi Baldurk, since you're here I'd like to bring this to your attention again. Hopefully I'm right about it being a simple fix.

Broken youtube links can probably get fixed automatically but I've already got enough on my plate with catching up on queued archives, let's see if that can get sorted first before adding more work to my pile. There's also the issue of all the tindeck links across all LPs that need to be fixed at some point.

Namtab posted:

Baldurk I do agree with the critique about the internet archive banner though and I hope you can do something to make it stand out better. As a suggestion moving forwards maybe put another banner + link above the video list itself?

Unlikely to ever happen as it means manually editing in something on every LP with an archive.org mirror. At the moment it's added as part of the page whenever an archive.org link exists in the database, so feasible changes are ones that only change the styling. I still think that anyone blind enough to completely ignore it especially when there are no other banner ads is unlikely to ever pay attention no matter what it looks like.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2019 00:53

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

All the threads in the archive queue have now been responded to. Most people have an LP ready to approve, a couple I asked for the author to give me some info to finalise it. I'm probably going to bump the auto-poster to post 2-3 LPs a day for the next while so that it doesn't take several months to get everyone's LPs posted.

If you haven't heard from me then feel free to email me again, but I won't jump on it until probably next weekend because I'm knackered right now.

I've posted an SSLP test post with the archiving guidelines which I will keep updated as anything changes. These will apply for any requests received from now on. Any requests I get that don't follow them will be politely sent back for edits. If a mod or JordanKai wants to edit that link into the OP where there's currently an older quote from a few years back, that'd be great. Please have a skim over them even if you think your LPs will be fine, because something that takes you a minute can save me a bunch of time.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2019 01:35

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

Jamesman posted:

I don't know what TOC means and I couldn't find any context in the post that would tell me. I'm an idiot and need things spelled out. Please help.

Clarified, sorry I thought I had that in there somewhere just in case but it must have gotten lost in editing.

Fedule posted:

quote:
One line - one link. You can't have two updates linked from the same line like: Update 6: Let's go exploring (Part 2)

Curious why this is an issue? This would have invalidated a couple of my past LPs.

Basically this:

Commander Keene posted:

Probably because the scripts expect each line to be its own update and break if there's more than one link on a line.

It breaks some assumptions in the scripts including e.g. how to pull the titles out, since it wouldn't know that the second update should be named "Update 6: Let's go exploring Part 2" instead of just the link text of "Part 2". In the past I just fixed this up manually, but that's one reason why some SSLPs took a long time to process. I could probably support cases where each link has a full title like Update 6: Let's go exploring (Update 6: Let's go exploring Part 2) but I'm not sure if that's useful to anyone and I thought it was better to be super-simple and super-clear.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2019 10:09

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

The section indicates where it applies:

quote:

For threads with update posts

If you're just linking to youtube or any other site you can arrange it however you like, just like any other content of posts.

For update posts I need to be able to extract out titles and display a sensible ordered table of contents, hence those guidelines to ensure I can do that with minimal fuss.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2019 18:01

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:42

baldurk: Jun 21, 2005; If you won't try to find coherence in the world, have the courtesy of becoming apathetic.

I've added a note to address that specifically in the archive guidelines. I can pull from the forum archives just fine so no need to worry about that. But if the OP isn't ready to archive as-is and needs edits, that's when you'd need to convert to an sslptest post and send it to me as well. You could move & edit just the OP and keep all the links to the thread if the updates don't need to change, since I will fetch the thread & then replace the OP with the sslptest post contents.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2019 10:42

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

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