1) talking in the chatter box (3 points are awarded every half hour you are talking... in other words, if you write a single message at least once every 30 minutes, you get 3 points every 30 minutes)
2) creating a new poll
As usual, you can see the most accurate and up to date listing of how AP are earned here!
posted on: Friday - Nov 21 2008 (5:54pm) · posted by: Lev
Two new forums
UPDATE: It just came to my attention that both of these forums were set on manual approval for all posts - This was not intentional and has been changed now so all posts are automatically added here as well.
I've just created two new "general interest forums":
posted on: Monday - Nov 17 2008 (11:54pm) · posted by: Lev
New contest - win $50 for Amazon.com by being active on TT
Some of you have expressed concern over the activity (or should I say, lack there of) on Tainted Thoughts lately.
So to get people to do things on the site again, I thought I would make it interesting to give away $50 bucks for Amazon.com again.
The idea is simple and the contest has already begun (as of midnight last night, local server time). The member who gains the most activity points from now until the end of the month (at midnight as the day becomes the first of December, local server time).
So all you have to do is increase your activity points, and when the end of the month comes, whoever is in the lead gets a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com!
Check back on this page shortly because within a day or two, there will be additional ways you can rake in the points by doing other things on the site.
posted on: Monday - Nov 17 2008 (12:45pm) · posted by: Lev
Looking for a few good men (or ladies)
I'd like to breathe a little life back into the site, and part of doing that will be to make some changes.
One such change will be new section and forum moderators.
If you would like to help moderate any of the forums, or sections (such as "visual art", "literature", "politics", etc.) then let me know.
Duties will include approving items, deleting duplicate items, regulating on people being asses, removing spam and tagging items as featured/sticky.
Making sticky items is one of my focuses right now because it brings attention to specific items - possibly items that have remained on TT for a long time but not received any attention.
You will also have the ability to do things like adding content to the spotlight (and will be encouraged to), as well as an array of other administrative tasks.
If you'd like to help, leave a note, send me a private message, or drop me a line somehow.
You don't need to make any long term commitment, as even temporary help is appreciated. If you can't keep up, or can't stay active, there are no hard feelings and I will just seek other help.
posted on: Thursday - Nov 13 2008 (5:54pm) · posted by: Lev
Okay, Okay - you all got me! (typo/error in HARD TIME article)
Well, I just went approve some posts, since the section they were in didn't do it automatically, and I came across something which really took me by surprise.
There were several people who had left feedback for the HARD TIME article pointing out the technical mistake.
It was earlier written that Galileo was burned at the stake for stating the Earth was not the center of the Universe but instead the Sun.
As many people already know, this is absolutely not true, so I apologize for that misconception. I have known about this technical mistake for some time (probably close to the amount of time that I first published it, sadly), but I never corrected it because I felt it was relatively minor and probably not noticed by anyone reading it anyhow.
Well, I do stand corrected, and since I see quite a few people noticed it, I have updated the article and temporarily pulled the PDF.
I have now changed it to state what really happened; Galileo was imprisoned for his beliefs by the church until death, and it was Bruno that was burned at the stake for his blasphemous ideas.
I must have simply mixed the two scenarios and names up and gotten the facts incorrectly.
So there, even I can admit when I do something wrong!
posted on: Tuesday - Nov 11 2008 (6:35pm) · posted by: Lev
Activity points and site ranks explained
Since we will be having another contest any day now, and since Neglection started working on writing some helpful tutorials for members, I thought I'd do my part in actually creating a couple of pages that go over how activity points are earned, and how many points are required for each of the ranks you see on the site.
posted on: Thursday - Oct 23 2008 (11:49am) · posted by: Lev
TT is evil!
I love when we get hate mail, but sadly I was persuaded into believing we've lost our edge and that it was a thing of the past. It could be that society has gradually shifted to becoming more liberal after being fed up with the policies of conservative politicians, and as an effect TT no longer looks as radical as it once did. Or perhaps, it's just that we don't have as much "in your face" content as we used to, which always aided in the arousal of anti-TT sentiments. In any event, I am happy to say we got another wonderful cheery letter from someone.
-----
Please get me out of this hell hole of "Tainted thoughts" This is the most disgusting crap I've ever heard and seen....you guys are totally evil...I am a Christian girl who loves Jesus and I do not want to be a member of this stinkn' site ever again! Take me off your list! I will be praying for you all!
-----
Now, let me dissect this as best as I can, which shouldn't take too long since it isn't a long message.
First of all, as most of you should already know, you can delete your accounts yourself. This is done by clicking the "settings" button and then using the "delete my account" link. I prefer not to delete accounts now that I give members this ability because it gives me some sort of insurance that I am not removing an account that was requested by someone other than the account holder.
TT is the most disgusting crap you've ever heard or seen? Wowza! Now, either it is my feeling that you simply must be too young to actually have seen the real ills of society, or your religious barrier is blinding you from the real problems with the world. I try to build and present TT as a community that respects every opinion, no matter how offensive or radical, so that we can have a civil society where we reason with our differences instead of resorting to violence, force or war. TT, to me at least, is about addressing the corruption of conventional wisdom and institutions and finding alternatives. Yes, many members of TT have strong anti-religious mentalities, but at least most of us still retain a sense of open-mindedness and struggle to respect different points of views even if we don't believe in them. How someone can see this as being the most disgusting crap they've ever seen is beyond me. I can only assume that these feelings were expressed by a really closed minded individual who's brain filters out anything critical of their religious beliefs, and stands firm in the notion that anything which contradicts what they believe is "wrong", "blasphemous", or "hateful". In my opinion this is what is wrong with the world; closed minded, self-righteous zealots who can't accept and respect the variety of opinion.
We are totally evil? First of all, I think it's important to point out that this is a hugely stereotypical point of view. To begin with, there are many Christians on this site, and there are probably just as many patriots as well. If someone wants to address me as evil, that's more than a fair statement, but to summarize the whole site or community as evil is nonsense, as there are a large number of people who do not see things in the same way as I do. In fact, this is one of the things that I am most proud of with TT; that we have managed to build a group of people with such ranging and diverse beliefs. There aren't many places online, or even in the world at all, where people from all sorts of beliefs can come together to commune peacefully. Some of the most active members at this site harbor such different views on the world than that of my own, and still we are able to talk to each other civilly. It is my opinion that if we were evil: 1) we would all be of the same state of mind and perspective, and 2) we would resort to intolerance to one another instead of mutual respect.
You are a Christian girl who loves Jesus? Yeah, and so are a number of other girls who are also on this site. And I'm an atheist boy who loves peace, unity and a world without self-righteous barriers that tear humans apart and fill them with hate. I respect that you can believe what you want if you find that belief best suited toward your life, but you refuse to accept other people for having different points of view. Who is the better person here?
You'll be praying for us? Wow... I've never heard this before. My mom has prayed for me, my brother has prayed for me. People who don't even know me and only may see my name in a church newsletter pray for me. That's part of the problem. Many Christians (and other religious fanatics) spend too much of their time thinking prayer is going to make the world a better place instead of actually putting in some real effort themselves. With all the time that is spent praying for a better world, perhaps we'd actually have gotten somewhere if that same amount of time was put into reshaping the world into a better place by actions. Prayer is the path of the of the negligent. If you think God is going to take care of everything you have a problem with, then you're likely going to have another thing coming.
Anyhow, if the person who wrote this message to me is reading this, I thought I should point it out that I tried to respond to your email, but it was instantly bounced back to me, stating that the email address was not valid. So, I'll just paste my original email to you here:
-----
Hallo,
You are more than welcome to delete your account yourself. This is accomplished by clicking the "settings" button in the control panel. Then, look under the big "reset password" link for the link reading "delete my account".
As for your specific concern or tone, as much as I'd love to go into this with you, I don't think there is much of a point, considering that you seem to have shown that you are not interested in reason or alternative points of view. If you're not happy on TT and don't what it represents, you are encouraged to simply delete your account and find another site that is more attune to beliefs, as there is no point in feeling frustrated or angry when you have a choice of not being a part of it.
Oh, and lots of people pray for me. I love it. It fuels my fire, and gives me more basis for many of my beliefs.
posted on: Sunday - Sep 28 2008 (10:28am) · posted by: Lev
TT Chat Rooms!
Please consider this a beta!
I've got it up and running for the most part. You can do what's most important: chat!
I've spent more time focusing on speed and performance than a bunch of useless flashy features. From my testing thus far, it is quite fast, considering it is all mySQL driven.
I've created two rooms for now:
Lounge Free for all
The lounge will be the main chat room for everyone to enjoy peacefully. That is to say, once we get these chat rooms active, the lounge will be moderated and offenders will be warned, kicked or banned. The free for all room does not have the same rules attached.
To see what the rules are for a room you are in, write this where you write a message:
/rules
I will be following conventional IRC syntax with many commands, so having some experience with IRC will be handy (especially if you are an op, since kicking and banning will be done in the same manner).
If you are already in stealth mode on the site and open up the chat, you will automatically be chatting anonymously. You also have the ability to chat anonymously even if you aren't in stealth mode - just tick the respective box. Chatting anonymously will assign you the same unique ID that you see here in the chatter box, and your name will not be present with any of your messages or in the list of users chatting.
The chat room is only open for members of this community, and it most likely will remain that way (due to an inability to prevent spam bots).
If you close the chat window, you will automatically be timed out after five minutes, but as long as you keep the chat window open, you will remain "chatting".
I haven't worked on any of the access list functionality yet, but I hope to have that together by this weekend.
You will also notice that you can only be chatting in one room at a time. This will hopefully also be changed shortly.
The list of chat rooms will also be changed, and more will be done with the overall design to let you know where you are, and so on and so forth.
Once I get more of the functionality together, and once the appearance of the system is a bit less bland (a bit, mind you), I will create another button for "chat" to go in with the rest of the control panel buttons (home, members, settings, profile, etc..)
If you are on chatting frequently enough, and you show you are mature enough, I'd love to have you as an operator. Your duties will be nothing more than passing time with others on, and ensuring people are abiding by the rules.
Since this is a pretty big feature, and since it is in its infancy, I am sure you have lots of suggestions, ideas and feedback. Please feel free to provide any of your thoughts or suggestions thus far in this item!
UPDATE:
- Flood control in effect (it's currently set to 1 second, since I don't want to be too restrictive. There is also a mechanism to prevent the same message being posted multiple times back to back)
- Private messages can be sent within a chat room using the following syntax: /msg lev message text goes here
- Private messages may also be sent to stealth members using their unique identifier. If their name shows up as "STEALTH MEMBER 411", then sending a private message to the user is done like so: /msg 411 message text goes here
- Clear the message buffer (clean the window of present messages): /clear
- Reveal the identity of a stealth member (For moderation purposes only, so normal members won't be able to use this!) /unmask 411
- Name highlighting; each username has its own color to make association of messages easier. Colors, scheme or style may change...
- Silent (or private) messages are highlighted in yellow. These are messages, or system responses, which only you are seeing. Anything highlighted in yellow is visible only to you.
- Colors have been removed both for usernames and silent messages. I will probably re-instate them at a later time, but I would like to come up with a full class for color manipulation, because I am not happy with the inverse tones I am getting now. I thought the yellow highlighting on silent messages looked tacky, so silent messages are now appearing merely in italic.
posted on: Wednesday - Aug 20 2008 (8:05pm) · posted by: Lev
Refrain from upgrading to Firefox 3 - it sucks!
Simply put: Firefox 3's rendering engine sucks.
While Firefox 3 has one or two really cool features, and while it claims to be more reliable and perform better, the bottom line is that it has introduced a countless number of new problems.
I seem to notice a new, major issue every other day, and as I continue to upgrade regularly through my package manager, they continue to get worse and worse.
If you are using Firefox 3 you may notice the numerous issues with CSS, which result in awkward colors and alignment issues. You may even notice several other bugs in Firefox 3 concerning table widths, and the use of 100% dimensions failing to scale to the desired size. Another huge annoyance is the inability to remove a browsed file from the input area of an upload field in a form. There are several others I've mentioned over the past month or so in my blog, if you want more information. These issues only exist in Firefox 3, and will not be a problem in Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, or Opera (for the most part).
If you know what's good for you, I'd strongly recommend sticking with Firefox 2 for at least another year, or until you hear me preaching about how great it has become. If it weren't for the fact that my damn package manager won't let me install Firefox 2, I'd remove every trace of it with a big grin of relief.
Obviously, since I wouldn't recommend Firefox 3 to anyone, I have pulled all of the advertisements for Firefox from TT. They will not go up again until the Firefox development team fixes some of these major design and rendering issues which are degrading web sites.
If you think I am babbling on from my own spite to how it displays my pages, you are wrong. Many of the rendering issues I've been noticing with Firefox 3 effect a wide range of web sites, and the issues, while perhaps minor, are prevalent almost anywhere you look.
So as a web designer myself who has a keen eye for these things, I'd have to tell you that Firefox 3 is a big disappointment so far. While I've never been completely satisfied with a Firefox release to date, I would at least stand by version 2 more so than any other browser.
UndyingFantasy (10:41pm): hahahahaha. okay. so. the cops are gone (they left hours ago but i came in and took a nap). they finger printed everything.. but i still gave them a copy of my blog (i told them what she said about suing me for slander and the cops LAUGHED, and said 'in her dreams'), showed them my text messages (which they advised me to save, because, oh, hey THREATS) and then took down both of their full names when they found out they're on probation and i casually mentioned they probably did this while high on drugs. i love life.
Lev (6:41pm): u should put on that nwa song while they r there
UndyingFantasy (6:25pm): weeee. they're here. time for the fun.
UndyingFantasy (6:15pm): speaking of fucking cops.. where are they?
UndyingFantasy (6:13pm): i saw a funny clip on youtube the other day.. the cop gave a guy a long piece of white tape to lay on the ground to walk.. he was like 'alright, let me walk this way and when i tell you to, just put it down'.. well, when the guy went to put it down.. he just face planted straight into the pavement. the cop was like 'well, this sobriety test went well'
Lev (6:09pm): drunks are some of the funniest people they bust. especially when they lie or go with the "i only had two beers" routine while they are struggling to stand up
UndyingFantasy (6:08pm): i'm still trying to find that show.. it's just basically going thorugh the process of booking people.. and they bring in lots of drunks who get angry and have to be restrained.
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