deleted_blathes_discuss
DannyH Injury_toll
death_toll
the_saudi_puzzle
american_leaders_should_simply_apologisebritish_leaders_should_simply_apologise

For some reason this development troubles me greatly. Its easy to see how Methinx might justify his behaviour in light of an apparantly greater crime on the part of Kx21 but it sets a very dangerous precedent. A great taboo has been broken. Never before has any form of censorship existed on Blather.
Methinx has stated that his changes are not irreversible. He has simply hidden the words but two things make this problematic.

1. Only a small group of knowledgeable individuals have the power to bring them back.
2. As I understand it only a certain number of command characters are accepted until the blathe is permanently locked in state. Thus implying it would be possible to make a blathe inaccessable. Perhaps people have discovered a way to overcome this. I would be interested to find out.

One of the things I have always found most awe-inspiring about blather is it's immutability. The first real prospect for something more damaging than a mere war of words looms on the horizon...

Should we lobby the Gods to close the loophole allowing HTML commands into the who field?

Any thoughts?
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megan why can you see it when you go to "view source"?
i'm computer ld though, so if that's a retarded question, don't mind me
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daxle the people can't be trusted, so you want to call in the government to take away their choice?
i think that's fucked.
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ferret the people are deleting each other. i think that's a good reason to call in the government. besides, it could be a temporary thing, or perhaps just unlimited amounts of html input could be implemented so people could bring the blathes back indefinitely. this problem has troubled me greatly as well. 040611
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dosquatch Whichever way, it seems to be over now. Wouldn't calling down legislation be akin to closing the barn doors after the horses are already gone?

It was a bad, ugly thing, and I hope it never repeats, but we cannot revise it out of existance. All we can do is go forward.
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kx21 Let it be... 040611
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Finger From

the_teaching_of_all_beings
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Moon its

:) Let it be When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

...

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/beatles/14848.html 040610
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methinx I do not advocate deleting peoples balthes. I was only tring to get kx's attention. I just wanted the blathes created beyond the 50 charactor maximum to die down.

I never learned style sheets or how to crash pages. I never deleted anything, it was just smoke and mirrors.

The blathes were hidden by blathing to the word with underscores in place of apostrophys or apostrophys in place of underscores. To bring them back you need only to blather to the original punctuation of the blathe.


I had consevation at heart when I began this, not destruction. Creating topics beyond the 50 charactor max creates garbage data, unuseable information. Dead blatherspace. That was really all I wanted to say.
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kx21 The blathes created beyond the 50 charactor maximum to die down -

"Software Bug" in "Data Entry" Check / Validation...
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DannyH I take your point, Methinx, and I certainly didn't start this thread as a discussion of the rights and wrongs of your actions. It's not you I'm worried about, it's those that may come in your wake. 040614
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tourist I Mostly read here Now, and rarely post.
But I Have gone back into the archives and in the beginning blather was all Words, single standing alone.forming bonds between them.Then came the short Phrases _linked , these don't form their interconnections as easilly as single words do and so the casual relationships that Blather was creating are Dieing down.The Randomness Fades.
It's All Evolution, but the nature of this Group Mind Is Different from what it Once Was.
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kx21 M_Theories about "Knots"

That the Number of Knots is directly proportional to number of Connections.

Copyright 2004 kx21.com
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. Sciettific observation:-

Old connections:-

Injury_toll
death_toll
the_saudi_puzzle
M_theory
...

New Knots:-

Injury_'toll'
death_'toll'
the_saudi_'puzzle'
M_Theories
...

Show one how many new knots can be made from the existings connections...
And_I_will_tell_you_how_wonder_you_are...
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methinx Given that there are 43,570 words currently in the blather database, if you were to blathe a refrence to every single word in every single blathe existing, you would have a maximum amount of 43,570*43,569, or 1,898,301,330 knots possible. 1,898,301,330-current number of connections=how many new knots can be made from the existings connections

This figure has several errors.

1. There is no way to acount for the number of conections made thus far, so you cannot acurately calculate how many knots have yet to be connected. By the time you were able to count all of the current knots more knots will have been tied.

2. Suppose you were to make knots by tieing blathes together through posting to words with a common screen name. There is a maximum of 50 charactors allowed in your name. Given 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 numbers, 31 puntcuation marks, and thousands of ascii charctors available, there is a very large number of knots able to be tied int his manner. I excluded thess figures as I do not know how to calculate them given that all data entered between less than and greater than symbnols in the screen name that is not an acepted html command will be ignored. This also exculedes style sheet ajustments for the same reason.

3. Blathers with underscores in them have the ability to be linked to themselves a number of times equal to the number of undercores in the word factorial. I was unsure wether to count these as seperate knots or only a single knot as all knots created in this manner will point to the same place, the blathe in question itself. This is rather complicated and for that reason not factered into the answer. It is really a judgement call.

I think that is the closest estimate of how many new knots can be made with existing blather material you are going to get kx21, now do I get to find out how wonder I are?
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Otto Crossreferencing Weblink the_best_inside_joke_on_blather

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~geoffo/humour/flattery.html
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u24 The gods have been known to intervene before; see dallas_test.

Objectively, it makes sense to remove the 'html in who field' bug, and the apostrophe bug. And it would be nice to have blather not allowing titles over 50 characters at all.

Subjectively, though, I think it would be interesting to see how this would evolve in the future; would blather dissolve into war, would everyone leave, or would we come up with a friendly solution (without removing the bugs)?

After all, if history is anything to go by, it is evident that society and conflict are inseperable; blather is unquestionably a society, regardless of how much we would like to beleive otherwise. The question is; do we want to risk a higher level of conflist than verbal?

back to reality now:

DannyH, ok, yeah, if you hide a page by adding stylesheets to it, then add 30 more, you can't put any more stylesheets in it, which would lead you to beleive that it's irreversible. But, using some javascript, you can reverse the effects, see the source of what_if_i_wanted_to_read_the_deleted_pages (I think)

.
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? what_if_i_want_to_read_the_deleted_pages 040616
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u24 NB:
you need javascript errors turned off. This is not a side effect of the reversing, just some other scripts of the page.
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dosquatch I don't think the bugs should be fixed. Well, maybe an error trap for titles that are too long, but none of the rest of the "bugs" you listed are actually broken, as such. Sure, they can be leveraged to a negative end, as has been demonstrated, but they can also be leveraged to a positive end, that being a greater range of expression, as you yourself have demonstrated. What would it serve to strip that from us? 040616
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dosquatch And as far as the apostrophe bug goes... where does the "hidden" page go? 040616
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u24 you know, I actually have no idea how it remembers the hidden pages. If I knew PERL, I'd look at the source_code, but it would just make my head ache. 040616
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p2 it's all in the database
switching from ' to _
or vice versa
basically changes the sql query
and therefore
changes the returned recordset
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dosquatch There's.... a database? Ah, that explains much.

My question then changes to, why dynamically generate static pages?
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p2 it's only regenerated
when you add an entry
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dosquatch Yes, but I meant why do that instead of full time dynamic generation? Why mess with static pages at all? 040616
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u24 I forgot that it held the entries in the db. I thought it held who/word/date but not 'says' in the db.

dosquatch; yeah, I thought it was odd. As stated in README (see source), it's "horribly inefficient".
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u24 one thing that having static pages has meant, is that blather's peppered all over google. I doubt it would have been so if the pages had been called, eg; read.pl?id=45 instead of /f/foo.html 040616
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p2 conservation of resources?
wasting processor cycles like that
may cause blather_white_screen
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p2 from BuildWordPage in blib.ph:

SELECT word,id,stamp,replyto,name,email,entry
FROM entries
WHERE word=\"$word\"
ORDER BY stamp
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p2 entry = 'says' 040616
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dosquatch OK, fair enough. Thanks for the enlightenment :) 040616
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p2 no prob
but kx21 handles the enlightenment
i just do computer stuff
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marked . 040813
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andru235 regarding style-sheets:

is that how some people get the wierd symbols into blather? is that how someone put the moving "you" entry into [will post page later, when found]?

if so, why does posting them change the page? why does the page disappear, instead of merely updating, as with other entries?

surely this 'stylesheets' thing must have a corollary 'pro' to the 'con' of disappearing pages.

or perhaps i am totally misunderstanding this, i am, after all, a champion misunderstander.

at any rate, i'm glad to understand the apostrophe thing; several of my blathes that have disappeared are apparently a result of this; i had suspected malice. ah, suspicion. it is all your fault. let's be uncles to one another.
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andru235 "view source" also brings them back. i hadn't thought of trying that. granted, i don't think much about things not connected to d#-minor. 050918
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andru235 see, if i hadn't read this page, i wouldn't know about the apostrophe thing or the 'view source' thing. where to learn of other such obvious secrets? 050918
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meta meta 060222
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. please delete left_field 111122
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from