c4countdown

Rhys Benjamin wrote:How to get round 50 trial games.

I thought you were going to suggest having an alter ego for some reason!

Rhys Benjamin wrote:How to get round 50 trial games.

Ideal if you value your dignity at £14.99 or less.

I'm playing Howard at 200 rounds now. He's had to dip out for a moment.

160 rounds to go......

Ben Hunter wrote:Anyone got a screenshot of the frontpage from around 2009?

I checked the WayBackMachine on the Internet Archive but there is nothing from apterous.org. Dunno why, guess Charlie ducked out of it somehow? I don't really know how it works.

On further checking, it doesn't seem to have been caching anything since August 2008, so that'll be the reason I guess. And a real fucking shame at that, it's a cool idea.
Have a look at the old C4C, though.

How come browser page titles just show 'Game Recap' now? In my Gillard moments of opening all games that have been commented on since I last had a look at the site, this was really useful.

Having the goat metamaxes in the recap is brilliant

Paul Howe wrote:Having the goat metamaxes in the recap is brilliant

Seconded

Just wondering what it means when a player's row is all in bold on the current Duel standings table on the right of the duel page?

At the moment the following players are all bold and I can't for the life of me work it out:
James Hurrell (#11), Graeme Cole (#18), Mark Tournoff (#19), Karen Pearson (#30), Eoin Jackson (#50), James Levison (#57), Jon Wells (#63), Milo McKenzie (#66), and Keith Williams (#87).

Matt Morrison wrote:Just wondering what it means when a player's row is all in bold on the current Duel standings table on the right of the duel page?

At the moment the following players are all bold and I can't for the life of me work it out:
James Hurrell (#11), Graeme Cole (#18), Mark Tournoff (#19), Karen Pearson (#30), Eoin Jackson (#50), James Levison (#57), Jon Wells (#63), Milo McKenzie (#66), and Keith Williams (#87).

It's meant to be the players who have played all the month's Duels, but it doesn't quite work properly, so it's actually the players who have played all but one of the month's Duels.

Matt Morrison wrote:Just wondering what it means when a player's row is all in bold on the current Duel standings table on the right of the duel page?

At the moment the following players are all bold and I can't for the life of me work it out:
James Hurrell (#11), Graeme Cole (#18), Mark Tournoff (#19), Karen Pearson (#30), Eoin Jackson (#50), James Levison (#57), Jon Wells (#63), Milo McKenzie (#66), and Keith Williams (#87).

In theory that means they've played all the duels this month. Unfortunately, this table is still slightly miscounting the number, so we get one extra (from the last day of the previous month I think), so this bolding is inaccurate.

Ah yeah, cheers guys. I knew it'd be something I knew back in the day and had forgotten.

In other news, I actually got a bit sad today thinking about going on holiday in summer and losing out on 3 ostraca and my 100% record
Is it too sad to get my sister to log in once a week and vote randomly for the games to keep my place atop the table?

Matt Morrison wrote: In other news, I actually got a bit sad today thinking about going on holiday in summer and losing out on 3 ostraca and my 100% record
Is it too sad to get my sister to log in once a week and vote randomly for the games to keep my place atop the table?

It is a bit.

Not a particularly important observation (certainly not worthy of either a Bug Report or Feature Request), but I notice that on Superstats Unique Words page, my lists of unique words are sorted into alphabetical order for English (ODE), French and German (with umlauted vowels placed at the end of the alphabet)... yet for CSW and Dutch, the words are listed in the order in which I first declared them. Surprising!

(For other languages I don't have enough unique words to offer any info on the order they're sorted.)

Charlie Reams wrote:

Matt Morrison wrote: In other news, I actually got a bit sad today thinking about going on holiday in summer and losing out on 3 ostraca and my 100% record
Is it too sad to get my sister to log in once a week and vote randomly for the games to keep my place atop the table?

It is a bit.

Not only is it sad, it's cheating of the highest order, and I think you should probably be banned for even suggesting it.

Just to say I've been apterousing since February 2010 and so much cool stuff has been added to the site between then and now.

Adam Gillard wrote:Just to say I've been apterousing since February 2010 and so much cool stuff has been added to the site between then and now.

Cheers! It's nice to be at the stage where I can work on cool stuff rather than basic functionality.

Fixed: Can no longer comment on ProRanks for weeks in which there were no ProRanks (thanks Steve Balog).

I've gone off Reams and Balog now.

Gavin Chipper wrote:

Fixed: Can no longer comment on ProRanks for weeks in which there were no ProRanks (thanks Steve Balog).

I've gone off Reams and Balog now.

Your comments will live in the database forever, and will be displayed thousands of years in the future. You have that consolation.

The new notifications idea is great. Will notifications of tournament games be in this part or will they still be shown in a large notice at the top?

Eoin Monaghan wrote:Will notifications of tournament games be in this part or will they still be shown in a large notice at the top?

Probably, yep. Not sure exactly how that'll work yet.

Charlie Reams wrote:

Eoin Monaghan wrote:Will notifications of tournament games be in this part or will they still be shown in a large notice at the top?

Probably, yep. Not sure exactly how that'll work yet.

FWIW, a vote for "no" here. Notifications are for things that have happened. Tournament games (and GOTW voting reminders, etc.) are things that you need to action to happen in the future.

That's my opinion anyway - reminders to complete tournament games and vote for GOTW would be lost in the notifications system - literally hidden away from sight unless you act on them the first time you see the notification. The way Facebook does it is anything you need to action IS often (but not always) mentioned in notifications admittedly but ALSO gets a special, more obvious, and persistent positioning somewhere else on the page too (think friend requests, event invites, or whatever).

Matt Morrison wrote:

Charlie Reams wrote:

Eoin Monaghan wrote:Will notifications of tournament games be in this part or will they still be shown in a large notice at the top?

Probably, yep. Not sure exactly how that'll work yet.

FWIW, a vote for "no" here. Notifications are for things that have happened. Tournament games (and GOTW voting reminders, etc.) are things that you need to action to happen in the future.

That's my opinion anyway - reminders to complete tournament games and vote for GOTW would be lost in the notifications system - literally hidden away from sight unless you act on them the first time you see the notification. The way Facebook does it is anything you need to action IS often (but not always) mentioned in notifications admittedly but ALSO gets a special, more obvious, and persistent positioning somewhere else on the page too (think friend requests, event invites, or whatever).

I was thinking more for tournament organizers, who could be notified when a tournament game is played or something.

That part is 100% definitely a good idea.

Not a bug, but an interesting oddity of Stepdown scoring for impossible Numbers games.

When you can't get within 10 of the target, then you can score points by declaring any old rubbish. For example, here the target was 469 and I declared 480. And here I got 10 points per round for daft declarations of 42 of 7.

I don't think the fact that these games were in Octorock, maks any difference. It's just easier to generate an impossible numbers game in Octorock.


The reason I was looking at this, is that I was wondering whether it would be more sensible for Octorock numbers to be Stepdown scoring, i.e. if the target is 291 and the closest possible solution is 300, you would still score points for being more than 10 away, e.g. if you got 300, you could score 10 points - if you got 305, you could score 5 points - if you got 280, you might reasonably score 2 (since it's 11 from the target, but the nearest you could get was 9 away the other side).

Similarly, if you can't get within 10 of the target, you could score for being as close as possible to the target, e.g. target is 900, best possible is 240, you could score 10 points for 240 or 4 points for 234.

The reason for having a scoring system like this is so that you don't penalise good numbers players when the target is impossible. It seems slightly unfair for me to get 0 pts (or whatever) for not even a clue how to get near the target, and Matthew/Gevin etc to also get 0 points despite having worked out the closest number they could get.


Having said all the above, I'm not sure this would be easy to implement. So it's probably a no-go, especially since I don't yet know how popular Octorock Numbers (the main affected format) will be.

But it does raise a warning - if Octorock is scheduled for the Duel, then it should never be allowed to be Stepdown scoring.


I also wonder whether something similar applies under Stepdown scoring in the Letters rounds of Lock formats, i.e. you automatically get 10 points when there is no valid declaration. This is less important though, as it doesn't really disadvantage one player over his opponent.

Just my $0.02.

Thanks for stopping the spam emails.

Yours sincerely,

Adam Gillard

Life President, People's Bank of Nigeria

PS - do you want a bigger P£N|§?

Charlie, how does "last seen" work on the website?
I'm really well behaved when it comes to trying to play tourney games to the point where I monitor people's profiles for periods, but several times when I've got excited about constantly-updating "last seen" dates nothing happens in terms of proper hardcore action.

Matt Morrison wrote:Charlie, how does "last seen" work on the website?
I'm really well behaved when it comes to trying to play tourney games to the point where I monitor people's profiles for periods, but several times when I've got excited about constantly-updating "last seen" dates nothing happens in terms of proper hardcore action.

I believe it's the last time they loaded a page while logged in. (Opening the game window also counts as loading a page.)

Cool. So if it is updating they *are* still clicking on pages. THat's useful to know, thanks!

Matt Morrison wrote:Cool. So if it is updating they *are* still clicking on pages. THat's useful to know, thanks!

Or they may have left the page open in some tab and forgotten about it (do normal people do this?).

Charlie Reams wrote:

Matt Morrison wrote:Cool. So if it is updating they *are* still clicking on pages. THat's useful to know, thanks!

Or they may have left the page open in some tab and forgotten about it (do normal people do this?).

Oh right. So it isn't just a page load that is monitored but a constant update that they are still viewing the page?
And yes, I quite often leave an apterous tab loaded. Sometimes. But definitely not never by a long shout! I'm weird.

Matt Morrison wrote:

Charlie Reams wrote:

Matt Morrison wrote:Cool. So if it is updating they *are* still clicking on pages. THat's useful to know, thanks!

Or they may have left the page open in some tab and forgotten about it (do normal people do this?).

Oh right. So it isn't just a page load that is monitored but a constant update that they are still viewing the page?
And yes, I quite often leave an apterous tab loaded. Sometimes. But definitely not never by a long shout! I'm weird.

It includes the ping that updates the notifications panel, and also if they close the browser and reopen it then it would (on most browsers) reload the page. It's probably a good ballpark though.

It's been a while since anyone posted here just to say thanks for a feature. I know it's been around for a while, but I just want to say that Lexplorer is brilliant. Even if it were the only thing hosted on apterous, you could get a lot of people visiting the site just to use it for a number of word puzzling needs. I still use it all the time when I miss an obscure or infrequent max to see what derivatives it has and sometimes the definition too. I've recently found it very useful in making different types of word puzzles. I don't play Scrabble competitively, so I don't know what kind of similar online tools Scrabblers (or other wordy people) have, but I can say that it's miles ahead of anything comparable I've seen (despite the "Related words" section being a bit dodgy!).

So yeah, thanks for Lexplorer.

Adam Gillard wrote:It's been a while since anyone posted here just to say thanks for a feature. I know it's been around for a while, but I just want to say that Lexplorer is brilliant. Even if it were the only thing hosted on apterous, you could get a lot of people visiting the site just to use it for a number of word puzzling needs. I still use it all the time when I miss an obscure or infrequent max to see what derivatives it has and sometimes the definition too. I've recently found it very useful in making different types of word puzzles. I don't play Scrabble competitively, so I don't know what kind of similar online tools Scrabblers (or other wordy people) have, but I can say that it's miles ahead of anything comparable I've seen (despite the "Related words" section being a bit dodgy!).

So yeah, thanks for Lexplorer.

I will just add that I have just used Lexplorer for a quiz only 5 minutes ago! (I wanted to know a few words that contained the word TEACHER - I settled for HA TEACHER - HEARTACHE for my quiz).

Like Adam says, it's an awesome tool. I'm always using it for when I'm writing the anagrams for quizzes, and doing crosswords and stuff too so yeah, I raise my glass to Lexplorer.

Ryan Taylor wrote:

Adam Gillard wrote:It's been a while since anyone posted here just to say thanks for a feature. I know it's been around for a while, but I just want to say that Lexplorer is brilliant. Even if it were the only thing hosted on apterous, you could get a lot of people visiting the site just to use it for a number of word puzzling needs. I still use it all the time when I miss an obscure or infrequent max to see what derivatives it has and sometimes the definition too. I've recently found it very useful in making different types of word puzzles. I don't play Scrabble competitively, so I don't know what kind of similar online tools Scrabblers (or other wordy people) have, but I can say that it's miles ahead of anything comparable I've seen (despite the "Related words" section being a bit dodgy!).

So yeah, thanks for Lexplorer.

I will just add that I have just used Lexplorer for a quiz only 5 minutes ago! (I wanted to know a few words that contained the word TEACHER - I settled for HA TEACHER - HEARTACHE for my quiz).

Like Adam says, it's an awesome tool. I'm always using it for when I'm writing the anagrams for quizzes, and doing crosswords and stuff too so yeah, I raise my glass to Lexplorer.

You're both welcome. It's been a fun thing to work on over the years. I thought of the name before I thought of what it would be, so clearly that's the way forward!

Charlie Reams wrote:

Ryan Taylor wrote:

Adam Gillard wrote:It's been a while since anyone posted here just to say thanks for a feature. I know it's been around for a while, but I just want to say that Lexplorer is brilliant. Even if it were the only thing hosted on apterous, you could get a lot of people visiting the site just to use it for a number of word puzzling needs. I still use it all the time when I miss an obscure or infrequent max to see what derivatives it has and sometimes the definition too. I've recently found it very useful in making different types of word puzzles. I don't play Scrabble competitively, so I don't know what kind of similar online tools Scrabblers (or other wordy people) have, but I can say that it's miles ahead of anything comparable I've seen (despite the "Related words" section being a bit dodgy!).

So yeah, thanks for Lexplorer.

I will just add that I have just used Lexplorer for a quiz only 5 minutes ago! (I wanted to know a few words that contained the word TEACHER - I settled for HA TEACHER - HEARTACHE for my quiz).

Like Adam says, it's an awesome tool. I'm always using it for when I'm writing the anagrams for quizzes, and doing crosswords and stuff too so yeah, I raise my glass to Lexplorer.

You're both welcome. It's been a fun thing to work on over the years. I thought of the name before I thought of what it would be, so clearly that's the way forward!

Reminds me of this.

Adam Gillard wrote:I don't play Scrabble competitively, so I don't know what kind of similar online tools Scrabblers (or other wordy people) have, but I can say that it's miles ahead of anything comparable I've seen (despite the "Related words" section being a bit dodgy!).

Scrabblers have Zyzzyva, which does much more than Lexplorer, although I still use the latter for a few specific things (like the copypasteable stemmer.)

Today's bit of Charlie amazingness: I was testing out how well Apterous works with a writing/drawing tablet (verdict: it'd be better if I knew how to get Win7 tablet input to do an automatic "enter" key, and you lose the bit of grace period at the end of the time since the input doesn't go in the box until you're done with the word, but it's still decent). When I pasted in a numbers entry, I noticed just as I hit end round that it used the Unicode × multiply symbol (since obviously that's what you would want in that situation) and I prepared to do the clicky bit, but to my surprise it worked! (And then I found that a plain letter x also worked, which I may well be the last person to hear about.)

I just want to express my appreciation for the absolutely nonsensical amount of work Charlie has done on the site in the last few days, and especially today. Cheers.

Quinne James wrote:I just want to express my appreciation for the absolutely nonsensical amount of work Charlie has done on the site in the last few days, and especially today. Cheers.

Seconded. Give that man a Spoon of Awesome.

Nick Deller wrote:

Quinne James wrote:I just want to express my appreciation for the absolutely nonsensical amount of work Charlie has done on the site in the last few days, and especially today. Cheers.

Seconded. Give that man a Spoon of Awesome.

Yes, I'd have put this as a comment under the "I've been busy" news item if I could - Charlie puts a metric shit-tonne of work into apterous, and it seems especially so over the last few days.

Just saw this. It's been a fun few days.

Surprised this didn't get a mention...

Apterous's 10 millionth round played!

Ben Wilson wrote:Surprised this didn't get a mention...

Apterous's 10 millionth round played!

Maybe the fact that no points were scored, meant it was mentionless.

Comfortably over 1000 closed tickets now on apterous (1105 and counting) - thanks for all the hard work, Charlie!