Archive for May, 2007

29
May

PPT Oekaki Discussion - Dealing with Spam

   Posted by: Kym Huynh   in PPT Oekaki

With the introduction of two brand new oekakis, the Advanced and the Sketch, to the PPT oekaki community it becomes clear that the current pointing system on PPTO devised by Diva_brat will become pretty much unmanageable. This is because opening the new oekakis will mean that we’ll need more admins to keep things in order, and if these admins do not communicate regularly repetitive rule breakers will not be caught.

As an example, imagine if a user broke rule number 4 and admin B deleted their rule-breaking picture, whilst admin A had the mast list containing a record of who had broken what rule. Every time admin B would delete a rule-breaking picture, they’d have to send a record of it to Admin A, which would be repetative and time consuming. Consequently they would likely stop doing this after awhile, and thus each admin would have different copies of who had broken what rules in a week. This means that a user could very easily go over the ‘no more than 3 points in a day’ limit that is currently in place.

Instead i suggest a the following method:- For every rule a person breaks, they receive one point. Three strikes and they’re out, so to speak. All rules would have the same value, and these points would NOT run out over time like points in the current system. The points would also NOT carry over to the other oekakis.

E.g. If you had three points on the advanced oekaki, you would be banned. However you could still draw on the Normal and Sketch oekakis.

A record of these warnings (and general discussion amongst oekaki staff) will be made on this blog in the oekaki section.

E.g. something along the lines of “User _____ has been awarded a point on the Advanced oekaki for breaking rule number ____.”

Alternatively we could go for a ‘Laissez-faire’ approach, and not have a point system at all - If a picture or comment broke the rules, we would simply delete it. If they kept breaking the rules the admin could give them an informal warning, suggesting that they re-read the rules etc. Afterall other oekakis don’t seem to have any sort of ‘warning’ system like we do, and they appear to get along just fine. I could be wrong, though.

And if the user continued to offend, then we would eventually delete them (notifying them first, of course).

I was intending to use this method at the Sketch oekaki. After all it will be for sketching.

Any other suggestions for how to deal with rule breakers would be lovely. Feel free to raise any other comments about the current point system, the current rules, etc.

As you’d expect, i want this sorted out before the Sketch oekaki is opened. I need some second opinions here!

I still think it would be a good idea for Staff to communicate on this blog, though.

20
May

Site Design Overhaul

   Posted by: Kym Huynh   in Main Website

The site may look a little different today (or over the past day and a bit). The entire layout has been stripped down by removing all the images. This is to make the site load faster and to provide me with an easy way to organize the site to feature the proper areas before slowly building up a new template again.

The menu will be vastly simplified again just to make everything that much easier. New sections have also been added to the menu which now has a complete focus on providing easy access Neopets news.

The news area is also the main focus of PPT with a large link inviting people to submit their own news for inclusion. Let’s see how this plays out over the next few months.

Update: The news boxes and the left and right navigation boxes have been converted from HTML tables to CSS for faster loading times. Paving the way towards the future here people!

Update 2: The more news box at the bottom of every page is now also converted to CSS. Hello faster page loading times!

Update 3: I’ve just gone to heck with it and bought a license for cutenews which is the official news updating platform on PPT. Time to put those PPT funds to good use I say. Interestingly the comments seem to be working now. Very well. Curious…

13
May

PPT Forum Reaches 10,000 Members!

   Posted by: Kym Huynh   in PPT Forum

The PPT Forum has officially reached 10,000 members again since the great reset of 2004. Registration surges during plot times (such as the more recent plot that is currently occurring). It has taken a while, but we are there people! In all honesty, we would have been there a lot sooner, but Jennifer (Runevalkyrie) has been busy deleting spambot accounts so while we did reach “10,000″ members a few months back, the numbers kept being whittled. At least now we know it is 10,000 real accounts!

Thanks to the ingenuity of Hunter, the registration now thwarts all spambot account creations (although registration is unfortunately a little more complex now). Let’s just hope phpbb3 comes along soon because there’s a lot of new features everyone wants to sink their teeth into.

7
May

Comments Problem on News Fixed?

   Posted by: Kym Huynh   in Main Website

Over the past year, the comments on the PPT news have been randomly disappearing. Today I’ve fixed it… tentatively. This means I’m not sure if they’re actually fixed but they seem to be working fine now after a little code tweaking.

Over the next few weeks, the news posting team will be consolidated and a few more people will be added. The PPT teams will now be contacted via email to make things easier for everyone.

Update: The comments problem is not fixed. Worse still is that the people who created the script seemed to have stopped providing support for the script so this means I’ll either have to wait for an update from them, or go out and search for a new script. Anyone have any suggestions? I’ve looked at fusionnews but changing everything over is such a hassle…

I’ve also been looking at phpbb and it looks like they are going to release the next version soon. Great news!