The Mod Blog

We, the staff of PaperDemon.com are a very friendly bunch. If you need help finding your way around PaperDemon, just ask one of our Moderators. Also, if you'd like to report a member or a submission that is in violation of our Site Rules, please feel free to contact one of us.

In this space, the site moderators share their thoughts about the PD community. We also post info about upcoming events, info about changes to the site rules, and cool tips and things we find throughout PD.

I just wanted to take a moment to spot light a bunch of writing tutorials written by OokamiKasumi. If you are a writer, you may find these very helpful.

Dialogue, Action & Description

Writing ACTION SCENES

How to make the END?

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So there was a bug where people were not able to add premium account members to their buddy list. No its not because Premiums are too cool for you! It was a bug!

It has now been fixed. Special thanks to Jianre-M for catching this one and telling me about it and who now has a free two week premium account. 

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The drop down menu in the writing section of the Red Curtain has apparently been living with broken links for a long time. Someone finally notified me about the problem and it's now fixed.

If you find problem links or any other problems on PD or RC, please reach out to me.

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The chat room appears to have been broken for a few weeks. Thanks to arkillian for letting me know it stopped working. The problem was caused by the PHP5 migration. But don't worry. It's all fixed now.

For those that don't know, we do have a pretty nifty little chat room feature here that is worth checking out. Chat it up with other members in real time.

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In PaperDemon's history we've gone through roughly 7 different page designs/layouts. About every year we redesign the look and feel of the site to give it a visual refresh. Usually its because I'm sick of staring at it and am ready for a change. It's been about a year since the current design debuted and I'm actually still very quite happy with it.

So instead of a redesign I think what I'm going to do is find ways to improve the existing design. Today I started making a few tweaks to the home page and to the Members Area Menu. What's funny is that there are some areas of the site that have left overs from a previous design template. As soon as I design a new template there are areas that get forgotten about and have the old site look and feel. So it's a year later and there are still areas like that.

Anyway, I'm going to try and make improvements to what we have rather than start something new. Mostly stuff with the CSS code and structure. The way I originally structured some of the CSS was way to specific and hard to maintain. I have to simplify a lot of it.

Another unrelated issue, the home page is taking too long to load. My scripts show its taking over 3 seconds for the home page to load and that is sucky. I've narrowed down the slowness to one particular area: Latest Writing. I'll need to do some caching on it to improve performance.

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The queue of artwork has finally gotten down to a managable size. The senior staff had over 100 art entries on their plate that needed attention but we finally chugged through those entries. I'm working on some new tools to help make the Senior staff's lives a little easier. Let's see if we can keep our queue low or if it baloons again. If we can keep it at a low number consistantly we may be able to raise the limit on the number of submissions each member can submit per day. Thank you for your patience as we are doing our spring cleaning.

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Now when you edit artists or authors on an artwork entry, you have an easy ajax search feature for finding artists that you want to add to your submission. Very nifty.

Also, links for editing your artwork submissions have been added right on the submissions themselves. Now when you are viewing an artwork entry that belongs to you, there's easy access for making changes to the entry.

One other thing. I noticed that when managing a writing entry there is no link for editing authors. I've added the link to this page now. I must have forgotten to add it once I switched the user interface to be more like the comics section. Why didn't anyone tell me? Sorry about that!

Also, a new [writing] code has been added. just type [writing#] replacing the # with the id number of the writing submission and it will create a nifty little link like so:

Painting in PhotoShop Tutorial 1

There's also been a [comic] code added. Just type [comic#] replacing the # with the id number of the comic (from the about comic page, not a page of a comic) and you'll get a link like this:

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arkillian found more bugs with the comments system. This is related to the last problem we were experiencing with comments. Unfortunately, due to my stupidity, I forgot to update another field in the database that was maxed out. there were ~170 comments that got screwed up and lost in the commenting database. I've gone ahead and deleted these messages. They were all replies to comments. I'm really sorry to those that posted replies to comments in the art system but deleting them was the cleanest way to avoid further bugs on the site. New comments made after this post should not be affected by the bug.

Update
By the way, you may see ghosted notifications in your inbox due to the deleted entries. Please just remove them. Also, today is not my day. I just mistakenly deleted the 10 most recent art reviews and there's no way i can undo it. I almost deleted all of them. If I had deleted all of them I could have restored it from my last backup but it wouldn't include posts posted after my backup. I'm really sorry for the mistake. But at least its only 10 entries and not all 65,000+ of them.

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Dear PaperDemon members. Sometime yesterday the Art Comments/Reviews system broke. It is back up and running now. Although it sucks that it broke, it is cause for celebration. And here's why...

arkillian reported to me yesterday that she had received a few empty art comments in her inbox. I looked in the database and saw there were roughly 10 other of these ghost messages and they were all recent. I had no idea what the problem was but thought I'd take a look at it in the evening. Unfortunately, I ended up not having a chance to do it that evening but figured it could wait.

Then arkillian pinged me on IM today notifying me that none of the art comments were going through! I then had a pretty good idea what had caused the problem. I logged into my database to confirm my suspicions. The Art Comments table had reached it's id limit. I had set it to INT(6) and the maximum number of entries it can take had been reached at number 65535. I simply changed the limit to a higher INT and all is peachy.

Can you believe it? This is cause for celebration! We've reached 65,535 art comments. Hooray! See, it's not all bad!

Only one bad thing about this though. All comments made during this broken period have been lost. If you get a chance, please go back and rewrite your comments for any artwork you have posted to in the last couple days. If you have any ghost comments in your inbox, please delete them.

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So for a while now people have been able to check a little box when editing their profile to state whether or not they accept commissions. But for the longest time that checkbox didn't really do anything. Now it does. If you check that box then on your profile underneath your basic contact info will appear:

I accept commissions!

So it's not all that glorious but I hope it will be beneficial to someone out there.

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