Altered Alterations

While I’d hoped this summer would be a time of increased coding, working on Engineering Faith had to compete with other things like my day job, Budgetable, conferences, vacations, and other vital occupations. Now that I’m getting back into school mode, though, I’m back into Faith mode!

Admittedly, I have been afraid that while I was off working on other stuff, things would be going to hell - and not just some smartass making a Place of Worship called “Hell”. Surprisingly though, it’s actually been pretty stable. There haven’t been any insane explosions of followers, nothing new has broken horribly, nobody completely destroyed a game through a trivially abusable bug (although I’m sure it’s still possible). On the downside, it seems all the bugs that were there before are still there - odd, really.

The thing that struck me the most, though, is that even though I haven’t updated it in a while, and it’s still not ready for prime time, people are still playing. Just seeing that excites me and reminds me that I’ve created something cool - it just needs to be taken into the home stretch.

A big reason I think my work on Faith dropped off over the summer is that I was no longer seeing people who are playing it every day, like I was at school. Instead, I was seeing people who use our internal website at work every day, so I got more excited about that. As mind-numbing as generating quarterly contract renewal reports sounds, that kind of toil can be enjoyable if you’re really making people happy and making their lives easier. Basically, I’m a whore for user feedback.

As such, I decided I didn’t already have enough RSS news items to plough through every day, so I added an RSS feed to the bug tracker. It now keeps me instantly up to date about how things are going, and what bugs are, well, bugging. Gone are the dark ages where Altering Time bug reports go unnoticed because I’m simply at school, working, brushing my teeth, or even in bed. Wait… what have I done?

Especially now, know that your votes on bugs really do matter, and I’ll be attacking popularly requested fixes soon. As for when it’ll be out of beta, well for once I think I’ll give an absolutely firm date of

As you may have noticed, I’ve been making some changes around the site. The first of these was the blog, which you’re, uh, likely aware of. Things here have been going well so far, and this section is already comprising a substantial amount of the site’s traffic. But enough blogging about blogging - on with the show.

Homepage revamped - Give it up for a new homepage that comes up for logged-in visitors! Now featuring the last 20 items that changed from across the site, it lists the category and age of each. The previous model is still available for those who aren’t logged in - showing the newest item from each category is great for site newbs, since it helps them find what the site has to offer. The new edition effectively removes the need for the “Posts since last login” feature once used to watch Forum activity. Now you can log in and out with reckless abandon! There have been claims that it could look better, such as that it’s too cute or too plain. We rise to the challenge, and will keep at it to make it the shiniest and improvediest homepage ever.

Smilies bank cancelled - This summer, simplicity is the new cyan. You’ve been demanding less features, and we’re going to give it to you! The bank of yellow smilies that used to peer at you eerily whenever you were writing a Forum post have been shown offstage. Not only were they distracting, but they encouraged, well, using smilies. One of these things was not like the others. AT isn’t “just another forum” for 9 year olds - this is Altering Time, the most noble of alteration forums. Simplicity reigns supreme, and you get your dollar’s worth.

Spam spammed - Have you noticed buttloads of spam recently? Each moderator has been deleting at least one butt worth of spam posts daily, which amounts to maybe 3 buttloads a day on average, which is roughly equal to damn annoying. But wait! A suggestion has come forth: a feature where users’ first post can’t be a new topic. Not only would this stop a lot of spam, but it would be completely free of cost! On the other hand, it would inconvenience some newbs, potentially stopping them from joining the fray. On the other other hand, it would inconvenience some spammers, and we hate spammers even more than we love newbs.

Redesign philosophized - The “other guys” might flagellate themselves by doing a huge all-at-once redesign, changing every colour and every line in an orgy of rewriting. Not here at AT: every change is carefully calculated to titillate in the most subtle and refreshing ways. Expect these sort of piecemeal updates - it’s the way of the future. For example, the gradients that gracelessly fade white to black on either edge of the page shall be slain in due order.

That’s it for this episode. Don’t miss the next episode, slated for some completely undetermined time in the future.