Future forum checks?
Moderator: Staff
- Erwin V.H.
- Posts: 100
- Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2009 1:38 pm
Re: Future forum checks?
Errr... You know as well as I do that the BP hasn't got anything to do with it. I don't even know why you're dragging it into it (and that's the second time you do it). I've never felt personally offended by anything the BP published (I can't even imagine by what article I could've been), except perhaps once that wasn't until well after the cessation of recognition on the Flemish side.
Also, the IMS is a state institution. So there's no reason for it to publish data for an entity it doesn't recognise. But I was actually planning on publishing the data I kept in a private capacity as a side-note as well from next time on, so I guess I might even do it now.
Also, if for some reason you don't trust my data (I never claimed to be infallible; well, not with a straight face anyway), you're always welcome to make a positive contribution and publish your own figures.
Also, the IMS is a state institution. So there's no reason for it to publish data for an entity it doesn't recognise. But I was actually planning on publishing the data I kept in a private capacity as a side-note as well from next time on, so I guess I might even do it now.
Also, if for some reason you don't trust my data (I never claimed to be infallible; well, not with a straight face anyway), you're always welcome to make a positive contribution and publish your own figures.
Governor of the Northern Beneluccas
Former President of the Republic of Flanders
http://vlaanderen.micronatie.nl/forum
Former President of the Republic of Flanders
http://vlaanderen.micronatie.nl/forum
Re: Future forum checks?
The problem is that should you get the "position" to maintain the list for the Dutch sector you can filter out nations you don't like and you have shown you are very keen to do so.
In case you hadn't noticed the fetid swamp has been largely drained and even in this last stagnant pond the majority of fish have already died and are rotting on the surface. - Prophet Ardy
-
- FMS Staff
- Posts: 21547
- Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:37 pm
- Location: Cherry Trees, Craitland
- Contact:
Re: Future forum checks?
Erasmus, if you're really that bothered, just ignore their data. They're only providing a service to help quantify certain nations' activity the best they can; nothing's "official" about it. Just wait 'til January when I begin the MCS's activity checks if you feel you need a different supplier of post count information
Re: Future forum checks?
I am not that bothered by what currently happens. I would be bothered if Erwin's plan of "dividing the work" would be adapted and his skewed numbers would become official to the MCS. Erwin's provocations do not bother me otherwise, in fact I enjoy them when taken with the same amount of salt as the Batavian Post.
In case you hadn't noticed the fetid swamp has been largely drained and even in this last stagnant pond the majority of fish have already died and are rotting on the surface. - Prophet Ardy
- Erwin V.H.
- Posts: 100
- Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2009 1:38 pm
Re: Future forum checks?
First of all, about me not liking certain nations. Thank you for your kind offer of assistance, but I'm old enough to decide for myself what I like and what I don't like (see the BP thing as well). In this case, my ex-sim opinion on the 'West-Cibolan entity' oscilates between positive and indifferent, and mostly tends towards the positive side. You might have known that by the simple fact that I've publicly praised its cultureral development several times, including very recently. Honestly, it's not like I'd like to eat a Jingdese every morning at breakfast. If that's what you're afraid of, I'd be more concerned about these equine mantises if I were youErasmus wrote:The problem is that should you get the "position" to maintain the list for the Dutch sector you can filter out nations you don't like and you have shown you are very keen to do so.
Also, if I didn't like West-Cibola, I probably wouldn't have tried (in an incredibly clumsy way and failing miserably) to introduce a period without official interaction, in the hope tensions would cool off and we could get things going again.
Now, about the 'skewed data':
1. Please don't overestimate my internal consistency. I was perfectly fine with publishing data without Jingdao for internal use, and with publishing data with the Jingdese numbers if it were to be meant for broader, more 'metamicronational' uses. Or, if I may perhaps underestimate my own cynicism: I consider myself to be a micronationalist first, Flemish only comes second. I consider the MCS to be a 'meta-instance', standing above politics and feuds, and believe its my duty to provide it with accurate data.
2. Also, the accusation of 'skewing data' might have been accurate if I actually deliberately falsified data, say double the Flemish numbers and decimate those of other nations. But I don't. My data on Flanders, Zeeburg and Batavia wasn't any more skewed because of the lack of Jingdese data than it is because of the lack of data on (picks random country) Interland.
Seriously, what are you afraid of? The MCS isn't going to erase Jingdao from the map if I don't mention it. Somebody else would check its post count if I didn't do it.
If it would be my intention to harm Jingdao that way, it would probably be wiser of me to show fake Jingdese numbers, declining every month until the virtual death of Jingdao. And even that wouldn't work, because it's not like nobody's going to notice Jingdao isn't dead, unless you suddenly removed yourself from Bastion to some secret place and stopped interacting with the outside world.
Governor of the Northern Beneluccas
Former President of the Republic of Flanders
http://vlaanderen.micronatie.nl/forum
Former President of the Republic of Flanders
http://vlaanderen.micronatie.nl/forum
- dr-spangle
- Technical Advisor
- Posts: 13072
- Joined: Wed May 30, 2007 12:20 pm
- Contact:
Re: Future forum checks?
Sent to Jeroen, who actually contacted me about this:
Hey,
I left in April 2011 or something stupid, I kept updating the forumlist as a torture to continually remind me to never return to this place.
The scripts are a mess, enough of such for ari to seemingly reject taking it on
I'm tarring it up now, there's a bunch of crap in there, daily forum archives of everything on the list, etc. In case I ever wanted to roll out daily forumcheck updates, which is something the system does actually support.. the whole thing is built for super flexibility, but no one ever wanted that crap
And people thought I had some bot, because they are bastards born of the deepest depths of hell, who seem to believe that work is automatically done for them rather than hours of maddening work
The "bot" is a half assed form that does 40% of the work, leaving only 2 hours of tedious and shitty work left to do
It's still tarring.
The sql download is here:
**********
I guess I had best try and guide you around the back end of it while this tars
The admin panel is located at:
*********************
Username: ******
Password: ************
There you will be presented with 4 headers.
The first is modifications:
It takes you to a page which lists the requested modifications, sometimes it gives a link saying "easyfix available" that doesn't exist. If it exists, it doesn't work.
It does have a button for the modification being completed, that works, but you have to do the modification manually first, for which, see the second section:
The second is manual database modifications:
It lists the tables, and you can click them to go and edit or delete a row
I'll explain the database layout in a later section.
Be careful opening the first tables though, they're big, takes a while to load.
The third is "Balanced actions":
Basically, don't use the raw database stuff often, a lot of stuff is linked up, it shouldn't be now (probably isn't actually, but Nations_data used to have columns like Num_Forums, which obviously depended on the number of forum rows in the forum table for that nation), but basically this is a beautiful repository for functions that add nations, add forums, etc etc etc, it does magic, I have a small altar dedicated to it.
The forth is "Validate database":
If you mess stuff up by doing raw database modifications (You shouldn't really... this section shouldn't be necessary anymore, I don't even think the database is linked up anymore..)
The transient fifth appears only on the first of the month, says something like "Record Postcounts":
It takes you here: **************************
That's the mythical "bot" that some fags seem to think exists. It's a long and tedious form.
It asks the date first, because, as I said, it can actually take postcounts any day of the month, (I planned for a while to do daily perhaps, then I realised I actually dislike having a boot smashed into my face.)
After that is a line saying (on this instance) "117 to check, 61 automatically checked, 56 to do manually. (auto checker had 52.137% success rate.)"
That's the bot, at work.
This page takes ages to load, you might notice, that's because it takes a copy of every forum and feeds it into a function that lives in:
****************************8
It tries to work on some forums, it's hellish to make work, even more hellish to teach new things, you'll notice that the forum table has a column called "Type_Count". On the nation pages it says the type of the forum, that's user input, it's the "Type" column, but I soon learnt that users are remarkably stupid in correctly selecting their forum type, so I had to make another column, and I needed to sometimes tell it to use Dutch and stuff, for instance row 15, "http://batavie.nl/forum/", and has Type "PhpBB3", but the function is told it uses "PhpBB2-Dutch" because it's dutch and because maybe it was phpbb2, maybe it just looked enough like it
After that line is the godawful table, the nightmarish table.
It's huge and tedious and if you misclick the whole thing resets. It's like being indiana jones/Daring Do without any of the fun.
It's finished tarring now, the link is:
***************************
but you still need documentation I should think... frankly, you can probably keep asking me how it works whenever, throw some question via Ola, Ari, or beets perhaps and they'll forward it (I'm in decent contact with all 3 of them via IRC). and my email address is dr-spangle@dr-spangle.com, not too hard to remember..
So, database layout:
Nations_activity
This table has these columns:
ID,NatID,Year,Month,Day,Date,Post_count
ID is a standard unique key
NatID is the nation ID, from Nations_data
Year is the year of the postcount
Month is the month of postcount
Day is the day of the postcount
Date is to make it easier on the scripts to display PPD, it's... erm... *checks* the days since the 31st of December 1BC (well, assuming the year 0 was a thing, which it wasn't. so it's days since 31st Dec 2BC)
Post_count is the combined number of posts on every forum that nation has, on that date
Nations_activity_forums
ID,NatID,ForumID,Year,Month,Day,Post_count
ID, same as above.
NatID, same as above
ForumID is the ID of the forum, from Nations_forums
Year, same as above
Month, same as above
Day, same as above
Post_count is the post count of this specific forum on this specific day
Nations_culture
ID,NatID,Date_uploaded,Comment,File_name,File_type,File_size
ID, same as before
NatID, same as before
Date_uploaded, UNIX timestamp of the date when uploaded, not the weird date format used before.
Comment, comment given on the cultural item
File_name, Name of the file (the files are stored in http://mnforumlist.com/culture/{NATID}/{File_name})
File_type, the MIME type of the file.
File_size, size in bytes.
Nations_data
The main table.
NatID,Name,Full_name,Status,FAOF,Language,PPD,Act_IDOld,Act_IDNew,Flag_main,Flag_thumb,Deleted
NatID, the ID number of the nation
Name, the short name of the nation, for the front page
Fill_Name, the long form name
Status, Alive or Dead
FAOF, Originally "First Appeared On Forum" as a foundation date kind of thing that could be verified, rather than some bullshit nations saying they derive power from time immemorial. but now it's just Foundation date. it's an UNIX timestamp
Language, the language(s) they use
PPD, This column isn't used anymore, the index page calculates it on the fly. (Btw, no available PPD is listed as -123456.789, to separate it from a PPD of 0)
Act_IDOld, the second newest log from Nations_activity.
Act_IDNew, the newest log from Nations_activity. These two are used to find the PPD on the index page.
Flag_main, The ID from Nations_flags of the main flag for the nation.
Flag_thumb, The thumbnail from Nations_flags of the main flag for the nation.
Deleted, If 1, the nation doesn't show up on the front page, if 0, they do. Created when some spammy nations appeared and I couldn't tell if they were "real", so I just hid them. Later I added entries for the Bastion, the hub, Open Micronational, MNeu, List of Micronations, and the UK of Equestria. (UKoE massively outpaced all your posting, it seems.) If you add ?H=1 to the URL of the front page, it lists these also, see: http://mnforumlist.com/index.php?Sort=PPD&H=1
Nations_descriptions
ID,NatID,Desc,Name,IP,Date
ID, same as above
NatID, same as above
Desc, The description entered
Name, Name of the dude uploading description
IP, IP address of the dude uploading description
Date, UNIX timestamp of when they uploaded it.
Nations_flags
ID,NatID,File_name,Type,Area,Description,Length_X,Length_Y,ThumbID
ID, see above
NatID, see above
File_name, flags are stored in flags/{NatID}/{File_name}
Type, either "Main", "Provincial", "Historic" or "Thumb" Thumb is thumbnail
Area, the area the flag represents, whatever provincials
Description, Description of the flag
Length_X, the width of the flag
Length_Y, the height of the flag
ThumbID, The ID of the thumbnail of this flag in the Nations_flags table, if it's a thumbnail, this is just 0
Nations_forums
ID,NatID,Forum,Forum_Count,Forum_status,Type,Type_Count
ID, see above
NatID, see above
Forum, The link to the forum displayed on the site
Forum_Count, the link the "auto" forum checker uses to try and find the count
Forum_status, "In use", or the number of posts it closed at.
Type, the type of forum it's lists on the website
Type_Count, the type of forum the counter is told when trying to find the count
Nations_lang_ip
Oh gosh, the language system.
ID,IP,Language,Manual,Last_Change,Last_Visit
ID, see above
IP, the IP address a viewer is using
Language, the language the user at this IP has decided they want
Manual, Y or N, Y means they chose that they specified this language in the drop down at the bottom, N means it was automatically chosen for them, based upon their browser header preferences
Last_Change, UNIX timestamp of the time they last changed their language preference
Last_Visit, UNIX timestamp of the last time they visited the site.
Nations_lang_request
This table records which languages user's web browsers have automatically asked for which the system doesn't have. (Belarusian and Russian are highest, if you want to try and translate the site into them)
ID,Code,Num,Date
ID, see above
Code, the language code, ISO 639-1 codes.
Num, Number of times the language has been requested automatically
Date, Might have been date first requested, might have been last, either way, it's not working anymore. All are set the same.
Nations_lang_request_text
ID,Language,Text,Date,Fixed
ID, see above
Language, The ID number of the language, from Nations_langs
Text, the text segment identification name
Date, the date the request was given
Fixed, Y if the segment of text has now been made in the given language, N if it remains to be done
Nations_lang_text
ID,Text_Title,Language,Text,Used,Translator
ID, see above
Text_Title, the Text column from above, this is the text segment identifier
Language, The language ID number, from Nations_langs
Text, The actual text segment in the given language
Used, The number of times it has been used
Translator, The name of the person who translated this segment
Nations_langs
ID,Name,Code,Entries
ID, see all above
Name, name of the language
Code, the 2 letter ISO 639-1 code for the language
Entries, The number of text segments uploaded for this language.
BTW, 1=English,2=Handslammer,3=sdrawkcab(backwards),4=Macedonian,5=Polish,6=Welsh,7=Swedish chef,8=Craitish,9=Dutch,10=Swedish,11=Spanish
Nations_modifications
ID,NatID,Type,Timestamp,Name,IP,Suggestion,Fixed
ID, see above
NatID, see the stuff before
Type, Which data section they requested fixing
Timestamp, UNIX timestamp of the request
Name, name given by the dude requesting it
IP, IP address of the dude requesting modification
Suggestion, The suggestion they made
Fixed, Y or N, Y for fixed, N for not fixed.
Nations_pronounce
ID,NatID,Name,IPA,Sound_file
ID, see above
NatID, see above
Name, S or L, short or long name
IPA, the International Pronounciation Alphabet transliteration of the name
Sound_file, link to the sound file of me trying to say that shit correctly, often near impossible
Nations_tags_data
The ill fated tags system, was designed to be able to tag nations as Anglophone sector, Simulationist, Micras nations, whatever
ID,Name,Description
ID, see above
Name, Name of the tag
Description, Description of what the tag is for
Nations_tags_tagged
ID,NatID,Tag_ID,Current,Date_Added,Date_Removed
ID, see above
NatID, see above
Tag_ID, the ID of the tag, from Nations_tags_data
Current, Y or N (why didn't I just have some binary 1,0 field? I dunno.) Is the tag current, does it currently apply Yes or No?
Date_Added, The date the tag was applied to the nation
Date_Removed, The date the tag was removed from the nation
Nations_updates
RSS feed posts
ID,NatID,Date,Title,Link,Description
ID, see above
NatID, see above
Date, Date of the RSS entry
Title, Title of the RSS feed entry
Link, Link provided with the RSS feed entry
Description, Description with the RSS entry
Nations_websites
ID,NatID,Address,Status,Type,Flash_required,Language
ID, see above
NatID, see above
Address, the website address
Status, Status of the website, In Use or Dead
Type, type of website, freewebs or whatever
Flash_required, Is flash required for the website... back in the day this was actually a problem, it's worthless now.. Flash is dead anyway, it's HTML5 or GTFO effectively
Language, the language the website is in
Nations_wikiarticles
ID,NatID,WikiID,Link,Type,Description
ID, see above
NatID, nation the wiki article is written about (and almost surely, by)
WikiID, ID of the wiki, from Nations_wikis
Link, Link to the article
Type, Is this an article about the nation itself? then "Main". Is it about a person in it? then "People". Something cultural = "Culture", a place = "Place", whatever, another part of this system no one utilised.
Description, A short description of what it's about, "-" if it's about the nation itself.
Nations_wikis
You can't view this in the forumlist admin panel database editor, because it's full of HTML
ID,Name,Link,First_Bit,Last_Bit
ID, see above
Name, Name of the wiki (this is designed for intermicronational wikis, hence no NatID column)
Link, Link to the wiki main page
First_Bit, this is the bit of html before the wiki article, on the edit page, used with the following column to scrape the wiki articles daily... you'll find a huge directory of those in here also.
Last_Bit, this is the bit of html after the wiki article on the edit page
Finally, database explanation done, I ate a beef satay meal while writing that... and tried to calculate how much work my 3 running computers right now are contributing to the brony@home group on folding@home (the answer is not much, my desktop contributes the real power of my stuff, and it's switched off until the 4th)
Language system
The language system, has the database tables above, also a php function and the forms to upload a new one...
The function that actually puts this shit up on the site is in function.lang.php, it's called function_lang().
It takes the inputs: $text,$lang,$db_pref,$inputs=0
$text is the text segment identifier name/title thingy
$lang is the ID code of the language selected
$db_pref is the database prefix (Nations_)
$inputs is, if given, the inputs needed for the language segment, stuff like the number 458, in the segment "There are 458 nations on this list."
The add language forms are over here: ****************************************8 and are also godawfully long.
*************************************************************
This says the stuff wanted for languages already loaded
I think that's a full description of how it works, prolly... good luck. I'll post this into the thread in the forumlist section also.
But yeah, frankly, this is a thing I am somehow proud of*, so if you ever want help on working or modifying it, or want to cry as to how badly I've made it, you can contact me, email or whatever should work..
*ish, the main thing I'm proud of in this detestable hobby is Harvey saying I'm the worst thing to ever happen to this hobby once hallo revealed you all hate each other.
Anyways yes. Have fun
-
- FMS Staff
- Posts: 21547
- Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:37 pm
- Location: Cherry Trees, Craitland
- Contact:
Re: Future forum checks?
Fortunately I'm not intending on creating/maintaining a full list like on the ForumList - with all the additional information - so for my data, all of the above really isn't a worry. All I'll focus on is the raw post counts for nations each month; and only for those nations which are on Micras
If Jeroen's interested in getting the proper ForumList all restarted though, that'd definitely be great!
If Jeroen's interested in getting the proper ForumList all restarted though, that'd definitely be great!
Re: Future forum checks?
That /is/ the plan, however I am still not sure how feasible it is for me to maintain.Craitman wrote:Fortunately I'm not intending on creating/maintaining a full list like on the ForumList - with all the additional information - so for my data, all of the above really isn't a worry. All I'll focus on is the raw post counts for nations each month; and only for those nations which are on Micras
If Jeroen's interested in getting the proper ForumList all restarted though, that'd definitely be great!