At 3/14/05 01:35 AM, UndercoverStudios wrote: He said for everyone to stop running all scripts.

Maybe so but most people don't understand the meaning of the word "NO" and will try to appeal Wade's decision.

It will be a shame to see some threads go but if it's slowing NG down, then there's no question they should stop.

Absolutely. Wade said liljim was working on lists using bar graphs so let's be patient and see what he comes up with.

At 3/13/05 05:51 AM, pieoncar wrote: I couldn't help myself. I had to make a stat thread of sorts for the BBS.

Apologies, but I'll have to get back to the original comments later. I got referred to this thread based upon Wade's random rants that followed ... and I'll be at those for a while.

At 3/13/05 07:16 PM, WadeFulp wrote: I can't say for sure what impact this has had, but similar things like this have fucked up the site for everyone. STOP WITH THE FUCKING STATS.

Why don't you do something simple like figure out what impact they had before coming to knee-jerk conclusions. Based upon previous comments by both you and James, the BBS and Portal are not interconnected. The Code 3 BBS errors have only been frequently occuring in the past week, and the Portal errors, stating that the system is overloaded, have only been occuring during the past week ... the first time I've had this kind of frequency of Portal errors since the summer of 2003. If they are not interconnected, since any script he was using was only accessing the BBS, why are there problems with the Portal? Did it ever dawn on you that some of the prep work that Tim did for the (now-delayed) hardware upgrades just might be the issue? Maybe it's not, but it's more than a little obvious you didn't even consider that issue before firing any of these replies off.

If we want you to have certain stats we'll gather them in a manner that won't screw up the site.

It's taken James 18 months to get the Portal Stats off the ground, and it hasn't been updated since the day it was unveiled ... a month ago. The only change he made to it was to add a couple of overview charts including blammed submission values, which, as I pointed out then, are just as useless charts as some of the ones I made for the Submission Stats site. They look pretty and all, but they aren't useful. And before you throw a fit about that particular site, yes, those stats Mike and I put together for it were gathered manually.

Some of you think you're doing no harm and are being helpful, well YOU ARE NOT. STOP RUNNING YOUR FUCKING SCRIPTS.

gfox and I have had lots of discussions in the BBS over this, with James occasionally popping in to correct erroneous statements. Frankly, I think James has got a better handle on what affect anything we are doing and, if it were harmful, or even deleterious, he'd have certainly told us to cut the crap a long time ago.

At 3/13/05 09:17 PM, WadeFulp wrote: Basically no one should be running anything that pulls info from our servers. LilJim will make pages to list the stats you guys want, but in a way that won't screw up the site.

As above, the only new stat that's shown up in the past year has been the Portal Stats. There may have been others that that were instituted prior to that of which I wasn't aware (or didn't notice), but I'm still reasonably confident in stating that the stats available haven't changed (aside from the Portal stats) since I started this account.

In the two + years I've had an account here, the FAQ has only been overhauled once.

It has been wrong since day one and was never fixed, despite both Jon and I pointing out the error on the first BBS page of YOUR News post stating that it was updated.

The ease with which one could have gone back and changed the text of the
document to correct blatantly wrong statements is incredible, yet has never been done.

At the time it was written, users were still supposed to flag "free blams," a fact which changed two months after the FAQ was updated when the submission bans were instituted. The volume of work that making even that minor change (deletion) to the FAQ would have saved you is enormous, but apparently putting forth even that amount of effort was beyond the combined resources of the NG Admins.

Given the above "frequency" of NG changes, why would any of us believe that stat lists are going to happen anytime soon? Just because you say so? You've said a lot of things Wade.

At 3/13/05 10:49 PM, WadeFulp wrote: Spurious disinformation and thinly veiled threats.

Define "soon." You can't, can you. James has enough to do without (yet more) of you making random statements about things he can't deliver. There have been 4 mass purges of flagged flash since January of 2004. Before the first, we were told we would be receiving the points for the flagged flash. Before the second you actually stated that there was a problem with the system and that this time we would be getting those points. When we didn't, you crawled into the woodwork until the storm blew over, and we haven't heard a peep from you about these phantom BPs we've never received. During this last purge of 1400+ flash, the most I heard of anyone getting was TWELVE.

Why haven't you been logging IPs to date, and suddenly feel the need to start now? Maybe this would explain why garbage like "Cooking with Poopie" kept appearing dozens of times, -Err0r's plague1x alt resubmitting all his crap, Knockx's various alts firing off his (flagged over and over) anti-TLF trash, all of this in spite of the submission bans and NG RULES stating not to do so. Instead of this knee-jerk hissy fit about something that may or may not even be prosecutable, IP logging should have been in place a LONG time ago to go after the people who break explicit rules stated in the user agreement.

At 3/13/05 09:51 PM, WadeFulp wrote: You know if we logged you doing something like that we could probably have you arrested? Please stop running those types of things. It's similar to a DOS attack which is illegal.

There's a big difference between a Denial of Service attack and a series (albeit extensive) of database queries. That difference has to do with the intent and how it is done, and most of the illegality comes from the hijacking of other systems to participate in the attack, just as there's a big legal difference between "similar" and "same." I'll have a chat with my counsel in the morning, maybe you should bother to do the same before you start tossing out random threats again.

At 3/13/05 11:30 PM, WadeFulp wrote: If there is enough interest in a certain list i'm sure LilJim can put them together.

Maybe you should consult with him before you volunteer him for more work?

At 3/14/05 02:14 AM, D0GMA wrote: I got referred to this thread based upon Wade's random rants that followed ... and I'll be at those for a while.

You mean "I was" referred to this thread don't you D0GMA. I thought Id' correct you since you do enough of it yourself. While you're taking shots at Wade's comments I have only one glaring question for you.

Who runs this site?!?

Oh shit...this isn't the end of all these fabulous stat threads is it?

It had better not be...that's just about the only reason I come here...

At 3/13/05 05:51 AM, pieoncar wrote: I couldn't help myself. I had to make a stat thread of sorts for the BBS.

*pantgaspwheeze*

OK, now I can get back to this stuff lol First off, I've never been a big fan of any stat relating to posts and postcount, but I'll wade through this as it appears that you've spent time and effort on other aspects.

So, here is what I have for pretty much every post -- I did make a couple changes in the middle of the run, so what I have doesn't apply to searches on the entire list of threads, but if you want to see all the threads you've made, I'll make sure those are up to date.

The most convenient way for this information to be accessed would be if you laid it on a website. You'd have better control over the layout and could more readily provide links to various subsets of how the data is sorted.

- the icon used for the topic

Now this is downright silly to track ...

I'm not sure offhand what else might be considered a spam statistic, but I am never obligated to give anyone the statistics they ask for.

Total posts ... the ultimate spamometer.

It looks like BBS members do go out most often on Fridays after all :)

LOL now that I find surprising.

That seems to somewhat accurately reflect BBS activity. Want your thread to get good exposure? I'd say you should probably post it in the early evening, around 4 or 5 PM EST. This way, there will be many people online but your topic will be less likely to get pushed down to the 2nd page by other posts.

Now that's how these kind of stats should run ... not just a bunch of numbers to overwhelm the viewer, but a conclusion that gives some kind of utility to it.

This set of data might not be so worthwhile, considering how Newgrounds' userbase is always increasing. But, August and December at the top makes sense for people being on break.

Yeah. This presents as much utility as Mike's and mine's chart about submissions rates by date. It's interesting and all, but doesn't mean much. ~shrug~ maybe you can make a pretty chart out of it and hang it on an internet wall and then let it collect dust ... like we did lol

You can see the statistics I have up above, and you can figure out what I can make from them. I expect the most common request to be "give me a list of all the threads I've made." As long as the moderators say this is okay, then I'll gladly give you a list of your threads. No requesting lists of other people's threads. (Moderators may be an exception to this rule, but we'll worry about that later if it comes up at all.)

I've created 7 topics ... so if you make any kind of ranking list, I'll definitely be down near the bottom lol

Actually, since you've collected all of this data (and James has entirely given up on the project) what I'd like to see is some form of a text searcher that isn't going to affect the NG BBS. The real question, from that aspect, is whether your bot is making new queries of the BBS every time you go to do any of your searches (be they by text, my threads, or whatever) or if you actually have that data stored on your computer/webhost. The reason the text search was taken off was due to hindrances to NG that it was causing. If your bot has to go back to the BBS every time you do a query, then you start engendering the same issues. It's just common sense to not do that, no matter what legal ramifications there may or may not be.

As far as closing notes go, don't expect there to be any kind of web interface for this. It won't be worth my effort to code. Don't expect open access to this database either, at least not without convincing me somehow :P

Actually, it should be fairly straightforward to set it up in some kind of html format. Really, the control over how the information is presented is worth it.

At 3/13/05 02:10 PM, pieoncar wrote:

Makes sense, but you can just use logic to get to the same conclusion.

And now here's some hard data to back it up :P

Which is pretty much why I kept restarting that Submission Stats project. Everyone was "reasonably" sure of the "best" times to be on if you wanted BPs. For the most part, they turned out to be right, but now there's actual data showing some of the other times that are nearly as good.

nor do I want this topic turning into a human-powered version of the long-inactive BBS search-by-text option (only for topics instead of all posts).

Maybe this is just because this is kind of my brainchild, but I'd like to know why, in more detail, you would disallow this function, when you went on to say

See above.

So, as for some last words, I'm going to send an email to Tom, Wade, and Jim to see what they give the okay on. In the meantime, I would imagine that emailing people their personal stats would be okay (SCD and LFB, check your email in a couple minutes). Until the admins reply, I'll continue with the time statistics and helping out in finding topics with the "difficult" words.

Tom's probably going to leave this to Wade to handle from an administrative aspect, so it's doubtful he'll pipe in. James is in Japan, so there's not telling if he'll (be able to) make the time to comment until after he gets back. Until then, we get Wade ...

At 3/13/05 09:01 PM, ShittyKitty wrote: Umm, does this include my NG Total Listing? If so, I'll stop the list as soon as I return to my machine next Sunday.

If James thought there was a problem, you'd have heard about it months ago, don't you think? The most I've seen from him has been rather vague hints in that direction (usually via gfox' posts), but there's been nothing explicit telling any of us we're causing any significant issues.

At 3/13/05 09:29 PM, ShittyKitty wrote:
19,000 profiles on Wednesdays, about 90,000 profiles on Sundays, and all 1.2 million possible profiles every month.

/me goes back and does the math ;)

Less bandwidth than I thought ^^

At 3/13/05 10:44 PM, -idle- wrote:
Just wanted to know if you are planning on stopping any of the current listings which are unauthorised? Are some of them allowed and some not?

Any of the lists by the users counts as "unauthorised," to the same degree that a biography may be "unauthorised." It doesn't mean illegal, just that it's not sanctioned.

I only ask because most of the listings make no secret about the fact that they are operating, and more often than not are using systems similar to a DOS attack.

We use a program that makes DB queries for an extremely limited period of time. This is not a DoS attack, and any "similarity" with one ends which a comparison of the degree. The purpose of a DoS is to overwhelm the gateways of a system with queries and processing requests. If 2-6 requests per second for 20 minutes "overwhelms" a system that touts 500mbps, the person who put it together is a moron probably also owns a Chevette with a Ferrari engine.

At 3/13/05 10:50 PM, Inuzuka-Kiba wrote: Looks like some of the lists will be ending up discontinued or people will have to start relying on manual pulls again. Tough luck list makers. :'( I guess with manual the lists would be updated less often and less people would be listed. ;_;

~shrug~ I'm not stopping the EGRL until they expand the BP list to show at least all of the Elite Guard in some kind of readily accessible format. Depending upon the results of my conversation in 6 hours, I may be going back to a manual pull (and subsequently reducing the volume of people I list), but I highly doubt it.

At 3/13/05 11:02 PM, -idle- wrote: Even though Wade said they have caused some trouble

Wade says a lot of things ...

Instead of having a Top Voting Power list, there could just be a ranking in the profile (just a thought).

If there's a ranking, there should/will be a listing as well. Back when there was a Popularity ranking, there was a list, and I see bno reason why that kind of set up shouldn't continue. The ranking lists are done at 4:35am EST, while the ranks listed in profiles aren't updated until 4:45am, so the lists are always done first.

At 3/13/05 11:10 PM, phileeguy wrote:
It's a shame that these lists are going to be put on hiatus, because like Wade said the creators didn't mean any harm. I am just a little depressed right now because I would have finally gotten a spot on the next Penta List update.

Why does everyone seem to think the lists are going away? What happened when they changed the way reviews were configured in profiles? The lists were later than normal. End.

Wade has never said anything about stopping the lists, and, legally, he knows he couldn't even if he wanted to. The (very thin) legal limb out onto which he's been climbing has been about the use of programs to gather the information. He's tossing around keywords like DoS and FBI and expecting to scare people into ceasing their use.

At 3/13/05 11:17 PM, ReconRebel wrote: This place was becoming a list factory Inuzuka (way too many). I admit I'll miss some of the updates but it's for the good of Newgrounds like Wade said.

IF it's for the good of NG, I'll stop using the lister, but it's going to take more than Wade making arbitrary statements and spurious comments to convince me of that. On a Sunday afternoon, what are the chances he's actually spoken to an attorney? With James in Japan, what are the chances Wade actually asked, or that James had time to check, about the real affect the DM, or any other data puller, has?

Better to lose a bunch of lists than risk screwing up the entire site.

Again, there's zero reason for any of the lists to go away, even if we stopped using a program ... except maybe the Total List might not be so Total. I'll have issues with pulling 1k profiles manually. I see no way that anyone can do 90k.

At 3/14/05 12:08 AM, Evark wrote: I realize by now that your post is several hours old, and that you probably aren't as mad as you were initially, but I still think you need to hear someone reinforcing the notion that nobody is out to harm Newgrounds.

You aren't familiar with Wade then ... He's out on a rant and will stick with it, harm or no harm intended.

If my counsel tells me anything more concrete than that he might have a leg to stand on against me, what I use, and the way in which I use it, I'll stop. Wade's attempts at unassailable authority and scare tactics don't phase me in the least. Had he bothered to approach this in a reasonable manner, there would have been room for discussion, but he's drawn his line in the sand.

At 3/14/05 01:12 AM, CorpseFucker wrote: Maybe these guys collecting stats is what was causing alerts with my firewall?
Something along the lines of "MSSQL_NULL_PACKET" or is that something else?
I haven't got one of these alerts for several months though.

Nothing we do affects you. My queries go from my computer, through a bunch of server hops to NG, and right back again the same way. If it's affecting you in some way, I'd be more interested in knowing why you're hijacking the routers along the transmission. The FBI would have more interest in that than what Wade's been throwing about.

At 3/14/05 01:41 AM, Zendra wrote:
I think more people will listen if you make a topic about it, in the General forum. :)

The list makers are all (almost all?) here, so this is the better place for him to post to get our attention.

At 3/14/05 02:06 AM, Afterburner wrote: Maybe so but most people don't understand the meaning of the word "NO" and will try to appeal Wade's decision.

There's a difference between Wade throwing a rant, legal threats, and hot buttons around and him making some kind of "ruling" that's appealable.

At 3/14/05 02:25 AM, Afterburner wrote: Who runs this site?!?

Moot. The issue now is Wade making legal threats without having bothered to consult with anyone who can back up those threats. It's like hearing "fuck" too many times. After a while you get inured to it, and can read behind the language enough to know that he's talking out of his hat. He know enough to have an idea of what to say, but there's no specifics.

At 3/14/05 02:14 AM, D0GMA wrote:
As above, the only new stat that's shown up in the past year has been the Portal Stats. There may have been others that that were instituted prior to that of which I wasn't aware (or didn't notice), but I'm still reasonably confident in stating that the stats available haven't changed (aside from the Portal stats) since I started this account.

I was thinking new stats, but said they "haven't changed." The removal of Popularity as a stat is a rather glaring inconsistency to that comment.

Correction:

"but I'm still reasonably confident in stating that no new stats are available (aside from the Portal stats) since I started this account."

Hmm, OK. I've discontinued my review list so it doesn't really bother me with respect to that, but I don't see how there would be a difference between me checking around 1000 profiles manually, and using a script to do it. To the servers, anyway - it saved me god knows how much time. Ah well, I'll leave those still doing lists to argue this one out.

At 3/13/05 09:51 PM, WadeFulp wrote: You know if we logged you doing something like that we could probably have you arrested? Please stop running those types of things. It's similar to a DOS attack which is illegal.

As D0GMA said earlier, the intent was to provide close-to-complete ranking lists for Newgrounds users, to supplement the lists that NG didn't provide. However, if it is a problem, I will discontinue the NGTL as of March 20. I'd do it sooner, but I'm on Spring Break at the moment and my computer is two hours away.

Ok, so all scrpits are done, but can we petition which stats we want as a page on the site?

The errors i seem to get are runn during the day and only on the BBS,
i may be wrong but doesn't shittykitty's list run at around 12 oclock at night when the amount of users is very low

At 3/14/05 07:51 PM, Mr_Fluffykins wrote: The errors i seem to get are runn during the day and only on the BBS,
i may be wrong but doesn't shittykitty's list run at around 12 oclock at night when the amount of users is very low

Only my Sunday updates were run at night. The Wednesday updates ran at noon, and the monthly updates ran all day for three days.

Meh I thought this was pretty cool.

At 3/14/05 10:55 PM, Tal-con wrote: What's DDoSing?

Chrome meant DoSing. The extra 'D' was a typo.

At 3/14/05 10:58 PM, Master_Inuyasha wrote:

At 3/14/05 10:55 PM, Tal-con wrote: What's DDoSing?

Chrome meant DoSing. The extra 'D' was a typo.

No.

DoS is simply Denial of Service, referring to any one of several methods meant to overwhelm the resources of a given computer system.

DDoS is a distributed denial of service, whereby the person(s) conducting the DoS hijacks control of one or more other systems to assist in the attack against another system.

This thread ultimately delivers.

too bad I just finished my popcorn.

At 3/14/05 02:14 AM, D0GMA wrote: BBS and Portal are not interconnected.

I stopped reading at this point.

1. The bbs and portal are related. Everything works from the same database.
2. Stat pages aren't something that should take precedence over other things that ultimately thousands more people will want to use. The portal/stats.html page doesn't even show up on our own stats and that's linked from the Portal index, which gets around 200,000+ hits a day.
3. I haven't given up on the stats, I've been working on other things, until:
4. As I already mentioned in another thread you post in, I'm on vacation in Japan and haven't checked into any of this in any depth yet.

At 3/14/05 11:30 PM, Sevenstar wrote: This thread ultimately delivers.

I KNOW!
It just keeps getting better.

At 3/15/05 04:14 AM, liljim wrote: I'm on vacation in Japan and haven't checked into any of this in any depth yet.

When you return, and once you've looked thoroughly into this, could you make a front page post about whether this kind of "data mining" will be disallowed or not? And if it will be, could you announce which stat lists you will be working on first? I think we need at least a B/P list, similar to D0GMA's, and a reviewer list. I know it shouldn't be the main purpose of Newgrounds to compete for points, but I'm really hooked on these stat lists, which is one of the reasons why I try to vote as much in the Portal as possible.

If it's not worth the front page, a thread in General would be nice.

At 3/14/05 07:51 PM, Mr_Fluffykins wrote: The errors i seem to get are runn during the day and only on the BBS,
i may be wrong but doesn't shittykitty's list run at around 12 oclock at night when the amount of users is very low

That's a good time to run it, right when we're running a lot of heavy duty scripts to process Daily Top 5, and many other things. We run it then because things are supposed to be slower.

Dogma has a point, I don't know how harmful everyone's data minning is. All I know is we've been having problems lately, having trouble to figure out why, the suggestion of someone running a script came up as a possible reason. Then I get an email from a guy saying he's been pulling stats from the forums and then see that other people are doing simlilar things and became suspicious. LilJim is in Japan and I have no way to monitor this kind of thing. So I was asking everyone to stop running the scripts until LilJim came back to let us know what was okay and what wasn't.

Where Dogma is way out of line is assuming the forums and the portal are seperate. We have a single database and when you go to the portal or the forums it's accessing the same user information. The entire site is tied together and this is why these data minning scripts bother us, because we are constantly fighting to free up resources on our single database server. We can't simply add more of them because MySQL is just starting to offer database clustering and Liljim would have a lot of work to do to set something like that up, if it's even possible in the first place.

Also Dogma is giving me shit about volunteering LilJim for more work. First off Liljim is a paid employee, so he's not really a volunteer, we pay him to do things for us, although I will say he volunteers a lot of time ontop of what we expect of him working on this site. :) I wouldn't have said anything about him making stat lists if I didn't know he was already working on a lot of stats for you guys and is doing so because he worries about all the scripts you are running.

So I didn't go off on my rant for no reason. I have reason to be concerned. I care about this site and I want it to run well. I would hope all of you would feel the same way.

Also if you run a script to pull data from the site and it does result in over loading our database, that is a denial of service attack.

This will teach them not to make stat pages >:(

At 3/15/05 08:54 AM, -LazyDrunk- wrote: Just my two cents, but wasn't there supposed to be a hacker going around fucking with people's sites? Link

Yeah, and look at what Knox's forums are coded with. Seriously.

I'll just be patient and see what Jim has to say.

At 3/15/05 04:14 AM, liljim wrote: 1. The bbs and portal are related. Everything works from the same database.

We were (I was?) led to believe that, during that series of upgrades in 2003, in part to resolve the issues with extreme Portal load, that they got shifted to separate servers. Do I need to go find quotes, or will that suffice?

2. Stat pages aren't something that should take precedence over other things that ultimately thousands more people will want to use.

I don't think anyone here said they should. Wade keeps volunteering you to do more stat pages, and has mentioned that we'd see them "soon." Had you kept reading, you'd have seen that addressed.

The portal/stats.html page doesn't even show up on our own stats and that's linked from the Portal index, which gets around 200,000+ hits a day.

Anytime I want to go look at them, I have to go into the SS thread and click the link from there. Like I said then, it's not a lot relative to the portal views, but we had 500 hits in 3 months at the Submission Stats site and that's enough that it shouldn't be simply dismissed.

3. I haven't given up on the stats, I've been working on other things, until:
4. As I already mentioned in another thread you post in, I'm on vacation in Japan and haven't checked into any of this in any depth yet.

You're on vacation, you shouldn't even be here :-P~~

See if you can find some nice, friendly, Japanese businessman to take you out to "do the rainbow" and some Karaoke ;)

/me tosses out prepared response and starts over for the "kinder, gentler" Wade.

At 3/15/05 08:42 AM, WadeFulp wrote:
That's a good time to run it, right when we're running a lot of heavy duty scripts to process Daily Top 5, and many other things. We run it then because things are supposed to be slower.

That's why I wait until after the 4:45am is done ... doesn't help my list much if scripts aren't done yet and the ranks are all wrong ;)

All I know is we've been having problems lately, having trouble to figure out why, the suggestion of someone running a script came up as a possible reason.

You latched onto it as THE reason and promptly lashed out at everyone over it.

So I was asking everyone to stop running the scripts until LilJim came back to let us know what was okay and what wasn't.

This is you asking.

At 3/13/05 07:16 PM, WadeFulp wrote: STOP RUNNING YOUR FUCKING SCRIPTS.

This is not. Maybe that attitude works for you someplace else, but this is Wi/Ht?Everything is open to debate at least once. At least it's not the Politics forum, or this would come up over and over again for months ;)

Where Dogma is way out of line is assuming the forums and the portal are seperate.

See my reply to James.

Also Dogma is giving me shit about volunteering LilJim for more work.

If things were left at a, "James is doing stats for you guys," it would constantly be coming up as an issue in the BBS. As both I and he mentioned, he's got enough else he's doing without you just randomly promising that he's going to do things. It's basic management skills, you at least touch base with your employees before you dump a new load into their IN box. We went through so many middle management people because none of them could figure out how to keep their support staff happy. They'd promise all and sundry to the clients and then get canned (oh wait, they resigned before they got fired lol) when they'd promised too much.

So I didn't go off on my rant for no reason. I have reason to be concerned. I care about this site and I want it to run well. I would hope all of you would feel the same way.

We made our lists because NG wasn't supplying the information we wanted. Rather than waiting, and waiting (and waiting) and getting disgruntled over the fact that James had too much other shit to do, we made the expansions ourselves. If he's making stat list expansions it should be because it's something that a large bloc of users want, not over some "worries about all the scripts you are running." ~shrug~ If that's what's got the fire going, I'm not going to quibble.

Also if you run a script to pull data from the site and it does result in over loading our database, that is a denial of service attack.

You might want to take a good look over Title 18: Part 1: Chapter 47: §1030 and the Section 814 amendments from the Patriot Act before you start slinging around threats of siccing the FBI on people. Some of the applications, like the one that started this thread, could be construed as in violation, while most are not. Your threats lumped everyone who's trying to do something for this site and its users together with the people who hack into credit card companies and those who spread virii.

At 3/15/05 08:50 AM, Zendra wrote: But will if James makes some new lists for the users, then does other lists will be locked, or can we still discuss about it? :)

There shouldn't be any reason for the list threads to be locked, at least not until after any official lists appear. If NG starts listing all the BP rankings, frankly, I'd see no reason for my thread(s) to stay open subsequent. I might carry on with some kind of a B list, as I don't really see an easy way for them to set up a Pace section. ~shrug~ we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

i do have to admit,i will miss the stat page but if destroying them is the only way to make newgrounds run clean again then let the stat page incinerate,lets just hope liljim can make one of his own after his lil vacation ^_^

At 3/15/05 09:36 AM, D0GMA wrote:

At 3/15/05 04:14 AM, liljim wrote: 1. The bbs and portal are related. Everything works from the same database.

We were (I was?) led to believe that, during that series of upgrades in 2003, in part to resolve the issues with extreme Portal load, that they got shifted to separate servers. Do I need to go find quotes, or will that suffice?

You will need to find quotes. :)

Anytime I want to go look at them, I have to go into the SS thread and click the link from there. Like I said then, it's not a lot relative to the portal views, but we had 500 hits in 3 months at the Submission Stats site and that's enough that it shouldn't be simply dismissed.

There are few pages on the site that do less than 500 hits per hour. That's my point.... People generally aren't interested in this stuff, there are just a select few who are interested in it. And I was a stat hound back in the past - check it out - that was long before I was involved with working on Newgrounds. The thing to keep in mind here is that there are a few people who're interested in all the stats from the site - but those people are few and far between.

See if you can find some nice, friendly, Japanese businessman to take you out to "do the rainbow" and some Karaoke ;)

I've done Karaoke a few times here... What... is... "The rainbow"? I'm almost worried to ask. :)

At 3/15/05 10:44 AM, iLLiCit_JmBd wrote:

Someone say something?

At 3/15/05 11:02 AM, liljim wrote:
You will need to find quotes. :)

Meanie :-P~~~

I've done Karaoke a few times here... What... is... "The rainbow"? I'm almost worried to ask. :)

Sake brands make their bottles in all different colours for all the various styles of sake they make. A good sake bar will have upwards of 50 brands, so you start at white and work your way to black. I made to it green =)

IMO what really messes you up is going back and forth between hot and cold sake.

At 3/15/05 11:02 AM, liljim wrote: There are few pages on the site that do less than 500 hits per hour. That's my point.... People generally aren't interested in this stuff, there are just a select few who are interested in it. And I was a stat hound back in the past - check it out - that was long before I was involved with working on Newgrounds. The thing to keep in mind here is that there are a few people who're interested in all the stats from the site - but those people are few and far between.

Perfect example lies in the thread you just linked to:

At 7/29/02 11:25 AM, liljim wrote:

At 7/27/02 11:48 AM, Testerline wrote: why do we need all that stuff? i dont think we do

It'd just be nice to see some more stats. It's not a question of needing it, per say.

Most people on NG (the "norms" as I like to call 'em) are like Testerline. They don't care about excess information. They aren't curious more than a slight bit about anything other than what the hip topics on General to talk in are. If you ask them something about say "how many users have over 5000 reviews?" they'd be much more likely to say "I don't care and why the hell should you care, either?" than point you to the portal stats page that features the top 10 reviewers on the site.

I don't care too much that the majority of the site is like this unless they specifically try to infringe upon others' interests or demean them, and sadly they often do. Just look at some posts on page 2 of this thread, for instance (Undercover Studios, I'm looking in your direction).

I'm of the mind of liljim from 2002:

It'd just to NICE to see some more stats (for those of us who care, and who knows, maybe more would care if NG had more official stat lists). It's not a question of NEEDING it.

Nothing on NG is truly NEEDED, after all. This is all optional, this is all luxury, this is all a great site that the world's health and lives aren't depending on... but it does no harm and it's a good source of entertainment, information, inspiration, and art.

And what the hell is wrong with that, eh? So what's wrong with enjoying stats about the fun game-like point systems on the site as well? They do keep a WHOLE LOT of people around here, after all. Way more people than are checking out our lists, I must admit. But that's to be expected. Our profiles show our exp and b/p and so forth... but they don't have direct links to Dogma's EGRL.

Anyway, I'm rather late arriving to this party, but I'll just say this:

Wade apparently is freaked out by SK's program. That's fine, and he probably has some valid points about site performance issues. But I SEEM to recall having CALM and RATIONAL discussions with liljim about his program and about all our lists and the potential for NG to replace them and make them obsolete in the near future. This conversation took place in mid-January, IIRC.

AT THAT TIME, and this is the key part, liljim never made ANY pronouncement that we must immediately cease using the NG Lister or any similar programs to compile our lists. He made it clear that sooner or later the program either would stop working or we'd be asked to stop using it, but we probably wouldn't even care all that much, as NG would be officially offering SO much more information to us that we'd be happy and sated.

So... I just find it strange that Wade suddenly blows his top over this new thread stat thread. If the "scripts" or whatever that pieoncar developed are a huge problem, then that should be addressed separately and by itself. NO ONE is using pieoncar's program or whatever but him. The rest of us are using (and have been, since August 2004) SK's program.

And if that's not cool anymore? Well, we weren't given ANY direct orders to stop in January, so don't act like we're in "violation" of some previous pronouncement or something. I find that insulting. If liljim had even said "I think you guys should stop using it for the time being while we assess what effect it's having on the site, and besides, these new lists are coming out in XXXX weeks."...

then I think it's safe to say that Dogma, myself, ramagi, jonthomson, etc. etc... all the people who use SK's program to make lists we had running LONG before SK's program came about... would either have:

A) stopped our lists
B) reduced our lists in length and done them manually
C) reduced our lists in update frequency and done them manually
D) tried to do our lists manually in full form

Same amount of profiles need to be pulled for D, obviously.

The only difference is that it takes a HELL of a lot more time for the listmaker to pull the data by looking at profiles him/herself... and that it strains NG's database less (that would be the entire reason for doing it manually, of course, to save NG the trouble of NGL's impact upon it).

So whatever. I'd just like to hear it straight from liljim: should we or should we not use NG Lister anymore? Is it okay to use it at 5 AM, for instance? For only 100-200 profiles? Or should we not even use it to pull 5 profiles at once? Is it absolutely essential that we instead just open and look at those 5 profiles manually?

Or, instead, would you rather we just not use it at all, whether it's essential or not? To see how the site's performance is improved/affected?

Or, would you ask that such huge pulls as SK's lists cease, but would ramagi pulling 500 or so people once a month still be okay?

Or what? Just please, liljim, shine some light onto these darkened, shadowed issues. Because Wade's comparisons of rabid, loyal, and dedicated Newgrounds users to Denial of Service virus-spewing hackers who are trying to hurt the site is insulting and quite shocking to me. And he clearly was kneejerking.

Anyway, things like this certainly don't make me want to catch up on the BBS topics I need to catch up on anytime soon. Christ. (sigh)

At 3/15/05 04:22 PM, gfoxclock wrote

Most people on NG (the "norms" as I like to call 'em) are like Testerline. They don't care about excess information. They aren't curious more than a slight bit about anything other than what the hip topics on General to talk in are. If you ask them something about say "how many users have over 5000 reviews?" they'd be much more likely to say "I don't care and why the hell should you care, either?" than point you to the portal stats page that features the top 10 reviewers on the site.

Yep, I would agree people in the general would do that. Another great example is some asks any ng related question. they reply
read this!

Why cant we just see what this this page is I am sure I wouldn'tknow what it is, but I like to know because I am just curious to find out. maybe a screenshot.

(sigh)

Yowser

At 3/15/05 09:36 AM, D0GMA wrote: If things were left at a, "James is doing stats for you guys," it would constantly be coming up as an issue in the BBS. As both I and he mentioned, he's got enough else he's doing without you just randomly promising that he's going to do things. It's basic management skills, you at least touch base with your employees before you dump a new load into their IN box. We went through so many middle management people because none of them could figure out how to keep their support staff happy. They'd promise all and sundry to the clients and then get canned (oh wait, they resigned before they got fired lol) when they'd promised too much.

Look asshole, you don't have to tell me how busy James is. He works for us remember? We are well aware of what his priorities are and what he's working on. You act like you know more than I do about the situation, but how could you, you fucking moron! Randomly promising things? I never told James to give you stat lists, he came to me and showed me all the stats he's preparing for you fuckers. I wondered why he was making all these stats, they are cool and all, but I didn't think it was a priority until he explained to me that if we offer these stats it will get rid of the need for you fuckers to do it yourself. So Liljim is obviously concerned with all your fucking lists and is doing something to remedy the situation. Now get off my nuts!