Happy 7th SE-versary!

When They Severed Earth from Sky - How the Human Mind Shapes Myth

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Saturday, 20 February 2021

quote [ So, I chose Sensible Endowment because this site is basically an inheritance of the old community, it's also run primarily by donations, and, most of all, to be well endowed is to have large genitalia ;) ]

Wow. So, it's a been a bit of a year, huh?

Since our last anniversary, my grandfather went quietly in his sleep. The months leading up to it, not so quiet or sane. It was a bit of a rough downward spiral. Anyway, funny story, apparently the only fucking place in Florida that is shut down to the public for covid is the courthouse I've needed paperwork from to settle my grandfather's estate. Fun, fun, fun. Um, Oy and I had settled into a place to ride out the plague with a couple of friends and have since been kicked out, with apologies, but no real explanation for why beyond the toxic temper tantrums of a drama queen roommate. So, we're back in Jacksonville staying with generous family for a couple of months while I try to finish up my grandfather's estate so that I can buy a van and get back on the road. Yeah, quite a year.

You may remember a post from August 2019 about SE possibly being hacked. It would appear that is the case. Some (but not all, kinda weird) SE credentials were found in a bundled hack release called Cit0Day. SE doesn't store your passwords in plaintext so all they got was email addresses and a salted password hash. But, if you use your SE password for any other accounts out there you should still definitely change those accounts' passwords. I've been slogging through the old codebase for the security hole that may have led to that breech and will update y'all once I find and patch it. Thanks to avid and apomorph for bringing this to my attention.

SE is still held together by subscriptions and my dwindling sanity. Those of you who can afford to chip in, it's much appreciated. If you can't afford it, no worries, but please do consider modding and commenting and posting more. I'll keep the site up and running as long as I can, but y'all gotta do your part too. ScoobySnacks is gonna break eventually, and then what will we do?

Here's to another year where we're not wiped from the face of the planet. Cheers.🍻

[SFW] [Meta SE]	[+10 Underrated]
[by steele@8:42pmGMT]

Comments

TM said @ 1:50am GMT on 21st Feb [Score:2 Good]

Sorry to hear you're going through some bad times, Steele. I appreciate all you have done and continue to do, and I know others do as well. I will try to post more often, though I will never be in ScoobySnacks' class.

cb361 said^[2] @ 10:35pm GMT on 20th Feb [Score:1 Classy Pr0n]

Ursula Martinez

mechanical contrivance said @ 3:17pm GMT on 21st Feb

Is there a way to watch age restricted videos without signing in?

cb361 said @ 5:22pm GMT on 21st Feb [Score:1 Informative]

There's a youtube video on the subject, but it's age restricted.

You could try these: 6 Ways To Easily Bypass YouTube Age Restriction

zenviper said @ 3:37am GMT on 21st Feb [Score:1 Good]

Steele, thank you for everything you do. While I don't post or comment all that often, I have been coming here and the old SE for I think 23 years now, and I really appreciate this space. Also appreciate your shares on VR, so please do keep on keeping on.

Bob Denver said @ 6:17am GMT on 21st Feb [Score:1 Good]

Thank you Steele! I wish I could contribute, and I will when I can. I think it has been a rough few years for many of us. But, hope springs eternal!

Paracetamol said @ 3:46pm GMT on 22nd Feb [Score:1 Underrated]

BTW, you can check if you were in that leak via https://haveibeenpwned.com/ – looks like the last 2 years were ripe with breaches.

Here's a short explanation on the whole thing, concerning 23000 smaller sites and forums. Is there such a thing as an automated XSS attack?

Paracetamol said @ 3:46pm GMT on 22nd Feb [Score:1 Good]

Also, good luck for steele in finding a more steady pace this year.

moriati said @ 4:25pm GMT on 22nd Feb [Score:1 Good]

Thank you Steele, and hang in there.

conception said @ 8:36pm GMT on 22nd Feb [Score:1 Interesting]

RE: Modding - if there a chance of getting a "mod from the front page" greasemonkey script or update? That'd help my very lazy modding penchant.

steele said @ 10:12pm GMT on 22nd Feb

I'll have to think on that. It complicates stuff on the backend because most of the front page is cached, but then I'd have to a run a query to see what you haven't modded yet for each of the posts....

Paracetamol said^[7] @ 12:35pm GMT on 26th Feb

[Edit:] Damn, this eats my code … let me try via sandbox … ok – this strips HTML tags from the comments – …okay, sorted it out – aargh, it eats HTML on every save:

If you paste this in a Bookmark:



javascript:(

  document.querySelectorAll('.entry_header_text a').forEach( function(link) {

    let id = link.getAttribute('href').split('/go.php/')[1].split('/')[0];

    link.insertAdjacentHTML(

      'afterEnd',

      '<form method="post" action="/entry.php/'+id+'"><button name="mod_type_id" type="submit" value="1">+1 Good</form>'

    );

  })

);

… it will add `+1 Good` buttons after all titles once called. So it actually works. It currently breaks on entries w/o click trackers, but it's only a proof of concept.

This snippet can be fine-tuned, but it won't:

- find out if you already voted (no dataset of the voters is available)
- find out if you're a subscriber (ok, maybe there's a flag in the code I didn't catch)

steele said^[1] @ 1:18pm GMT on 26th Feb

This snippet can be fine-tuned, but it won't:
- find out if you already voted (no dataset of the voters is available)

I'd have to a run a query to see what you haven't modded yet for each of the posts....

Adding a full mod box isn't the issue, that's just a couple lines of php and html, it's taxing the database that complicates things. For a single post it's not that a big deal, but for the front page which people constantly refresh, it becomes a bit much.

Paracetamol said @ 1:28pm GMT on 26th Feb

True, the vote freezes the site for quite a moment. Even if you'd trigger this in the background, excessive modding will occupy the DB quite a bit. How did this work stable in the old days?

steele said @ 1:47pm GMT on 26th Feb [Score:1 Insightful]

Marck was paying a couple hundred bucks a month for SE to have it's own dedicated server. But even then, old SE still ran into problems around this as well. Marck just wasn't around to tell people about it.

Paracetamol said @ 2:16pm GMT on 26th Feb

Ok, what you could do:

- Create a separate query to list all user mods per post.
- The modding script would pull this dataset via a separate frontend request (allowing it to time out).
- By passing the same file to all logged in users, you can cache/throttle the execution.
- The script would compare mod users against the current user to hide/show the button.
- Since the modding call would run in the browser, the result could be previewed and the mod option hidden without making a new request.

Once the page would be refreshed, the cached dataset would already mirror the client state.

Paracetamol said @ 2:17pm GMT on 26th Feb

Shit, this is a ticket conversation, right?

steele said @ 2:59pm GMT on 26th Feb [Score:1 Funsightful]

More like PM convo but whatevs. But that's basically what I do in the beta where everything is ajax. You gotta remember we're talking about modifying 20 year old code that i didn't write. So like half the time i think i'm being smart and actually i'm inexplicably breaking something that should have nothing to do with what i'm touching.😅🤯

Saint Marck said @ 10:30pm GMT on 20th Feb

What the fuck's going on here?

lilmookieesquire said @ 7:28am GMT on 21st Feb

You'll get back into CB's basement for another 7 years, and you'll LIKE it.

A friend said @ 10:11pm GMT on 21st Feb

Can I come out now?

lilmookieesquire said @ 11:56pm GMT on 21st Feb

We already knew.

donnie said @ 11:32pm GMT on 22nd Feb

I am the walrus?

Mikhail_16 said @ 10:17pm GMT on 24th Feb

To another circle around the sun.