Thread for your website-related questions

[dvgrn]

Who made LifeViewer, the "official" web player I'm guessing, and is the source available?

Chris Rowett is the author. Here's one of Chris's early answers to that question. No announcement about open-sourcing LifeViewer has been made, so it's safe to assume that the answer hasn't changed.

Last I heard, one reason behind that decision is that LifeViewer is highly experimental code, and Chris used the project to learn JavaScript and HTML5. The code would likely have to be rewritten from the ground up to make it really open-source-compatible -- i.e., to make it so that someone who didn't write the code might have a chance of having a pleasant experience when trying to modify it.

That said, it is definitely possible, and not forbidden or restricted in any way, to borrow LifeViewer code as it stands and put it on a stand-alone Web page.

[Book]

About glossaries:

1. Wiki has a "glossary of basic terms"--should it be alphabetized?
2. Is there a way to make #1 and the category:glossary page more visible?

Because they are quite useful.

And a unique LifeWiki feature.

[GUYTU6J]

...
Some specific examples of discoveries that won't be of interest to this community include:
...
c.An alternate stabilization for a reaction (unless it is smaller than the smallest currently known).

We should reconsider the phrasing for this rule for at least two reasons. One, the parenthesized condition does not explain the criteria of being "smaller". Two, it also misses some cases that are bigger but potentially interesting in a non-sortable aspect; for example, the fishhook eating beehive in buckaroo is an alternate stabilization for the block eating beehive in queen bee shuttle, and a fishhook is not apparently smaller than a block, but buckaroo is still considered interesting at least for its independent glider-reflecting capability that queen bee shuttle does not have.

[77551enpassant]

The mobile home page is broken. Also, it doesn't force HTTPS for me.

Screenshot_20230122-123517.png (640.2 KiB) Viewed 6124 times

[muzik]

Is it possible to request that moderators edit posts which contain code boxes that unintentionally trigger LifeViewer pattern errors in order to make said patterns viewable on the forums?

[Book]

Is there a way to get more frequent updates to wiki-names.txt? (https://gitlab.com/apgoucher/catagolue/ ... -names.txt)? I seem to recall this is generated by someone running something at the wiki end. It appears that last update was a year ago.

[rattlesnake]

Why was viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3597 locked?

[dvgrn]

Why was viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3597 locked?

Different moderators may have different opinions about what exactly to do with threads like this, but basically this looks like it was locked to discourage pointless noise. I could say it was because somebody suggested it. But that's probably not the reason (I don't know, because I didn't do it).

The thread was probably locked because it looked like pointless noise and not discussion. Even posts on the Sandbox get into the new-posts and recent-posts lists, and if there's too much noise it starts to obscure the posts that these forums are actually trying to support.

[confocaloid]

Is there some good way to collect links to all forum posts with a posted RLE with a given rulestring?

The usual forum search does not always work, in part because the rulestring may contain minuses and/or slashes. An autogenerated mapping from rulestrings to sets of posts would be nice, if there is a reasonable way to build such a mapping.

[dvgrn]

Is there some good way to collect links to all forum posts with a posted RLE with a given rulestring?

The usual forum search does not always work, in part because the rulestring may contain minuses and/or slashes. An autogenerated mapping from rulestrings to sets of posts would be nice, if there is a reasonable way to build such a mapping.

That sounds like it might be doable with a cross between lw-scraper.py and get-all-patterns.py.

Those are scraper scripts written at one time or another to extract whatever particular items were of interest from forum pages or wiki pages.

A run by one of these kinds of scripts does give the conwaylife.com server a fair amount of exercise, but there shouldn't be any problem running something like that once every now and then.

Fair warning, get-all-patterns.py was written long enough ago that it's probably Python 2, and will need some minor updates. lw-scraper.py has definitely been upgraded to Python 3. I'm running it once a month at the beginning of the month, these days.

No warranty express or implied, etc., etc. No doubt there's a more efficient way to do a full scan of the forums than the way I implemented it -- I only had to get it to work once, so I didn't spend a lot of time on optimization.

[Naszvadi]

Forum search - still unusable for looking after certain rulestings. No regex support, no escape sequences support.
Or somebody could easily search for rulestring "B3/S23-c" in the forums? And how? Is there a forum engine upgrade/downgrade with an acceptable search feature?

[confocaloid]

For rules that are 1 toggle away from Life, you can look at User:Pzq Alex/Rules 1 transition from Life which collects some known information.
For isotropic 2-state rules, I have an (incomplete forever) table of INT rules, which is linked from my forum signature:
User:Confocal/R This table has links to existing forum threads for many isotropic rules. The rulestrings are in the Catagolue format.
For the "b3s23-c" rulestring, there is already a forum thread: t3505.

[AlbertArmStain]

Is your age shared with any third party on this website?

[GUYTU6J]

It is 2:19 when I send this post, but the forums say it is currently 1:48. I have not adjusted my timezone settings, and the timestamp of my second-to-last recent post "Re: Thread for your unsure discoveries" is consistent with my memory. What happened before my last post "Re: Thread for basic questions"?

EDIT at 2:24 : the forums time returns normal at this moment.

[confocaloid]

It is 2:19 when I send this post, but the forums say it is currently 1:48. I have not adjusted my timezone settings, and the timestamp of my second-to-last recent post "Re: Thread for your unsure discoveries" is consistent with my memory. What happened before my last post "Re: Thread for basic questions"?

EDIT at 2:24 : the forums time returns normal at this moment.

I consistently get 1:48 as the displayed time of the forum post in question. I assume the actual time of posting is 5:48 UTC.

Any chance of an "off by 30 minutes" error (i.e. 2:18 instead of 1:48)?

I know the post viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5966&p=162804#p162804 was posted slightly more than 1 hour ago (around 20:53 UTC), and shows as "4:53 pm" (i.e. 16:53) when logged out. So the forum time is UTC-4.

[galoomba]

It is 2:19 when I send this post, but the forums say it is currently 1:48. I have not adjusted my timezone settings, and the timestamp of my second-to-last recent post "Re: Thread for your unsure discoveries" is consistent with my memory. What happened before my last post "Re: Thread for basic questions"?

EDIT at 2:24 : the forums time returns normal at this moment.

You probably have the wrong timezone set.

[NimbleRogue]

On one of my posts I have edited it on over ten different days and I just noticed it does not show that it has had a single edit, is this a known bug?

[hotdogPi]

On one of my posts I have edited it on over ten different days and I just noticed it does not show that it has had a single edit, is this a known bug?

Is it the most recent post in the thread?

[NimbleRogue]

Sorry my bad, should have been more specific
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6016#p161950

[dvgrn]

Sorry my bad, should have been more specific
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6016#p161950

Not exactly a bug, but known behavior. If I remember right, the last post in a thread is freely editable without an edit count being made visible, until somebody replies to it. After that point it becomes good to know that the response might have been to a somewhat different message, so the edit count is enabled then.

[NimbleRogue]

Oh I've never noticed that, thanks for the info

[confocaloid]

What is the current policy regarding documenting one's own discoveries on LIfeWiki?

[Chris857]

What is the current policy regarding documenting one's own discoveries on LIfeWiki?

Practically speaking, at least for glider syntheses that I make or improve of patterns with articles I just go and update it once it shows up through shinjuku/catagolue, since that seems pretty uncontroversial.

[Chris857]

Noticed a minor issue on the conwaylife.com homepage.

If I reload the page by hitting enter in the URL bar, the random pattern name in the dropdown matches the pattern shown in the life viewer. If I reload by typing ctrl+r, the pattern in the life viewer will change to a new random one but the name in the dropdown does not change and is (probably) out of sync with the shown pattern.

On Firefox, Ubuntu.

[hotdogPi]

Nathaniel, can I run this? It gets all Life RLEs from the oscillator discussion thread. I've already tested it on pages 1 and 2.

Code: Select all

import urllib.request
patterns = []
for page in range(160):
    url = "https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1437&start=%s" % (page*25)
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
    html = response.read().decode()
    html = html.split('<div class="codebox"><p>Code: <a href="#" onclick="selectCode(this); return false;">Select all</a></p><pre><code>')
    for pattern in html[1:]:
        patterns.append(pattern[:pattern.index('</code></pre></div>')])
for i in range(len(patterns)):
    if 'B3/S23' not in patterns[i]:
        patterns[i] = ''
    patterns[i] = patterns[i].replace('\n','')
    patterns[i] = patterns[i].replace('B3/S23','B3/S23\n')
patterns = list(set(patterns))