Chaos

I now removed some test-related posts due to a freakout I had on Saturday regarding the site. Pay no mind here

I'm placing this in General Brandon Discussion.

I'm sorry I'm an incompetent system admin and don't really know what's going on much of the time.

The search index is being rebuilt so activity streams will be weird for a while until that process is done.

Okay, so, my major panic attack over, here's what happened: For some reason followers disappeared. I have no idea. I could revert the database back a day, but I'd rather not do that, so this will do. In the process of me trying to discover what happened I made things immeasurably worse and crashed a database table and the auto repair did not work. The search index, thankfully, is now being rebuilt and there are no more errors in the database. So now I am going to not touch any more things and your followers are gone. I blame ghosts.

I know I know I know

I literally have no idea why this would be the case. No one did anything...

Um, why is this in the Mistborn board? I am moving this to Cosmere.

Under notification settings you can customize exactly what you want to get as an in-site notification and which you want as an email: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/notifications/options/ As I said, it's very robust

I'm going to move this to Cosmere Theories as it is more general than just Mistborn.

I tend to agree. But I maybe should play with Cloudflare settings a bit...

Oh, you PMed me. That's right. I'm sorry for the delay; I've been very busy. I've fixed this and merged your accounts.

Thanks for the screenshots. It is indeed from Cloudflare, our CDN. Cloudflare does super awesome stuff for us. I could disable this but I'm not sure I want to.

I don't fully understand this sentiment. Apps should have some features that make them deeper and better integrated than a mobile page is. However, 17S now uses a responsive design, and every feature on the desktop site that you could need is on the mobile version. That means that feature wise the site is set. Notifications would be basically the only benefit, and that's marginal at best. After all you can have email notifications in a very customizable fashion, which naturally you'd get on your phone anyway. Let me walk you through what I'd need to do for an app, because if I were to do this ever, I would want it done properly. That would mean I'd want an Android app and iOS and each of their UIs would need to be well designed for their platforms. I'd also need to go through the arcane lore of figuring out how the Invision APIs work, which I thankfully have not needed to deal with yet. I'd also need to acquire iOS devices and learn everything about it, as I'm an Android person. Oh, then I'd have to learn how to code apps. Yes, I suppose I could hire someone, but that's very expensive and we already make negative money on this site. Good app developers are pricey. Maybe someone would volunteer to make one. But I honestly wouldn't take them up on that offer. It's quite simple: it's not just making the app, but constant maintaining of the app. I have a difficult time just keeping the web version of 17S up to date. In a scheme with apps, you'd need to keep up with best practices of Android and iOS apps. Those standards are frequently updated, so that's more dev time and a lot of testing. Even more importantly, such a scheme is totally dependent on Invision Power Suite to operate. If I do site updates, would the apps break? More testing, more time to spend. Also, bugs become much more difficult to deal with as now there are essentially three versions of the site. This sounds terrifyingly awful to deal with. So I mean I'm happy to hear a good argument for an app but it has to be really good. The benefits are barely anything, so considering all that colossal work, it seems not worth it at all. I'd much rather spend the limited time I have on 17S/Brandon stuff on writing news articles for the site, working on the Coppermind, and keeping our one version of the site up to date. Oh, and then administration of the site and dealing with problem members. Maybe someday I'd have time to do theorizing too! But I am insanely busy.

This is... weird. You're the second person to ask me this in the last week. I'll give a more in depth response soon but what purpose would an app have over the mobile site? What benefits does that have?

Well, obviously, haha. But publisher types do get a say on this sort of thing. Still, Oathbringer is a fantastic title so I'm not surprised it got OK'd fast.

Facebook just gave me a targeted ad on my feed. Usually I hate crap like that, but then it said "Best Fantasy Since Brandon Sanderson." Okay Facebook, if you at least do that then that's at least appropriate targeting. Unfortunately they were comparing the book to Mistborn, and it felt urbany like the setting of Luthadel with girls with knives. Sure, I guess, but that's kind of the least important thing that's cool about Mistborn. I don't know, I like my fantasy book pitches to not sound like generic fantasy stuff. Dark Lord won? Okay I'm in. Random crap about someone and a sorcerer... meh. Still though, Facebook, A+ for trying!

That is a pretty logo! Seems that they are very solid on the title, obviously.

I'm not in charge of organizing this explicitly. I'm not sure if anyone truly is; we are all ultra busy.

I really like this idea. I'll agree, this seems likely.

You know, I've decided this topic is going to not lead to productive discussion and will become too heated. So I am locking it. I'm not sure internet forums are good for whatever this purpose of this thread is for.

I suppose that's fair

Excuuuuuse me, we staff have used the term spiking to refer to as promotion long, long before the dark alley

Kaymyth has been spiked! I'm not sure for how long she's been spiked, as I was not the one to do it, but congrats to her and I'm thrilled to have her. I didn't see anyone post about it yet, so I thought I'd mention it.