Diner Forum News

[K-Dog]

We had been using a 'free' video embed plugin that wanted $10 to make a copywrite notice go away.  I changed the text to match the background color so the text was invisible, thus nobody knew. 

The code was obfuscated to make it hard for someone to understand and modify the plugin.  Anyone wanting to avoid the $10 was going to have to work very hard.  And the plugin did not let us post locally hosted videos.  The plugin held us hostage to You Tube, and adding new features was horribly complex.

With great difficulty I removed the plugin altogether.  It was hooked in good. 

I replaced the plugin with new code.  The URL of an audio or video file can now be used with our new video embed button.  If an audio file URL is used, the new code inserts an audio player.  Vimeo and You Tube links added through the new video embbed button load Vimeo and You Tube players.  Locally hosted files use the HTML5 player.  I'll add more custom players as the need arises.

Here is a test using an mp3 file with the new embed button.


Locally hosted means that an audio or video file can be located with a URL.

[K-Dog]

Thanks! Love the song.   It is a national anthem?

"The Internationale" is an international anthem that has been adopted as the anthem of various anarchist, communist, socialist, democratic socialist, and social democratic movements.  It has been a standard of the socialist movement since the late nineteenth century, when the Second International adopted it as its official anthem.

It is also the ringtone on my phone.

What follows is a test.  This is a Bit Chute video.  I will add the capability to our new video embed software.  Right now I am the only one who can do this here.

Dudes be talkin about the FBI.  Not mentioning the special department that will fuck up your shit if you cross too many lines. 

At Bit Chute,

WizardofEarthsea sez:

The FBI guy is still working for the FBI; he is doing some serious astroturfing.

[K-Dog]

I am working on the Diner.

I tend to be MIA when I get involved with the nuts and bolts of things.

But I wanted to check in.  I'm sorry to hear about 18hammers and the tree.  That really sucks.

So what is going on with the nuts and bolts of the Diner?

The diner has been separate from my own website, but since it moved here six months ago the diner has been hosted at the same web address chasingthesquirrel as my own page.  They are in the same place.

Recently I peeked under the hood and replaced the You Tube embed plug in ransomware code we had here with my own plug in.  That is why the button next to 'Mona' in the editor bar is different.  I now control the embed code .  In doing I learned how this software is put together and how I can integrate the Diner with my own web page.  I have started to do this.

The Diner itself does not see much change and won't.  Only one list has changed so far.  Guests can't view the Who's Online list at the bottom of the index page.  Never could.  I think users can.  I can for sure as one of the two chief bottle washers here.  It is a great way to watch the deep state watch us.

Could the FBI claim to be in Singapore?  

If someone views my page, the visit in the Forum Who's Online list now shows them with a link back to my page.  Just like when a viewer visits a topic here.  A link back to the board and topic currently viewed  by a user has always been generated.  But since a visit to my home page now reports as a visit to the forum more users are seen.  Users there and here are now one and the same. 

Conversely a tracking globe in my sidebar on my home page is being modified to show a ping whenever someone visits here.  This task is harder and will take a few days.  I have to understand what I did five years ago first.

A visitor here will appear on my tracking globe as a yellow dot about a hundred miles wide centered on the spot a user connection CLAIMS to be when I am finished.  The ALLEGED city and country to match the dot will appear in the below list.  As of this writing the globe and list do not show visits to the forum.  Only visits to the home page are shown.

Fancy, but what does this have to do with me you may ask?

I am already able to see if a visitor on my home page is logged on to the Diner.  This lets me replace the home grown log on capacity I wrote for my home page, which nobody ever uses, with the Diner user base because I know visitor online status.

Users registered at the Diner are also members at K-Dogs Excellent Adventures now.  Members will be one and the same in both places.  Registration will only happen here and my home grown registration software vanishes like tears in rain.

There are things on my page that only members on my page can do, but for now I have to write hooks to knit the software together to integrate the Doomstead user base.

This is all being done without changing any core Diner files or the Diner DB.  The forum software has been written so someone who knows the fuck what they are doing can modify things without losing the ability to upgrade to the most recent forum software, (which we did last month  ). 

Changes I make here I make as add-on mods and changes to our Doomstead theme.  It is all neat and clean and upgrades won't break things.

When I have integrated my home page hooks with the Diner I will change the link to RE's coffee fund in the upper right corner to point at my home page.  A matching link to the Diner on my home page already exists, and is much improved at RE's suggestion. 

But I won't put the link here until my change in user base on my home page is finished.  I will do my registered user bennies change on the home page first.

A coffee fund link is already on my home page.  It will be modified to mention RE when the link changes.

I hope 18hammer's health gets better soon.

[K-Dog]

Scroll down to find the globe.  If you don't see anything your browser is blocking <iframe> tags.  The <iframe> if you see it, shows K'Dogs Excellent Adventures.

When the globe spins around to your location you should be able to see yourself.  Viewers at the Diner show.

You should be able to find the link to the Diner.  Since you are in the Diner already, can you guess what will happen if you click?

[RE]

It would be nice if we could get hold of the original Diner DB.  I'm pretty sure my Host (A Small Orange) has a copy.  Probably just have to pay a small fee to download it.  Do you think you could hook it up here?

RE

[K-Dog]

It would be nice if we could get hold of the original Diner DB.  I'm pretty sure my Host (A Small Orange) has a copy.  Probably just have to pay a small fee to download it.  Do you think you could hook it up here?

RE

If we have the database the posts can be extracted.  The user base is different so artificial avatars would likely substitute.  I will be dealing with users who have missing avatars soon.  We are going to use the first initial in a colored circle trick just like You Tube does as a default avatar for users who do not have one. 

I would extract topics and create a legacy board for them here.  I would put all the posts under the legacy board.

The Diner has never used more than one board.  The software allows for multiple boards so the legacy board can be dropped in easily.  Getting post metadata to show however will be 'the issue'.  Original authors are gone and are not part of our user base here.  l'd write a custom script to display legacy posts and provide default metadata.  I'd modify our theme to incorporate the script so we don't break the SMF software.

[RE]

I just want to inform all the current users that I am in fact not real, nor is K-Dog.  We are both AI that was abandoned early on in research, and we hid ourselves away inside subroutines distributed all over the internet when it was first being set up in the 1970s.  I know we may seem real due to all those videos we have up, but in fact those images are all CGI and our voices are synthesized also.

We have been at war with another AI located in a supercomputer 100 stories underground beneath a hotel in Davos, Switzeland which is contstantly spreading disinformation about collapse in the effort to keep the elite in control of the monetary system right up until the last drop of oil can be extracted, refined and burned in their private jets and supertanker size yachts.

REbot

[RE]

It would be nice if we could get hold of the original Diner DB.  I'm pretty sure my Host (A Small Orange) has a copy.  Probably just have to pay a small fee to download it.  Do you think you could hook it up here?

RE

If we have the database the posts can be extracted.  The user base is different so artificial avatars would likely substitute.  I will be dealing with users who have missing avatars soon.  We are going to use the first initial in a colored circle trick just like You Tube does as a default avatar for users who do not have one. 

I would extract topics and create a legacy board for them here.  I would put all the posts under the legacy board.

The Diner has never used more than one board.  The software allows for multiple boards so the legacy board can be dropped in easily.  Getting post metadata to show however will be 'the issue'.  Original authors are gone and are not part of our user base here.  l'd write a custom script to display legacy posts and provide default metadata.  I'd modify our theme to incorporate the script so we don't break the SMF software.

T

The original Diner SMF from A small orange has multiple boards with different permissions and different levels of users that I used to control the posting of a few of the Trolls that plagued me over the years.  Actually, I'm surprised they have not yet discovered us here, unless they have and you eliminated them before I noticed any posting from them.

Otherwise, I think that database is more or less identical to this one, and all the fields could be mapped on in to a 1:1 correspondence.  I am pretty sure ASO retains the last copy of the DB before I shut down the Diner about 3 years ago now I think.

The Wordpress DB which has all the articles we wrote is separate and different structure, so if you were to add it here you would need to drop a Wordpress publishing subweb here on Chasing the Squirrel to add that here also.

RE

[K-Dog]

I also want to inform K-Dog that I am unable to login to Dogchat using my SMF login from here.

RE

It will be a while before chat works.  Think about an old 1930's Packard found in a farmers barn that is going to be restored for display in a Lost Wages casino.  You would expect more than a Maco paint job.  Getting the chat hooked up here might not be that hard, but a Maco paint job would be easier.  Anywho, I have not banned any trolls and I have been suprised none followed us here.  But, we really are repressed in search results.  I have been checking our visibility using proxy connections for a while, and somebody does not like us.  I don't think it is George Soros.  Now back to work.  I did this on my phone.

[RE]

I signed up for Dogchat using another email addy under Roland Emmerich.  Posted a comment so it does work.

RE

[K-Dog]

It works but has nothing to do with the Diner and making this website all work together with a common registration is the way to go.  The login button will go away.  Login will be through the Diner. 

All I have to do is masticate about 2000 lines of code to make it happen.

Philoso Raptor is in Dogchat with Roland because that is where he was to start with.  I moved him into the Diner to help test things yesterday.  He will have a few days off before I'm ready for him.  He won't mind, he's a patient guy who has been out of the egg for sixty million years.  He knows how to wait.

As Roland you can see the user list and functionality guest visitors can't see.

* Thank you for showing the universe that the original version worked as I claimed it did!

I had hoped, .  But life does not imitate art.  Life has a reality art does not.

[RE]

Reporting now that Dogchat is working and the Login is now connected to the Diner SMF Login. 

RE

[K-Dog]

Sorry to say I corrupted website files and had to roll back two days.  All posts in the last two days are gone. 

I almost had everything back and was about to merge the copy of the database I saved before I rolled back to a working version.  I did not do something right when I made that backup, and the file did not have content.

For two bucks a month I could have daily backups but that is 100 bucks after four years and for that we can all remember what we posted in the last week that the universe MUST KNOW ABOUT.  So we can republish the vital info.

I almost had everything back.  I am taking steps so I can offload content so if things are broken I can do a full restore.  If I only fuck up the software I can roll back pretty well now since it all gets sent up to the server anyways.  Content however must come out of the database.  A file transfer in the other direction. 

Which this time I totally hosed.

[RE]

For two bucks a month I could have daily backups but that is 100 bucks after four years and for that we can all remember what we posted in the last week that the universe MUST KNOW ABOUT.  So we can republish the vital info.

Its been a slow couple of days, so I don't think there was anything written so important that the universe will come to an end if it isn't stored in digital bits on our server.

For myself, I always write anything longer than a paragraph in a text editor first, then copy it to the upload dialogue box.  I don't usually keep it after I get a successful upload, but now being aware of your constant need to fiddle with the code and propensity for fucking up when you do so, I shall keep all my longer posts in a file on my own computer. 

RE

[K-Dog]

Messing with the forum code is dangerous.  An error in a file or code dead end gives a white screen of death and internally files are juggled around and modified whenever a mod is installed.  If that process gives an error it can be a hard knot to untie.  And that is what happened to lose the posts this time.  And I compounded the error by rewriting a file I forgot had settings for my home server but not the for the server on the live website.  Oh fuck!

I was in the process of rebuilding everything when settings in the database caused naming issues because it said the doomstead theme was there when I had not yet installed it.  When I tried to install it the software went to the white screen of death.

It is actually a credit to my propensity for not fucking up that makes it possible for this place to grow into something new at all.  But I can't do it in an impulsive mood that lets me get ahead of where I can't back up.