You may or may not have noticed that the site was in read-only mode for most of today. This is because... drumroll please... we finally bit the bullet and moved CN off of atari and onto its own host.

At the moment, things seem to be running rather seamlessly on the new machine, but do take a look and report any glitches or problems you might notice to us, either here or via the editors email addy.

Having the site on a new host opens some new possibilities for us, so maybe we can finally follow up on some of the redesign and new-feature ideas we've kicked around for so long.

Anyway, have a look around and let us know what's up if something looks wrong.

http://www.citynoise.org/article/6492

Weigh in, suckas. This is your big chance to speak up...

i'd like to nominate the following ip/hostmask for a permaban: 203.10.121.81 / proxy2.eq.edu.au. every week or 2 this person pops up to post a dozen idiotic comments at once. i've cleaned them up several times now. eg:

Corey Nikols: Fuck Yeah! deeper!
in response to Tokyo Neon

anon (proxy2.eq.edu.au): yor mum
in response to Tokyo Neon

Big Dick Dude: Ill be happy to suck your dick
in response to Tokyo Neon

Corey Nikols: Im a gay fag.Please fuck me
in response to Tokyo Neon

Josh Martin: This site is fucking gay and retarted. Suck shit
in response to Tokyo Neon

dopy mum: fages
in response to Tokyo Neon

francis: u fucking sucks
in response to Tokyo Neon

Big Dick Dude: i hav a big dick
in response to Tokyo Neon

+: beep
in response to Tokyo Neon

Josh Martin: This site sucks!
in response to Tokyo Neon

Josh Martin: hi
in response to Tokyo Neon

jayden: hi
in response to Tokyo Neon

hi: hi
in response to Tokyo Neon

if you don't have this capability, it would be about two lines to code to check a comment poster's ip address vs a database table of bans.

after a long spell of inactivity, due mostly to work commitments i'm now finding i have time to work on the citynoise overhaul. jeeff has provided some excellent design and i'm currently working on implementing his vision in pure xhtml/css.

for those unfamilliar with current web standards, XHTML seperates style (what the site looks like) from content (the photoey and wordy goodness). The stylesheet (the CSS) transforms the XHTML data into a lovely looking web page, the differnce being that multiple stylesheets can be specified for use with different devices (ie screen, handheld, mobile, screenreader, etc etc) and browsers which do not support css, or support it badly such as Internet Explorer 3 or 4 or a mobile phone for instance can be made to fall back to the raw, unstyled content making the site super accessible.

This is all supergeeky though and probably excites no one but myself.

Along with restyling with jeeff's design, we also need to work on the new browse engine. One thing that has always and still holds back the site's layout in terms of usability is the inability we have to resize uploaded images (ie create thumbnails). I'm working on a way of providing this functiuonality in an API style from an external (robust) source (mine). If this can be proved to be stable and reliable enough it will enable much more flexible layouts even beyond what jeeff has already achived within the current limitations. Bandwidth will also be slashed dramatically, putting a smile on s5's face.

On the subject of funding/ad revenue i think i've now repointed all the random adsense blocks that weren't pointing to the saturn5 adsense account. Some adsense blocks are only served when visiting certain pages from external links and seemingly got missed out somewhere along the line.

The issue of popularness is something i feel we should also address during this overhaul. I'd like to overhaul the site once now and get all the links ironed out. Reimplementing in strict XHTML 1.0 will acheive this to some extent. Though perfectly adequate, an HTML 4.01 solution will need redoing in XHTML sometime sooner rather than later. This issue of popularness, however is this:

Currently, an article is popular because it has been viewed X times more than another article. Simple as that. This isn't very smart. It sorta works but isn't nearly an accurate reflection of what is popular or interesting and is easy to spoof if one really wanted to. Also, in terms of popularity in a certain month it is much more accurate than in 'all time' popularity, where an article which is say 2 years old and fairly uninteresting would be deemed by the ranking system as more popular than a brand new article which has recieved several thousand visits and a few hundred comments in the last few hours.

Something along the lines of flickr's interestingness algorithm would be nice. It is reputedly based on factors such as hits/comments/favouriting/and also interestingly inbound external links. This is however where my lack of math skill lets me down. I'm sure simple algebra could come up with an equation to formulate interestingess based on things as simple as average hits/comments per day, diff from overall averages, inbound links etc. The trick is in hitting upon a working equation and (ideally) implementing it in SQL.

Any ideas?

I could go on, but i wont. Just throw some ideas here and i'll check back as i get busy sorting stuff out.

Jamie

some jerk named Traveller keeps posting a rant with the above title. it's in response to the 7 Train Pervert article, which was closed for comments by hool because it was degenerating into a flame war. true to form, this subsequent post is a stupid rant peppered with nude-in-public porn from the internet and containing a ridiculous number of quoted comments from the original article which basically amounts to duplicating existing content. i've deleted this article over a dozen times, and hool has deleted it several times as well. this has gone on over the course of several weeks. worst of all, many people are clearly seeing the article in caches, as comments are posted after it has been deleted. the guy's ip address is always "null", so we can't ban the ip. how about a title or username filter? he always uses the same one. at any rate, we need to stop this. the "article", as offensive and stupid as it is, has hogged a lot of time in the #1 spot (having been reposted so often).

i've noticed recently that google adsense seems to place huge importance on the url of a page when deciding on which ads to display... to the extent that if you do something liek this

http://www.citynoise.org/article/4038/by/jack/personal_injury_lawyer

it's brings up ads for "personal injury lawyers" (one of the highest paying keywords on google)

after the variables are passed to a page anything else in the url is ignored by citynoise, but taken into account by google. would it be wrong of us to implement a list of high-paying keywords to tack onto all urls and make s5 some megabucks to pay for all out bandwidth?

or is it just dishonest?

i'm in two minds

hi. i've been working on a css redesign for citynoise. this page still has one or two spacing bugs and lacks any custom photoshop graphics, but that aside, any thoughts?

so what should we do about this? i can see why someone might be creeped out having a photo of their house with the full address posted on some random website. then again, we have no way of knowing who this person really is, and people take photos of buildings all the time. what are the limits of public space & public domain? anyone from the uk care to speculate on legal implications? i'd suggest removing the identifying address information and keeping the photo as a reasonable compromise, but then the article needs a whole new title. what a dilemma.

Sorry for starting a new post, but I could not see an appropriate one that looked as if it was still being visited.

Today I noticed what I believe to be an unusual editing error. Last night, I posted a text article about the upcoming start date for the smoking ban in Montreal. After a while, I got a response from a person who did not agree with me. The response was well written and polite. I replied, debating the issues they brought up on a point by point basis, and then went to bed.

When I got up, the original reply was missing. So was all the spam crap that had been building up before I went to bed. The only logical explanation I can think of is that your editing screen is probably set to "display recent comments" most of the time, and that the legit post was in between spam posts on that list, causing it to be accidentally tossed with the spam. A totally understandable error, if in fact I am guessing right.

I know that you guys are human, and that you do a LOT of work cleaning up CN. This causes me to wonder whether or not a safety net is needed for editing purposes. One thing I had thought of is to have the deleted comments/posts moved to an offline (and quarantined) folder for a week or so, in order to allow time for any problems to be noticed, should there be any. If that should occur, a simple undelete could then be done on the item in question. In this way, editing errors could be corrected, and the other admins could get a better idea of what each of you considers to be deletable, thus strengthening the editorial policy.

once again, we need to implement a captcha asap! the spammers have moved on to posting multiple articles as well as comments. today when i woke up the most recent 5 articles on the site were all spam. this looks terrible. i've deleted 3 more since then, and about as many yesterday. there are lots of captcha packages out there so it shouldn't be hard to implement. help!

ps. here's an email i sent just now to one of our friends:

---
from: jeff@__________.org
to: sales@caffas.com
cc: info@doveinteriors.net

dear vincent polding of norfolk,

i am an editor for the website www.citynoise.org. today we began receiving spam comments regarding doveinteriors.net, a website that you registered via the totalregistrations internet registrar. i have kept a copy of both the spam and your contact information, as well as the IP address posting the spam. here's an example of one of the messages:

*anon (host81-156-144-149.range81-154.btcentralplus.com):* Reference! Looking for Good Quality Furniture Built to last have you ever tried sourcing Used Contract Hotel Furniture Best Quality around try this website Did You Mean www.doveinteriors.net

please stop spamming citynoise.org immediately. if you do not comply, we will take further action.

jeff priest