00:32 <@deen> Hacker News has cool moderators. One of them liked my DDNet post and "so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours." Never heard of that before
00:35 <@deen> Oh, it's on the front page already
00:38 <+eeeee> the article is pretty solid, good job. title could be more catchy though, i don't think it reflects the contents very well
00:39 <@deen> suggest a better title
00:39 <@deen> I'm bad at that and probably changed the focus of the text while writing
00:39 <+eeeee> not a writer :P . but i will if i get a better idea
00:39 <@deen> "Experiences of Running an Online Game for 3 Years"?
00:47 <+eeeee> none of the things described in the article are revolutionary ideas or technically challenging solutions (although there are a few clever hacks), i think the most inspiring point of it is that this enormous amount of work was done as a side project by a small team (or even mostly one person) in spite of a toxic community
00:47 <@deen> well, but i didn't really talk about that in the post much
00:47 <+eeeee> hmm true
00:48 <@deen> and don't really want to, would sound like placing blame
00:48 <@deen> i just described some of the stuff we did, even if it's not all that special, also so I have somewhere to look it up if I forget it in a few years
00:49 <+eeeee> larger companies with resources and people working full-time run online games on a whole different level, take this for example http://engineering.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-time-applications-part-ii
00:49 <@deen> and it's half-aimed at the ddnet community, so non-technical people who might be interested in how ddnet runs
00:50 <+eeeee> but this article is interesting because it shows you can still do pretty decent job as a side project
00:52 <@deen> yeah, I'm always envious of what you can do with manpower and money, but oh well
00:52 <@deen> that would be against the spirit of DDNet
13:46 <+ScottKevill> deen: Great article on the tech of DDNet. I can relate to a lot of those experiences in bootstrapping GameRanger.
13:47 <@deen> ScottKevill: Thanks!
13:48 <+ScottKevill> Some of the things I expected to see as problems in the article I see are evident in your forums. :)
13:48 <@deen> Haha, for example?
13:48 <+ScottKevill> Bots, for one.
13:48 <@deen> GameRanger sounds cool
13:49 <+ScottKevill> General community politics & bickering as well.
13:49 <+ScottKevill> Can be a thankless job sometimes.
13:49 <@deen> Yeah, I mostly wanted to focus on technical problems, but you're right
13:51 <+ScottKevill> They do tend to inter-twine. eg. Community issues affect funding issues which affect how efficient & performant the tech has to be.
13:51 <+ScottKevill> And features you can or can't add because a small minority would abuse them in a big way.
13:53 <@deen> Heh, had to remove a few features like that
13:53 <@deen> Worldwide save games did not quite work with the way our replication worked and was easy to abuse once someone found out how
13:54  * ScottKevill nods.
13:54 <@deen> And DDNet community loves to find abusable bugs. But I can't even blame them, before running DDNet I used to do the exact same thing elsewhere :P
13:54 <+ScottKevill> GR was account-based from the beginning, but used nicknames + account ID number rather than unique usernames.
13:55 <+ScottKevill> Back when that was more common (eg. slashdot or ICQ).
13:55 <@deen> Oh yeah, we can't even ban people, no accounts whatsoever
13:55 <+ScottKevill> And I didn't want stale accounts making names unusable.
13:56 <+ScottKevill> (Or even the idea that you couldn't use a name because someone else that you may never even come across is already using it)
13:56 <+ScottKevill> That still created problems because users would try to steal/hack other user's accounts to get a lower numeric ID.
13:56 <+ScottKevill> Anything will be used as a status symbol.. pretty wacky.
13:57 <@deen> Yeah, was the same thing with short ICQ numbers
13:57 <+ScottKevill> I've been thinking for a while of adding unique usernames.. but the problem you mentioned.. users doing a landgrab and registering existing users' names.
13:58 <@deen> yeah, would require a lot of moderation for a long time
13:58 <@deen> and contradictory claims on who used a name first
13:59 <+ScottKevill> Best I could think of would be make a transition period where I charged a fee to reserve a username.
13:59 <+ScottKevill> Because opening it up as a free-for-all.
13:59 <+ScottKevill> s/Because/Before
14:00 <+ScottKevill> There'd still be abuse, but for those that really cared about their name, they could save it.
14:00 <@deen> Yep, that would also have been my solution, but I didn't want to charge money in any way for DDNet
14:01 <+ScottKevill> And the fee barrier would reduce the mass claims.
14:01 <@deen> So I had that planned for my new game project which will probably never come to fruition
14:02 <+ScottKevill> :)
14:02 <@deen> Another idea for us is to use the DDNet forum accounts as game accounts as well, but that sounds hacky
14:03 <+ScottKevill> Harder for them to argue.
14:03 <+ScottKevill> Could always do both.. and the forum account could then signal as some kind of "Verified" status.
17:30 <+nameless-tee> Yeah.. The account system solves a lot of problems, but brings even more others.
17:45 <+WolfAlex> @deen: why hacky?
18:30 <@deen> then our accounts depend on the forum software, doesn't sound ideal to me
18:31 <@deen> when phpBB changes its db layout we have to fix our servers for it. I'm not sure how securely the pws are hashed
18:33 <+WolfAlex> https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=4012075#p4012075
18:33 <+WolfAlex> not sure if still valid, but a starting point
21:19 <+xgenster> ola
21:35 <@deen> hi xgenster 
21:35 <+xgenster> deen, when does this place liven up ?
21:35 <@deen> this channel?
21:36 <@deen> it's pretty quiet
21:36 <+xgenster> yeah
21:36 <+xgenster> aaah ok
21:38 <@deen> You can check the logs: https://ddnet.tw/irclogs/