I’m filing my own bug report for tumbledry here. Has anyone noticed that when you mouseover Dan’s comments, there’s a thing that says “A partial iron” instead of loading an image? Well, that’s not the intended behavior of the comment code - it’s a rounding error that should never have made it past bug testing. Nevertheless, here we are, months after I recoded the ranking system… and this ugly bug pops up. I’m working on a fix, and more pictures. So that’s good.
Nils wrote this comment in January of this year. Given our recent discussion about life choices and comics, I think it’s appropriate to bring out his well-articulated viewpoint:
I think that we have to learn to deal with uncertainty for the time being. We’re 21 for christ’s sake, the possibilities and choices that lay ahead of us are virtually endless. The problem is that high school and college have not primed us to deal with the unknown. There has always been a set track that we have been required to follow and that track pretty much ends with college, I think. We should all be prepared for unforeseen conflicts and always have back up plans because you never know how things will turn out. I’ve been thinking a lot about post graduation lately and I have thrown together a few scenarios for myself: stay with TV and pursue jobs in TV market, move to LA and attempt the film industry, join the peace corp, or move to Norway and do something (read: I have no clue). I think can live with those options.
Thank goodness, YouTube has finally added comment ratings; set the threshold to “great (+10 or more),” and bask in the pleasure of not being assaulted by the fallout from illiterate morons writing the first thing that pops into their heads.
This Penny Arcade comic is something I’ve been searching for for a while (how do I get that double “for” out of that sentence?). Anyhow, it summarizes how internet commenting boards make people into completely offensive, babbling retards. It’s completely true.
Comments weren’t quite working because every time you left a comment, tumbledry tried to send you back a copy of every comment that had ever been left here.
Then it told you that you weren’t connected to the internet.
As promised: an addendum to my realignment notes—the revised comment ranking system. Nils mentioned that the challenge of earning new comment ranks was good and necessary. So, I have (very nearly) maintained the difficulty in getting ranks. There are still iron crosses at 1000 and colored iron crosses at 5000 comments. However, Dan argued (and I originally noted) that 125 commenting thresholds were rather widespread markers of achievement. So, I have changed things a bit. Now, vertical bars next to a commenter’s name represent the number of comments they have left, and therefore their rank. Each vertical bar represents 100 comments and every time the tumbledryer leaves 10 comments, their vertical bar increases in height. After 100 comments, a new vertical bar grows up next to the previous one.
In the past eight years, this website has evolved from an extremely simple, unchanging outline of an adolescent kid to a dynamic web of text, links, sights, and (at times) sounds chronicling a young adult’s life. All of this extra content has necessitated extra layers of complexity. As sections have been added, I’ve tried to keep it simple, but it has certainly been a challenge — and I haven’t always succeeded. So, for anyone new to tumbledry or curious how it all works, let’s run down the basics.
We’ve completed another step on the journey to a better commenting system at tumbledry. There are now ranking icons that allow one to see, at a glance, the seniority of a tumbledry commenter. I decided to name these “irons.” It fits in with the theme of tumbledrying … see? However, it is rather difficult to make an 11 pixel high iron look like a nice stylized iron, so I have gone with some different icons to indicate status. The tumbledry commenter, after submitting 20 comments under the same name and email address, will find themselves awarded a gray bullet. This gray bullet indicates that the user has left between 20 and 124 comments. Upon leaving 125 comments using the same name and email address, the tumbledry commenter receives their first colored bullet. This is generally an occasion to celebrate. Rankings continue along these lines … another 125 comments earns another gray bullet and 125 more comments changes that second bullet to a colored one. Users are notified of the number of comments remaining until their next promotion when they visit the front page of tumbledry. When a user leaves one thousand comments, their bullets are condensed into a higher honor: the gray maltese cross. Feel free to throw a party for this occasion. 5000 comments and the tumbledryer (we’ve discussed the spelling of this term previously, I think) earns the highly prestegious red and blue maltese cross. These crosses are accompanied by the usual bullets that track the commenter’s progress towards another cross.
About once a year, I get the urge to refresh the look of things around here. The current incarnation of the tumbledry visual identity has stuck around for over a year, which is not common. But, once again, I am getting the urge to redesign. What would you all like to see? I do not know if I will go fixed width or liquid, image heavy or minimalist (probably the former). Regardless, I would like to lighten things up with a more inspiring color scheme, but keep our mascot (Largent the monkey) in some way, shape, or form.
