Thread for your website-related questions

[hotdogPi]

That page is old. E.g. there are Perl scripts listed. If you copy some RLE in a clipboard and select "File -> Run Clipboard" in Golly, then the program shows a message "Sorry, but Perl scripting is no longer supported."

Should it be updated?

I've complained about this myself. Actual Perl code should continue with that message, but RLE needs to be detected as RLE and not as Perl code, giving a different error message.

[amling]

Most recently I wanted to find all posts of mine containing the string "(2, 1)c/5" but phpBB search is fixated on words of which that string contains none longer than one letter (which phpBB refuses to search). At least for something like 4c/8 I could filter for "4c" and read whatever showed up (including e.g. "4c/10"). How do other people deal with this sort of thing?

I have half a mind to start tagging (just in the sense of appending a string at the bottom) my posts with some phpBB-searchable encoding of all velocities they contain.

[dvgrn]

Most recently I wanted to find all posts of mine containing the string "(2, 1)c/5" but phpBB search is fixated on words of which that string contains none longer than one letter (which phpBB refuses to search). At least for something like 4c/8 I could filter for "4c" and read whatever showed up (including e.g. "4c/10"). How do other people deal with this sort of thing?

I have half a mind to start tagging (just in the sense of appending a string at the bottom) my posts with some phpBB-searchable encoding of all velocities they contain.

In emergencies I might do a regexp search of a scraped copy of all forum messages.

But most of the time I just shrug and shake my head at how bad the phpBB search system is, and invent ways to describe everything that I might want to search for in the future, in the form of OneChunkOfInfoAllStrungTogether123.

(Notice that's not OneChunkOfInfoAllStrungTogether-123 or OneChunkOfInfoAllStrungTogether_123 -- pretty much any special character inserted into the alphanumeric string causes the phpBB search system to consider the tag as two separate pieces.)

[confocaloid]

[...] How do other people deal with this sort of thing?

I have half a mind to start tagging (just in the sense of appending a string at the bottom) my posts with some phpBB-searchable encoding of all velocities they contain.

The best workaround I know of is to do what you described (manually append keywords that can be searched).
Even then, I remember sometimes forum search cannot find posts that contain a seemingly searchable keyword. I.e. even if one can find some posts with a keyword, there's no guarantee of finding all of them.

[amling]

...a scraped copy of all forum messages...

Yes! Where do I sign up for that? Is there an API? Conceivably I could even have a script updating velocity tags on my posts automatically so I don't have to remember...

[dvgrn]

Yes! Where do I sign up for that? Is there an API? Conceivably I could even have a script updating velocity tags on my posts automatically so I don't have to remember...

Ha, a workable API would be a nice feature indeed. I don't know of any such thing, unfortunately.

The stuff that I've written is much clunkier -- see, for example, get-all-rules.py and get-all-patterns.py from the conwaylife-scrapers folder in my main GitHub repo.

It would be fairly straightforward to adapt that code to produce a list of the forum number and post number for every post that you've made (for example) -- plus the text content of those posts. Could also generate a direct link to the "edit" view for each post, so that you could jump directly to each one where a tag would be useful, and add it quickly. It would take a Selenium script to add the tags automatically, and it would be good to be very careful about writing things like that -- a bug in a script like that could do entertaining things like wipe out all the content of all of your posts.

It's still all very awkward, but there does seem to be a theoretically possible workaround, at least. We're definitely getting what we're paying for in this phpBB search department.

[confocaloid]

What is this?
File:Eye of the glider.gif
File:B2n3 s23.gif
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

[TYCF]

What is this?
File:Eye of the glider.gif
File:B2n3 s23.gif
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

And https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no ?

[unname4798]

What is this?
File:Eye of the glider.gif
File:B2n3 s23.gif
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

The last three are abbreviation pages, but what about the other two?

[dvgrn]

What is this?
File:Eye of the glider.gif
File:B2n3 s23.gif
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?titl ... edirect=no

The last three are abbreviation pages, but what about the other two?

I'm going to go ahead and remove the three redirects, and will send a quick PM to tommyaweosme about them -- "Us:" or "U:" are outside of the User namespace, so they show up in main-namespace searches.

The third redirect already seems to be showing that the first two were the kind of attractive-nuisance idea that might catch on with other users. Hopefully a quick removal will discourage the creation of any more clutter-y "abbreviation redirects" for abbreviations that were just made up on the spot and aren't actually in general use.

[tommyaweosme]

i hate having to type out [[User:Tommyaweosme/the b3i project/b3i8]] or something like that. i just through it would be cool if it could be shortened.

with the two gifs, i was expirementing to see if i could post them on a forum post if i uploaded them to the wiki. it didnt work.

[hotdogPi]

If you're already in your userspace, [[/example]] will go to [[User:Tommyaweosme/example]].

[confocaloid]

You edited the quoted text. Please do not edit quotes.

[dvgrn]

with the two gifs, i was expirementing to see if i could post them on a forum post if i uploaded them to the wiki. it didnt work.

Why not just make inline attachments to forum posts, directly?

I've done an inline attachment and a regular attachment to your recent eye of the glider post, to show the difference.

[Sokwe]

with the two gifs, i was expirementing to see if i could post them on a forum post if i uploaded them to the wiki.

Like Dave said, you should use the forum inline attachment feature, rather than the wiki. Images uploaded to the wiki that are not used on the wiki may be deleted without notice.

it didnt work.

It's certainly possible to include wiki images in forum posts. For example,

Code: Select all

[img]https://conwaylife.com/w/images/8/81/Glider.gif[/img]

gives

[tommyaweosme]

It's certainly possible to include wiki images in forum posts. For example,

Code: Select all

[img]https://conwaylife.com/w/images/8/81/Glider.gif[/img]

gives

i tried using [img src]

[confocaloid]

Rule:Tireworld is non-notable. The same holds for many other rulefiles you posted to the wiki:
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?targ ... tributions

[tommyaweosme]

Rule:Tireworld is non-notable. The same holds for many other rulefiles you posted to the wiki:
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?targ ... tributions

i have very, very faded memories of, at the very start of my conways game of life career, someone telling me that they upload ruletables all the time. i guess i kind of hard-coded that into myself without knowing if i was allowed to or not. i guess i never checked the notability rules for ruletables.

[confocaloid]

i guess i kind of hard-coded that into myself without knowing if i was allowed to or not.

It's not exactly a recommended thing to do. The wiki repository is intended for interesting CA that are notable for some reason and that are supposed to be explored by others.

Without some observable evidence of interest from other people, it's best to post in TFYUCA / MDiOCA instead, and wait until someone else becomes interested in exploring the same CA.

[hotdogPi]

Due to a French language video on YouTube getting a whole bunch of views, the Discord server has seen a massive uptick in joins... but the forum has had no new members from April 11 to 24 (there's been exactly one today). I don't think it's the change in anti-bot question, as the first half of April has a decent number of new members. Why aren't they seeing this forum?

[AlbertArmStain]

Can the search feature on the forums be modified so that unique characters such as "/" or "-" will not be ignored in a search query?

[unname4798]

Can the search feature on the forums be modified so that unique characters such as "/" or "-" will not be ignored in a search query?

And to allow simple search? (It searches exactly for a thing)

[Period1GliderGun]

This may be the wrong thread, but how do I contribute to b3s23osc_stdin and Catagolue's gun and guntrue pages?

[dvgrn]

This may be the wrong thread, but how do I contribute to b3s23osc_stdin and Catagolue's gun and guntrue pages?

Either this thread or the "Basic questions" thread seems like a reasonable choice -- Catagolue isn't really the conwaylife.com website, but it's linked to in the header anyway!

For an overview of how contributions to "stdin" symmetries work, see the stdin symmetry tutorial as a starting point.

To contribute new record-breaking guns to the gun or guntrue pages, just paste gun patterns into the nonmagical box at the bottom of the Syntheses page.

If you start with the gun with all of its gliders removed, that will usually work fine. There's one caveat, which involves placing small still lifes in some corner of the bounding box, if the gun is very sparky and the sparks extend out beyond the bounding box of the combined catalysts. The size of a gun is measured by the size of everything-except-the-gliders-in-all-phases, and Catagolue isn't perfect about doing that measurement without a little help -- so it's possible to submit something that sets an illegal / invalid record, which is then a little bit difficult to excise from Catagolue's database again.

[Period1GliderGun]

This may be the wrong thread, but how do I contribute to b3s23osc_stdin and Catagolue's gun and guntrue pages?

Either this thread or the "Basic questions" thread seems like a reasonable choice -- Catagolue isn't really the conwaylife.com website, but it's linked to in the header anyway!

For an overview of how contributions to "stdin" symmetries work, see the stdin symmetry tutorial as a starting point.

To contribute new record-breaking guns to the gun or guntrue pages, just paste gun patterns into the nonmagical box at the bottom of the Syntheses page.

If you start with the gun with all of its gliders removed, that will usually work fine. There's one caveat, which involves placing small still lifes in some corner of the bounding box, if the gun is very sparky and the sparks extend out beyond the bounding box of the combined catalysts. The size of a gun is measured by the size of everything-except-the-gliders-in-all-phases, and Catagolue isn't perfect about doing that measurement without a little help -- so it's possible to submit something that sets an illegal / invalid record, which is then a little bit difficult to excise from Catagolue's database again.

Thank you! I will do my best not to submission-spam.