rawTOP
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There were updates to both themes today, so I'll be implementing those in a moment. So the upgrades continue. Hopefully you guys won't notice any issues.
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All the background processes are done. I got the "compatible" theme working (as far as I can tell), so it's now the default theme for the site and the non-compatible one has been disabled (it will return when a compatible version of it is available). Please report any errors – in detail. (I can't fix things unless I know they're a problem).
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I just did an upgrade to the site. While it wasn't a major upgrade, it wasn't minor either (I upgraded from IPB 4.1.19 to 4.2.1). There are some background functions that need to complete before all the functionality is fully back to how it should be. That could take a number of hours still. Reindexing of posts is only at 11%, and it's not the only thing that's getting reindexed. That's on the back end. On the front end there are two themes I use for the site. The default theme is not fully compatible with the new backend version. When I upgraded the other theme to a new version that was "compatible" it was a complete mess. I suspect that the reason is that my CDN is serving files from the old version that are cached and the mix is what creates a huge mess. I'll try again to get that theme working in the morning (maybe tonight before I go to bed). Hopefully things will have aged out of the cache by that time. Once that theme is working I'll make it the default theme (since it's supposed to be compatible) and disable the other theme until a compatible version of it is available. So the TL;DR version is 1) be patient – background processing will take a few more hours, and 2) hopefully appearance issues will get cleaned up tomorow (or earlier). In the mean time things should more-or-less work, but they may not be pretty. If you guys wanna list particular error messages that you encounter, that would give me a list of things to test. And please describe what platform & browser you're on and what you were doing when you encountered the error.
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You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard people say "It doesn't work" without them specifying what doesn't work. A full error message is manna from heaven
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Sorry about that. It's fixed. And that was the perfect error report. I knew exactly what to fix!
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I've been working behind the scenes on making it so people can enter personal details. I figured if I did it, I might as well do more than the few details that are required for chat. At the bottom of the chat page there's now a link to a page where you can update your details. I'm away in DC for Pride starting tomorrow. When I get back I'll take the next step and then those details will start showing up under the person's avatar in chat. But if you look at the list of things you can enter it's pretty exhaustive. It should be obvious that this is bigger than chat. –that my end goal is really to have full-fledged hookup sites. Given the architecture of what I'm building, details about you as a person are on one input form, and the persona you're projecting are on another input form. But even the chat - the reason why it doesn't look like the old chat, is because I was building something bigger than chat. It's the structure for a messaging system. It's a forum thread. It's a social site (like Twitter or Tumblr). There a lot of details to work out for each of those, but I'm trying to build things that are flexible and reusable in other contexts. This should be an exciting year if I can just get the programming completed…
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That is my goal. But gotta take one step at a time. But you'll see the beginnings of that pretty soon. I want to show the location for each user. Initially I'll just use whatever location they've entered here on the forum, but then I'll give them the ability to specify a lat/long. I won't show the exact lat/long – just use it to show "miles away", and I'll use it to do a lookup to find neighborhoods / cities near them. They'll choose one and that will be stored. Those neighborhoods are part of a huge place database. So if I say I'm in Mount Morris Park that's part of a hierarchy of places. So Mount Morris Park is part of Central Harlem, which is part of Upper Manhattan, which is part of New York County, which is part of New York State, which is part of the US. So people can browse the hierarchy once you pick a place on that hierarchy. I'll let you specify multiple places. So someone might say they live in Manhattan, but they spend weekends in the summer out in The Pines on Fire Island. Or you could specify a location for a trip you're planning, or a place you get to frequently on business (even if you don't know the dates yet). So yes, I absolutely want to do more hookup-oriented features.
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"Traditional chat window" – You mean one where all the messages are in a static pane with a scroll bar? That doesn't really work on mobile and about half the people here are on mobile. That whole interface came from the days when chat was powered by Flash which required a static box/window/frame (whatever you want to call it). But Flash is dead, and mobile is the future, so things have to adapt.
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Another update… To me the biggest issue is that there aren't enough people in chat. So I've now changed things so the number of people in chat shows next to the link to chat. It takes a moment to load, but it does eventually come up. Hopefully that will help attract people to chat. Apparently the chat is so similar to what you have in the main forums some people initially think it's just another forum and not a live chat. Not sure what to do about that. I mean it's clearly marked Chat. Next, I'm noticing people don't understand the idea of quoted replies. They're putting their response within the quote portion. Or they don't add any response – they just have the quoted portion. I'll keep trying different things until I see that stop. And lastly, I'm still working on adding new features.
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No comments in almost 2 days. I suppose that's a good thing. Here's what I'm working on… 1-on-1 Chat – I moved a bunch of code around yesterday (and messed up chat for a half hour or so in the process), so that group chat can share code with 1-on-1. That means when something is fixed or implemented in one, it will probably be implemented in the other. I also more or less figured out how I'll do the "you've got a message" feature. Stats & Location – Under each profile pic / screen name I want to have two lines. One with general stats and the other with location. It'll look something like this… rawTOP 49 ➖ ↗️ ? Harlem, 35 mi. So that 2nd line would read 49, neg, vers top, on PrEP. (The neg emoji would be a fully readable color – not something I can accomplish here). I'll use a biohazard symbol ☣️ for unmedicated poz, and a plus sign ➕ for poz on ARVs, and a grayed out biohazard for poz and unknown whether on ARVs (not something I can show here since it requires CSS). And you'll be able to specify whether certain stats are shown or not. I'm also thinking of letting users specify up to 4 other emoji that describe them or what they're into. So I might add ???? (for piggy, breeding, fisting, bondage). Then I'll also let people specify locations. They will specify a precise location (so I can calculate distances), and then they'll specify a city or well-known neighborhood. The location part will one of the things I need to build for Cumdump.Network (which I hope to have up by end of summer). I actually sorta built a lot of it a couple years ago, but need to rework it for my current programming environment. The stats part will probably get up quickly. The location part will come after 1-on-1 chat.
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A number of improvements were made today. Most notably was quick reply – a separate entry area where you just enter something and hit return. That was high on a lot of people's list. Right now I'm showing both. Tomorrow I'll probably make it so you can toggle between the two. I also improved the Who's In Chat section to break down the people who are active (<5 min) and ones that are semi-inactive (5-15 min). The semi-inactive ones may come back since if you look at another tab in your browser you don't ping the server for updates.
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There's a background process that runs every minute that updates how long ago a remark was made. It also gets kicked off after new comments are written to the page. Odd that it was wrong the first time. It's the same code. But it helps hearing that.
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It polls the server for new messages every 12-45 seconds (12 seconds if it knows someone is typing a response, 25 seconds normally, and 45 if you're the only person in chat). So you shouldn't need to refresh the page. That said, it won't poll for new remarks if the page is not visible. So if you jump to another tab, while you're on that tab chat will not refresh. I've just done two things to make it feel faster. I've dropped the regular refresh from 30 to 25 seconds, and I've implemented a 3 second max refresh when coming back after the tab is hidden. Also really weird that it would show new comments as 20 minutes old. Given time zone issues, time is actually pretty tricky to get right. I give the browser the datetime on the server, and when the page is loaded it determines how much the browser time is off from the server time and then all of that gets used to calculate how long ago a remark was posted. Definitely let me know if you continue to see problems with times.
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If you're on a computer and the fonts are too big, your browser will have the option to make them bigger/smaller (it's command + and command - on the Mac – I assume it's something similar on Windows – all browsers have it so they comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act). On a smart phone it's more complicated. On iPhones i'ts a system setting – which isn't granular enough, I know. But the point in, font size is a personal preference. I did notice that the profile pics were too big when I was on my iPhone. That's been resolved. As far as the placement of the list of who's online – it's just above where you type a reply. That seemed to me to be the most sensible place to put it. From that area you can see 1) new responses, 2) who's typing a reply, and 3) who's online – all things you may want to know as you're typing your own response. If I put things at the top as well that would increase the "jitteriness" of the page when there's an update and the page has to resize to accommodate the new list of who's online. And there is no sidebar because I take a "mobile first" approach to design. So I see more negatives with the other solutions than I see positives.
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There is now the option to play a sound when new messages come in (and turn off said sound). And your sound preference will be observed when you come back the ne Also, the new background for new messages goes black when they come in and then goes back to normal when they're no longer new messages. (It gets a bit confusing when a whole bunch come in at once). So let me know what else you guys want…
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The comment box is now smaller. But it will grow as you type stuff in it. The backgrond image has been "tamed" by putting a mostly opaque color behind the comments. I'll work on sound now. Otherwise, let me know your feedback on how it stands now.
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I have no recollection of what it looked liked Why?
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The vertical bars are there because it's quoted text from someone else's comment. It distinguishes it from the remark that person is making. An option to turn off background pics and enable sound will be coming for accessibility reasons.
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It's been there from the start. Right above where you type your comment.
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I'll make the comment area smaller. I noticed that last night when I was on my iPhone (on my 27" monitor it wasn't a problem – lol). Emoticons are not supported, but emojis are supported. Is that good enough?
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Well, I nearly cleared my list of bugs and enhancement that I compiled yesterday (and took care of a few more things I noticed today). So another question for you guys… Advertising. I'm thinking the most effective form would be text ads in the chat stream. They'd be kept pretty minimal. I'd put a limit on them where they couldn't be more frequent than every 10 minutes AND there would need to be at least 50 (real) chat messages between them. OR I could do banner ads. Do you guys have a preference? Also @kitpig said he thought the new chat was "clunky". If you agree (or disagree) can you guys explain what needs to change to make it not clunky? Otherwise, I think it's mostly done. So let me know what you want changed. [@BlindRawFucker wanted sounds. I hate sounds, but it's an accessibility issue for him, so I'll look into it. And I think he was the one who wanted to get rid of the background image – again for accessibility, so I'll work on that.] Also – I'm struggling imagining how you'd get alerted when someone wants to do a 1-on-1 chat with you. So thoughts on that would be helpful.
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To explain why I asked about topical chats… My eventual goal is to split up Breeding Zone into a number of different brands. #BBBH.Men for general barebacking Poz Pigs for HIV fetish Oral Pigs for oral Public Urinals for watersports ??? for straight stuff ??? for chem sex But I realize each of those needs critical mass for chat to be successful. That said, someone who is turned off by bug chasing may participate in a cleaner bareback chat, so this is a case where the sum of parts may be greater than the whole. But first there needs to be critical mass for each brand. You guys all said you wanted a unified chat. So that's what I've given you. And it will remain. But once I tackle a few other issues I'll be introducing nice-based chats. I've got them mostly programmed. The only thing lacking is user profiles on those other sites. (I could do them easily, but I want them to be integrated with the profile names here – so when you have a profile name it's reserved for just your use on all the other sites.)
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I managed to accidentally delete the other thread about chat (sorry – I thought I was deleting one comment). So give me your thoughts on the new chat. I still have a list of things I'm working on, but your input will help a lot. I'll post questions here. If you can answer them, it will help me debug things. First question – do the times on the responses seem correct? In other words, if all the messages (or a lot of them) say "now" – that's a problem, or if all of them say they were posted hours ago – that's also a problem.
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The Tall Dark Stranger In The Blood-Red Room
rawTOP replied to rawrawraw76's topic in Chem Sex FICTION
As the owner of the site, I fully support my moderators. They do an awesome job. It's truly rare that I disagree with how they moderate the site. If anything I'd have them give more infractions, not fewer. As far as this particular case, I've seen a lot of sites die. Nothing kills a site faster than negativity. That's why we don't tolerate it. You have the down vote button. Use it if you like. But verbalizing things just for the sake of being negative isn't OK. It's not what this site is about. An no, you don't have any freedom of speech here. This is a private site with rules of acceptable behavior. If you can't live by those rules you'll be asked to leave (temporarily or permanently).- 46 replies
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We hardcore barebackers take risks other people aren't comfortable with, here's your chance to do some good for the community while taking that risk… There's a Phase IIB HIV vaccine trial going on right now that needs volunteers. It's called The AMP Study (aka HTVN 704 / HPTN 085). One third of the people are getting a high dose of the vaccine, one third a low dose, and one third a placebo. They've done basic safety tests, so the goal of the study is to see if it's safe in a broader group of people, and to determine what dosage of the vaccine works (if any). There is substantial risk in this study. There's at least a 1/3rd chance you'll have zero protection. And there's a chance the low dosing won't work, and possibly even the high dosing won't work. I doubt they want people who are on PrEP, since that would mess with their results, but I haven't confirmed that yet. If you're in the study you'll get an IV drip for 30-60 minutes every two months. And I'm guessing you'll need to keep a record of all your sexual contacts so they know how much risk you take. And that's why guys who take risks are perfect candidates. The more risk the study participants take, the more definitive the results of the study. So you'll literally be giving back to your community while you're ass up in the bathhouse taking loads (and not just to the tops who breed you). If you're in NYC, and you're interested, click here for an online survey to see if you're eligible and indicate your interest. Outside NYC, contact your local HIV research center to see if they're participating in the trial. They're looking for 2,700 participants, so research centers all over are participating in the study.
