Diary

Board Meeting, October 6, 2008

Board of Directors.

Posted to Diary on Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 04:01:59 AM EST. RSS.

Agenda, Minutes, Chat Log.

A surprising amount of technical stuff was discussed tonight, despite the fact that our webmaster and developer were both unavailable.

People who visited the site last Friday may have noticed that it was down, and/or that once it came back up, we couldn't keep them logged in.  This crash was related to a hyperactive mysql process that was consuming enough memory and cycles that it was corrupting other processes and files, including our sessions table.  Shane has addressed this by capping mysql at a level where it can't interfere with the rest of the system if it goes haywire, and by adding some monitoring for when queries slow down.

Helping us get on the viral bandwagon, profwhat has done up a nice prototype of an "email this story to a friend" feature on our dev site.  Are we now just one inflammatory Palin story away from Internet riches?  Time will tell.  Next feature up:  An expansion of the moderation dictionary to include almost every English adjective.  We'd tell you which ones are missing, but where's the fun in that?

(RD)

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1

Two more items I forgot

Board of Directors.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 04:05:28 AM EST

none

  1.  Regarding nonprofit status, we're going to try and get the papers off by this time next week.

  2.  We're still open to suggestions on how to beautify the QuickLinks bar.  Anyone?  Anyone?

(RD)

4

^ 1

Re: Two more items I forgot

zyxwvutsr.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 01:30:44 PM EST

5.00 (astute)

We're still open to suggestions on how to beautify the QuickLinks bar
First of all, why does the sidebar use dl, dt, and dd tags? That's just wrong. (ul and li tags would seem to be more correct.)

Second, the QLs all run together, i.e., there is no way to tell where one ends and the next begins. Is the scoring line for the QL above it or below it? (One can scroll to the top of the list of QLs and figure it out, but a beautiful webpage would make it obvious at a glance.) Set off each individual QL with a border or whitespace. The margins around the components of the QLs should be smaller than on the rest of the page.

3

^ 1

QL format suggestion

delete me.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 12:12:28 PM EST

none

Best Quicklink Evar (-) +6 (+)
This is a great quicklink. Something really cool happened that people are actually interested in.

Worst Quicklink Evar (-) -4 (+)
This quicklink totally sucks, but not enough people have gotten to it yet to downgrade it out of existence.

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

2

Adjectives

profwhat.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 10:58:14 AM EST

none

I will happily go to work on the adjectives thing.  The list I posted earlier was culled from Webster's 1911 dictionary, so it is missing some key stuff.  I'm going to try to add to it.  The end product won't be perfect; it will miss some adjectives and include some words that aren't adjectives, but I'll do my best.  In the meantime, if anyone is aware of a good resource that not only lists words, but also says what kind of word they are (noun, verb, adjective, etc) please speak up.

5

^ 2

Re: Adjectives

pO157.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 05:13:53 PM EST

none

Was there any reason we had to use a dictionary approved justification? I'd be happy with writing my own in, and you'd better believe they'd be unique and zany.

15

^ 5

Re: Adjectives

delete me.

Thu Oct 09, 2008 at 03:17:44 PM EST

5.00 (astute)

+goldenpalace.com

Oh, wow. That is sixteen characters.

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

16

^ 15

Re: Adjectives

pO157.

Thu Oct 09, 2008 at 03:52:46 PM EST

none

Good point. I didn't think it could be used to spam the place. Maybe have a process whereby adjectives of our own creation or suggestion could be added to the dictionary? Maybe we could make a site matron with a Oxford unabridged dictionary that throws out any comments not listed. Like in some kind of high stakes scrabble game.

6

^ 5

Re: Adjectives

joshv.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 05:31:33 PM EST

none

Good point, what is the reason for the white list?  Is there a technical reason prof?

11

^ 6

Re: Adjectives

profwhat.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 07:33:34 PM EST

none

No, not a technical reason.  It'd actually be easier to allow any string of letters.

Expanding the list to all adjectives was Mayorbob's idea.  It struck me as pretty smart.  It gives people a lot of choice, but still keeps one rule in place.  The adjective-only rule will promote some consistency (moderations like "kangaroo" or "asdfasdf" might confuse new users as to what those funny words in the comment headers are), prevents mini comments ("youaresofullofshit") and also, I think, will make things a bit more fun--every game needs at least one rule, right?

12

^ 11

Re: Adjectives

delete me.

Wed Oct 08, 2008 at 01:27:53 AM EST

none

So, I can't use oh no you di'int?

Aww. :(

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson

13

^ 5

Re: Adjectives

Lou.

Thu Oct 09, 2008 at 08:12:55 AM EST

none

I think I warned you about using the word "zany".

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

14

^ 13

You can't touch this.

pO157.

Thu Oct 09, 2008 at 08:46:29 AM EST

none

Stop. Zany-time.

7

Possible SPAM attack

joshv.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 06:24:23 PM EST

none

I think we need to remove the ability to "email this story to a friend" from the Diaries.  It would be too easy for a spammer to create an account, post SPAM to the diary, and then email out a ton of links to the SPAM.  God help us if they automate it.

8

^ 7

Re: Possible SPAM attack

profwhat.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 06:28:06 PM EST

none

Interesting.  Or, just throttle the number of times a given link can be sent in a given time period.

9

^ 8

Re: Possible SPAM attack

joshv.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 06:34:13 PM EST

none

Sure, though I imagine that would be more complicated, as you'd have to store some extra information about every story, requiring a database modification.

10

^ 9

Re: Possible SPAM attack

profwhat.

Tue Oct 07, 2008 at 07:18:32 PM EST

none

Nope.  It has its own table, anyway.  It already has other abuse-prevention features.

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