Spring RTS Engine

The energy required to do work is normally sapped when I arrive back at this thread and see posts such as the above. I'm never short of things that need doing.

AF still has computer problems. A new reason is given why my playlists are not added: "the entire news feed would be knorke youtube videos".

This is still an issue, however I no longer deem it such a high priority that it prevent things being done

This year has also been pretty rubbish for computer issues, switching ISPs, a shattered retina display panel, a dodgy replacement panel, a windows machine with a broken boot loader, the 3 weeks on mobile internet, the horrors of the Ubuntu 13 experiment..

As for the technical changes made:

- The theme was changed because I didn't have time to build the theme I wanted, so I bought a pretty one
- Before the review queue page was added, approving and marking posts as irrelevant took up 90% of the time spent on springinfo.info, it was slow, it was tedious, and people complained loudly if it wasn't done
- limit logins can be a little fidgety and overprotective at times. The limits I had were hyper restrictive, and were relaxed
- The gravity forms plugin was installed to give a nice convenient, and most important, orderly way to add and suggest things





- The hosting is slow, and I tend to have a lot of stuff open, managing something over 5 tabs isn't convenient. I swapped my main tomjn.com site over to a VPS within the last 48 hours, the improvement is huge. I've thought about moving the hosting elsewhere, and about asking Licho if he'd be interested or not, but I don't spend that much time here as it is
- Adding tumblr was a trivial thing to do, it took all of 2 minutes and has ran ever since
- The current status of the pluggable issue I believe is it no longer exists. I updated some things and I managed to submit the new feed form okay. The relevant github issue is now closed
- I suspect I'm not being emailed when forms are submitted. I'm currently dealing with setting up email on my server at the moment, forwarding works, but smtp is broken =/
- The image of the springinfo news was actually in the review queue, publishing it was a simple click on a page thanks to the review queues new interface

My ideal solution to the youtube thing would be to:

- Use the Google API and not use RSS feeds at all. This has issues though because the aggregation tech used is v2, v3 exists, and to do this would have been a v4 project with a refactor. v4 was never started because I left said company, and I no longer have the more recent versions of that code. I'm also mindful I'd like to move off of it too. Thus it approaches a task on a similar scale to building the site to begin with. I do have some tech that might ease the situation, but while the site is as slow as it is, and my server situation is uncertain, I'm unhappy fiddling with it all
- Implement a new page with a youtube playlist to rss feed converter form. This would take several hours of work though, which I've either not had the time for, or have simply forgotten about.

Either way, trying to get these youtube playlists in is halted because:

- When logging in I find something else needs to be done and that takes up my time
- I'm drunk and I visited springrts.com for lulz to see if it was still there
- I spent the time I had replying in this thread rather than actually doing the work
- I tried to do the work and got confused, was I looking in the github issue? The thread? But this post is actually just links elsewhere not actual information? I need to get back to work my lunch hours almost up

With all of this in mind, the obvious still hasn't been done, nobody has given me an RSS feed to add. I seem to be given everything but the RSS feed. How can I make it any more obvious =/

I just notice you did a password reset, but your current email on springinfo.info is:

tarendai+springinfoknorke@gmail.com

Since I don't know what your email is I never set it up correctly, and I don't know wether the password I got you originally is still good or if you changed it

As a sidenote, you're now an editor rather than an author, you may be able to add the feeds yourself, or you may need to be an administrator, I'm not sure

AF wrote: With all of this in mind, the obvious still hasn't been done, nobody has given me an RSS feed to add. I seem to be given everything but the RSS feed. How can I make it any more obvious =/

What's the easiest way to submit a news item about new version in xta? Make a rss feed for it or ask you to make an account so the news can be created directly?

If the answer is 1), what would be a good site to make rss-feeds?

For feeds, any WordPress site you can just put /feed/ on the end of a URL to get an RSS feed.

Tumblr blogs are similar, add /rss on the end and you get an RSS feed. Perhaps Tumblr would be the best.

You can then either use ifttt to push out to twitter/facebook/etc, or if you're on WordPress, the publicize feature of the Jetpack plugin will do it too ( which is what I'm using )

Just so that we are on same page:
You stopped with springinfo and only post for drunk amusement, I stopped making videos and only post out of frustration. So all this talk is purely theoretical and noone really cares about a solution. This thread is titled "OH LAWD!!!" which reflects the state of things.
The frontpage looks so bad, with the regular spamfloodings of old crapnews and other content being ignored because its creators did not want to deal with this hassle for years.
I am not sure I would even want to see my content in such enviroment.

AF wrote:With all of this in mind, the obvious still hasn't been done, nobody has given me an RSS feed to add. I seem to be given everything but the RSS feed. How can I make it any more obvious =/

This "If i had just been given an RSS feed to begin with" blaming is just wrong because to begin with you only asked for youtube-links.

You asked for playlist-links and after a while how to turn those youtube-links into RSS-links. Such guide was posted, it is trivial to follow and you said you would look into it. The reasons you gave for videos not being added were never "RSS feed is missing" and always something not related to me, like computer problem or you had not yet approved something.

It never occured to me that it would that for some computers or people it might be a problem to open a link?
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/play ... FEBA7D69E9 &
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/play ... 1D716422BE
took one minute! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4POSZvvMj1M

AF wrote:Since I don't know what your email is I never set it up correctly, and I don't know wether the password I got you originally is still good or if you changed it

I was not aware I had ever an account set up. Afterall I was never able to login or change password or even register.

AF wrote:As a sidenote, you're now an editor rather than an author, you may be able to add the feeds yourself, or you may need to be an administrator, I'm not sure

So it might or might not work

Now you sent me a pm with some link to put a new password.
I could now log in but do not have any videos to test it with, maybe someone else wants to.
Question is: Do you plan to do that for every user?
Imo you would clearly not able to respond to requests in reasonable time, imo it is not feasible to set up accounts for every user by hand.

I've moved on and Spring isn't a big thing for me anymore, and when I get an idea and come back this thread always seems to sap all momentum out of it.

imagine how people feel who created content, wanted to show it and all that ever got onto the front page is:

imagine how people feel who created content, wanted to show it and all that ever got onto the front page is:

*imagines*

up and coming content developer wrote: Oh wow, that evolutionRTS is hyper productive, I wish I could be that productive, that team must be huge! Yikes it's all a single person?! Holy crap he deserves a medal, just who is this person 0_o hmmm Google says it's someone called Ben, lets see the G+ profile for a photo, HOLY MOLY HES HOT, oh god I just jizzed my pants, I'd best get some tissue...

Perhaps you should be more productive, or maybe Forboding needs to be less productive. Or maybe the site needs more feeds! Eitherway I think it's an improvement over when springfiles was there. Forboding is the best at marketing his wares online, and his stuff is easy to syndicate, so it's easy to pull in, and he's got a lot to pull in.

Not that there isn't other stuff, but most of it isn't in a discoverable format

There have been more recent BA/ZK (& maybe others) than some of those Evo posts that were being shown, so something was definately amiss.

(although I can't claim to add new posts as often as ZK/Evo do; BA just prefers a slower release cycle).

I don't want to be involved in the argument and have idea what happened but I see some youtube vids there now and this is good :)

AF wrote:

imagine how people feel who created content, wanted to show it and all that ever got onto the front page is:

*imagines*

up and coming content developer wrote: Oh wow, that evolutionRTS is hyper productive, I wish I could be that productive, that team must be huge! Yikes it's all a single person?! Holy crap he deserves a medal, just who is this person 0_o hmmm Google says it's someone called Ben, lets see the G+ profile for a photo, HOLY MOLY HES HOT, oh god I just jizzed my pants, I'd best get some tissue...

Perhaps you should be more productive, or maybe Forboding needs to be less productive. Or maybe the site needs more feeds! Eitherway I think it's an improvement over when springfiles was there. Forboding is the best at marketing his wares online, and his stuff is easy to syndicate, so it's easy to pull in, and he's got a lot to pull in.

Not that there isn't other stuff, but most of it isn't in a discoverable format

Yes, very funny. But the truth is not that this one feed has the highest output, it is just that this one feed spams the frontpage again and again with old posts from months ago!

Perhaps forb regularly goes back and updates those posts? I'd say it's a symptom of the older tech, and investigating and fixing it isn't a trivial thing.

As a side note, I forgot to mention TA Papercraft, I spent some time working on that site to get the feeds producing something with photos in them ( damn you Next gen gallery plugin ), but in the end the guy isn't really using it and I've not chased up why =(

EvolutionRTS videos also moved to a new channel which hasn't been added

Perhaps forb regularly goes back and updates those posts?

It does not appear so.

I'd say it's a symptom of the older tech, and investigating and fixing it isn't a trivial thing.

No, I think your first guess was correct. It really is because evolution rts is hyper productive and just has so excellent marketing.

As a side note, I forgot to mention TA Papercraft, I spent some time working on that site

That site is has nothing to do with spring, except a loose connection via TA. I find it strange to add such content when there is spring- stuff from within the community not being added.

Perhaps forb regularly goes back and updates those posts?

Perhaps some trivial change was made, but for example https://plus.google.com/events/c6t175h1 ... ogle%2B%29 (from current feed) dates from March 20th and has no recent info or visible change from what it (presumably) was originally. Of course, you are right that it could be "older tech" incorrectly interpreting some unrelated action as an update.

I find digg too sometimes picks up small changes, and shows posts as unread and new, as if they're ordered by last updated rather than publish date when someone fixes a typo or something

Silentwings wrote:I see some youtube vids there now and this is good :)

Not sure? In springinfo log-in thing it looks like this:
The first video is one of 2010, not sure why that one would appear and not a more recent video of that channel. (The last one is only a week old)

Were those two posts made by hand?
Will those youtubes now always appear in news, on their own, or was it a manual one-time thing?

Also appearently everybody can edit and "Trash" everyone else posts? At least there are links that suggest so.
So if someone messes with their feed and it causes to spam onto the frontpage, they could maybe just delete the zombie posts.
At least in theory, in practice the editing did not work:
When clicking "Update" it said in red font:

There was an error. Please reload the page.

After refreshing it gave the same error. After a few times it then went to a 404 page:

You have found a missing time plot.
Back in Home

Those are being shown by their publish date, not their creation date, which was when someone pushed 'publish' in the review queue.

Your ability to trash and edit other peoples posts is because your user has a role of editor. If you were merely an author or a subscriber you wouldn't have these powers.

As for the error, on which page were you?

Oho, the editing seems to have worked despite the error and 404 message.

AF wrote:Those are being shown by their publish date, not their creation date, which was when someone pushed 'publish' in the review queue.

So Silentwing's "I see some youtube vids there now and this is good :)" was a false hope because basically nothing changed with regard to those feeds?

Your ability to trash and edit other peoples posts is because your user has a role of editor. If you were merely an author or a subscriber you wouldn't have these powers.

Then make me an author or a subscriber.

As for the error, on which page were you?

Posts - all posts.
Then click the "edit" links as shown in http://springrts.com/phpbb/download/file.php?id=8934

Based on your history I got the impression you'd complain about something you couldn't fix yourself if you were only an author. I also wanted to ensure you could add your own feeds.

I've also removed the original knorke youtube feed, only new videos on the added playlists should have an impact now

BOTA was added to the game list, and an XTA tumblr feed was added