Thread for your website-related questions

[b-engine]

LifeViewer doesn’t work.

It do in my devices. Perhaps some problems with your OS.

[pifricted]

LifeViewer doesn’t work.

It do in my devices. Perhaps some problems with your OS.

Maybe it haven’t load fine.Now it works.

[Resu]

What is https://conwaylife.com/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi ?

[b-engine]

What is https://conwaylife.com/cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi ?

A webpage (or file) for an error, maybe.

[mmmmmmmmm]

I have a big request, and it's ok if you can't do it. I want a new lifeviewer to be added, called 'largelifeviewer'
the main difference is:
65536x65536 bounding box instead of 16384x16384 (or, if that is too big, 32768x32768)
To stop great lag and sit crashing, max speed is set to 1x, and themes that use history, such as poison or occupied, are disabled.
If you could add this, it would be awesome, as it would enable me to run macro spaceships such as the waterbear, demonoid, and parallel HBK. This lifeviewer would only be used for those spaceships. Even if you chose the 32768x32768, I would still be able to see the waterbear, which would be cool.

[b-engine]

I have a big request, and it's ok if you can't do it. I want a new lifeviewer to be added, called 'largelifeviewer'
the main difference is:
65536x65536 bounding box instead of 16384x16384 (or, if that is too big, 32768x32768)
To stop great lag and sit crashing, max speed is set to 1x, and themes that use history, such as poison or occupied, are disabled.
If you could add this, it would be awesome, as it would enable me to run macro spaceships such as the waterbear, demonoid, and parallel HBK. This lifeviewer would only be used for those spaceships. Even if you chose the 32768x32768, I would still be able to see the waterbear, which would be cool.

Your should ask this request here instead.
LifeViewer isn't designed for large patterns - that's the job for Golly. As Golly for mobiles might be deprecated in the future, LV might be the only reliable option for mobile CA simulation, and mobile phones aren't for large patterns at all.

[dvgrn]

Even if you chose the 32768x32768, I would still be able to see the waterbear, which would be cool.

Have you tried https://copy.sh/life ? You can click the "Import" button and paste in waterbear.mc from the zip file in the LifeWiki article, click "<<" a bunch of times to get the step size down to something reasonable, then hit "Run".

copy.sh/life uses the HashLife algorithm, so it works reasonably well for big predictable patterns like the waterbear. LifeViewer is geared toward displaying and experimenting with smaller patterns that may or may not be regular -- so even if a version of it were made with a higher board size, it's just not optimized with huge patterns in mind, and it would tend to run painfully slowly and/or run out of memory.

[b-engine]

Are the two CAPTCHAs (CloudFlare and the other one built into the forums) being breached?

For example "Lilidala" managed to break in, register, and post spams. Fortunately those are out of place so I could spot them immediately.
There's no point to advertise here, through. Cellular automata isn't quite related to anything conventional.

[dvgrn]

Are the two CAPTCHAs (CloudFlare and the other one built into the forums) being breached?

No more than usual, no. For many years now people have occasionally showed up trying to advertise any number of things. It seems like they get hold of some annoying spamvertising helper software or other, and they don't realize that it's not worth wasting their time on conwaylife.com. It's not a steady stream of people, more like an intermittent trickle.

They figure it out pretty quick when they get near-instantly banned -- or rather, their software probably lets them focus on the places where their advertising campaign is successful, and the random junk that they try to leave on the forums is just collateral damage -- so then it's quiet again for a while.

What happened with "Lilidala" (Ian07 did the quick easy cleanup this time, but other moderators wouldn't have been far behind) will no doubt keep happening, maybe a few times a month. No need to worry about it. It hasn't been happening unusually often recently, so it's just the usual background noise.

[hotcrystal0]

I know Sandbox moderation needs a reform, but there's basically no way to proceed. I hold the belief that we are more than just a hobbyist group who likes CA, but we are a community tied together by our interest for CA and we need a space where we can discuss non-CA topics on the forums.
In summary, this is why there's no way to proceed:

If you're not happy with the way forum moderation works in cases like this, you have a couple of options:

1) Don't use the Sandbox. (This is the simplest and most workable option, all things considered.)
2) Recruit a team of people who want to be dedicated forum moderators, convince Nathaniel and current moderators that the new team will do a job that's as good or better than moderators are doing now, volunteer to take over the work so that current moderators can retire without worrying that the forums will get overrun with noise -- and then actually do all the work.

Take a look at this post from 2020:

Back to the main point,
1. The CA forum is not strictly for "academic" uses of CA,
2. You can't tell someone they should go away because they like the visual instead of the technical side of CA (relates to #1)
3. Sandbox is for everything, nothing doesnt belong in the sandbox, except hate speech and the like (See the Forum Rules *cough* rule 1 *cough*).

The current stances on these three points are as follows:
1. Because of how the forums are structured, there is almost no place to discuss the visual side of CA.
2. This pretty much has no stance right now, but some may argue that rule 4 forbids discussion about non-academic uses of CA. I do not interpret rule 4 this way, but other than that, the moderator team just doesn't have a stance on this.
3. Let these messages by Sokwe explain it:

The conwaylife.com moderators take very little action and try very hard to balance the needs of the various members of the community. It's impossible to satisfy everybody in a community as large as ours. You may disagree with the decision to lock off-topic threads, but those decisions have been necessary to maintain civility and reduce moderator workload. conwaylife.com, like any halfway decent forum, needs moderation, and the moderators don't have time to deal with threads that are
1. off-topic
2. extremely high volume, and
3. more likely than other threads to include rule violations.

The scope of conwaylife.com is made clear by its organization and content. This is not a general academic discussion forum, and no reasonable observer would argue otherwise. We tolerate discussion of mathematics, computer science, and programming due to their close relationship with the study of cellular automata. Other topics belong on other websites.

About the third point specifically, it makes sense to go to another website if you want to discuss about such a topic and only discuss about such a topic or if you want to discuss it with people who know it well, but discussing about such a topic here may be a way to connect with other users in ways outside of CA. Yes, the community is based on the shared interest of CA, but is there anything that says we can't connect outside of CA here? The forums have created a community. Do we really have to go elsewhere on the internet to do so? Of course, one could argue that the Discord serves the purpose of informal communication, but I argue that the Discord isn't exactly the same community.

In addition, see this post:

Off-topic discussions were always merely tolerated. They started getting banned when they became a frequent source of rule 1 violations. CA games were and are still allowed. However, some of the current "CA games" have very little to do with CA. For example, the various role play threads are more like word games with drawings. From my perspective, they don't seem to utilize CA in an interesting or challenging way. By contrast, I think the catalyses game is a good example of a CA game that actually utilizes CA in a meaningful way. If nothing else, it gives users practice in applying catalysts in Conway's Game of Life, which improves the community's overall CA knowledge.

So all this comes up to is the following two I mean three points:
1. How did the forums get to this point? Was there more to it than just Sokwe's post mentioned above? Is the forums for academic uses of CA and only academic uses of CA?
2. Do we need a place to connect with the community outside of the shared interest of CA?
3. Is there any point in keeping roleplay threads here? If not, where else on the internet should they no?

if we're no longer allowing roleplay threads please at least redirect all existing roleplay threads to OotT

[Resu]

How old is LifeWiki, ConwayLife.com, and the forums?

[hotdogPi]

How old is LifeWiki, ConwayLife.com, and the forums?

December 2008 for the wiki and forums. I don't know about the main page.

[Resu]

When did the moderators become moderators?

[dvgrn]

When did the moderators become moderators?

hotdogPi volunteered quite recently (27 March 2025). The rest of the active and semi-active moderators have been around for a while. Andrew, Sokwe, and I have apparently been moderators since 2009. Where does the time go?

[Resu]

What are polls usually used for?

[dvgrn]

What are polls usually used for?

Polls don't get a lot of use. A few people (me included) have tried creating them now and then, to get a sense of what the balance of opinion is in the community on one subject or another.

It's not a terribly reliable method of deciding anything. If you get, say, twenty-six people voting one way and seven people voting another way, you don't really know how much any of those thirty-three people thought about the issue before voting.

Still, a poll can still provide some useful perspective sometimes -- along the lines of,

"Oh, there are six people who agree with me and twenty-six who disagree -- I thought it would be the other way around! I wonder if I'm not seeing or understanding something that those other people think is important?"

or at least

"Well, as things currently stand, it doesn't look likely that 15 or 20 people are suddenly going to change their minds and agree with me -- I'm in the minority, even though I'm sure I'm right.

With dozens of people voting against my plan, it's much too likely to degenerate into a pointless edit war if I just go ahead and continue editing.

So I'll guess I'll avoid edits in that area for now -- at least until I manage to convince a lot more people!"

[b-engine]

(Don't know where to put this, moderators please move this to more appropriate place)

The homepage is broken by those links at the top that refuses to wrap. Who's gonna fix it?

Screenshot_20250722-163847.png (34.96 KiB) Viewed 2794 times

EDIT: the screen size doesn't matter, only the proportion. That's why it happens on phones.

EDIT 2:
This isn't supposed to happen, right?

Screenshot_20250722-183857.png (37.59 KiB) Viewed 2788 times

[Resu]

What colours does ConwayLife.com use?
Also, what's a post quota?
Is the forums more active than usual?

[dvgrn]

What colours does ConwayLife.com use?
Also, what's a post quota?
Is the forums more active than usual?

I'd say the current level of forum activity is about normal -- at least if we're looking at month-to-month or year-by-year averages.

Post quotas are an experimental idea that I came up with a while back, to try to help explain some key ideas about appropriate use of the forums.

People had started tracking post counts, including that information in their messages sometimes, along with inappropriate goals -- e.g., posting so often as to reach ten thousand posts by a target date.

That wouldn't have been good for the forums' signal-to-noise ratio. So just temporarily for a few users, I instituted a post quota: "don't make more than N posts by such-and-such date". This seems to have gotten the message across quite well.

Hopefully I won't have to renew those quotas once the time period expires! The idea is supposed to be more like, "please just keep posting at the level you're posting now, without moderators having to spend time monitoring a silly post quota."

[unname4798]

So, which quota and for which users?

[dvgrn]

So, which quota and for which users?

Have you seen my note after your apology in tommyaweosme's Sandbox thread?

There are just two people with a 2,500-post quota at the moment, and of course I'd love to be able to retire all quotas at the end of 2025 when these current ones expire.

That's contingent on everyone having gotten the idea about not posting just to make one's post count go up, of course, and avoiding posts that come across as ordering other people around and thus causing lots of complaints.

[Resu]

Why is the [email] [/email] tag hidden?
[email protected]

[ThePlayzr]

You know how you can sort members by posts, name, or join date? Can someone make it so you can do that to threads too?

Why is the [email] [/email] tag hidden?
[email protected]

Probably because only the ones used commonly are shown, it's basically like the taskbar of the CGoL forums.

[Resu]

What's the least active forum? Is it ConwayLife.com?

[b-engine]

What's the least active forum? Is it ConwayLife.com?

There are probably tons of abandoned forums with no active users. But I don't know if you meant those forums with very few active users (probably not one or two).