The Gaming Den

@Zherog, first of all, thank you for all that you've done. And your instructions on account recovery worked fabulously.

Obvious question: is there a relatively easy way for us to download / archive our favorite threads to hedge against future issues? The best I've come up with so far is putting the thread into print mode, and then copy/pasting one page at a time. If you have a smarter idea, I am all ears.

Again, thank you. When I saw that the forum was down and the Wayback Machine only grabbed the first page of every thread, I got very nervous for a bit there.

You've hit upon the best way I've seen - copy/paste from "Print View". For those not familiar with the Print View option, down the very bottom of the thread page, next to the Post Reply button, will be a wrench with a dropdown arrow. Clicking it will give you some options, among them Print View.

The next time I go and poke around for mods / extensions, I'll see if there's any sort of "Save Thread" or similar type one out there.

At least one important post is missing from the forum. No idea why. And possibly theoretically others.

The links to the Tomes in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=48453&p=548351#p548351

Well, that's really fucking strange... I'll investigate.

Did they have Whisper tags?

There was, yes. It wasn't used often.

I have a "bug" of a sort.

Apparently the new character limit is 60,000 characters. I don't know what the old one was, but I do know that Fiends and Fortresses something around 300k characters. I attempted to edit it and it wouldn't allow me to edit because it breaks the character limit by a few times over.

Is that a thing you can change? That you want to?

It seems to have maintained all the existing text, and there are probably a great many other larger posts like Aftersundown or the Tomes that also exceed the current cap by a great deal.

If this can't (or won't) be changed then I can work on breaking it out into 60k character sections and reposting in a new thread because I don't have reserved posts at the beginning of that one to fit them. But if it doesn't cause the entire forum to lag or explode or whatever I would just assume have a character limit large enough to fit the whole thing in one post and keep using that thread, even if at this point the first several pages are all unrelated to the current content after 4 years of revisions.

I'm quite sure I can change it, and further if the limit was high enough previously then I see no reason not to make it high enough again.

Can you give me a better estimation of the size other than "around 300k characters". Or link me to the post and I'll get the info from the DB directly?

It's currently 264208 characters, but with my edits it was going to be 292,xxx characters.

I don't know what the actual character limit was but as I recall the Tome of Fiends is literally cut off mid prestige class so that's probably the largest in the forum, but without search of Bigode's links I can't find that one.

viewtopic.php?t=56536

Thanks - can you go and try to save it again? Just edit and save, no need to add the new material until we know I got it right.

It appears to now allow an edit with at least the characters that already had.

Great! It'll allow up to 300,000. That at least gets you through this edit. Once I resolve the issue of the missing posts*, I can adjust it again based on what's in some of those other large threads.

* Is it just me, or does this sound like the title of a bad Sherlock Holmes story: The Case of the Missing Posts?

If this was the Holmes from Sherlock he'd just look at the empty space where the post used to be and correctly infer from responses at the time exactly what the post must have said.

The Case of the Missing Posts seems more like it'd be dealt with by unsupervised white kids in the 60s to me.

Zoinks!

Kaelik wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 22, 2021 7:27 pm

At least one important post is missing from the forum. No idea why. And possibly theoretically others.

The links to the Tomes in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=48453&p=548351#p548351

I'll have this fixed today. The first post does in fact contain a whisper, so I need to edit that out and then unhide it. I'd like another cup of coffee before I go and do that, just in case...

Alright, somebody more familiar please have a look at the thread. If it looks correct, I'll go ahead and unlock it.

The tome index thread looks fine to me now.

In a similar tone, the formatting of the main content posts in the following threads have been horribly distorted, or at least it has been on my end, with the text slowly growing in size throughout the post until it reaches the point a single letter takes up the entire screen.

viewtopic.php?t=53563

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53704

Unsure if that is something that can or should actually be addressed here, but figured I'd mention it in case it is worth lookin into.

Lord Charlemagne wrote: ↑

Sun Apr 25, 2021 11:07 pm

The tome index thread looks fine to me now.

Thanks. It's unlocked now.

In a similar tone, the formatting of the main content posts in the following threads have been horribly distorted, or at least it has been on my end, with the text slowly growing in size throughout the post until it reaches the point a single letter takes up the entire screen.

viewtopic.php?t=53563

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53704

Unsure if that is something that can or should actually be addressed here, but figured I'd mention it in case it is worth lookin into.

Totally appropriate to bring it up here. Not sure how it happened, but basically instead of having a closing SIZE tag, every size tag in thread repeated itself. What's really interesting - to me at least - is how the software seemed to use that as a work-around for 200% of normal being the max.

Very likely there was something odd with the size tags, and when I programmatically tried to "normalize" them all to the current version, that caused things to get worse. But I'm curious enough that I'll take a peek at those posts in the original database to see what happened - and then I can look to see if other threads have the same problem.

As of now, the first thread you linked is fixed; I'm going out to do the 2nd one now. Thanks for pointing it out.

And, now the second link is fixed.

If you find others in the meantime, please go ahead and link them. Once I have an hour or so, I'll look in the DB to see what happened, which will let me figure out if I can fix it behind the scenes.

Seemingly the only way to restore accounts is changing password.

...except my old account was linked to a mail account on lycos, which stopped existing about half a decade ago. Is there a way for admins to change an account's mail?

Failing that... this is a vanity request, but could this account be bumped to 1000 posts, losing that title smarts.

TGD_Dogbert wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 28, 2021 8:29 am

Seemingly the only way to restore accounts is changing password.

...except my old account was linked to a mail account on lycos, which stopped existing about half a decade ago. Is there a way for admins to change an account's mail?

Failing that... this is a vanity request, but could this account be bumped to 1000 posts, losing that title smarts.

I've merged your thread into the sticky. Honestly, it didn't really matter except it gave me a chance to see how it works in the current software.

You have a PM from me to this account, with a new password on Dogbert. Let me know once you've successfully logged in - either via PM or replying here. I'll delete this account, and change the email address on Dogbert to be the one you used here.

Back in, feel free to delete that other account.

Thanks!

In the same boat as Dogbert. Old account Artless appears to not send the password reset email to any account I currently use so I assume it was something I abandoned forever ago.

Kitchen

Appears to trigger the word filter... It makes it hard to talk about kitchen-sink fantasy.