[CauseISaidSo]

Sorry to hear about your illness, SilverStag. Best wishes for a speedy and painless-as-possible recovery.

[CauseISaidSo]

For those of you who aren’t facebook friends – check this shiat out. I copied my last status about the $3000 musky I caught today. 🙁

I know it’s just “stuff” and stuff can be replaced, but on the cosmic Bell curve of Things That Suck, that’s still pushing heavily into the positive tail. Sorry, man. I know that sinking feeling well. It’s that moment when you realize that circumstances and a momentary lapse in attention have teamed up to bitch-slap you and you wanna cry out to the cosmic arbiter that it’s not fair but of course immediately realize that there is no arbiter of fairness and you can’t even get relief by being mad at someone else ’cause it’s your fault. Yeah, been there, done that. 🙁

[CauseISaidSo]

Followup: I pinged Mike on FB and he agrees the ampersand is probably the likely culprit.

I would agree with that as well. I saw a similar issue with another user’s entry a few weeks ago. The problem is that Fark is rendering the link by HTML-encoding it. My browser seemed to handle it OK, but my scraper failed to pull it back. Fark’s ping-the-link-to-make-sure-it’s-good checker thingy may have a similar problem with such links.

What I mean by “HTML-encoding it” is that Fark substitutes the ampersand in the link for its HTML entity value so “&” becomes “&”. I fixed it in my parser by decoding links before trying to pull images.

[CauseISaidSo]

Just getting caught back up, so this is a little late, but congrats to rav on firsts in both single and combined. Here are this week’s SQ top ten lists:

By votes:

Rank  Username        Votes

----



1   U-Man             885

2   ravnostic         768

3   kestrana          692

4   Ranger Joe        650

5   orionid           643

6   olavf             551

7   SilverStag        551

8   Ennuipoet         548

9   BecauseISaidSo    544

10   oddmind           516

By NVC:

Rank  Username           NVC

----



1   U-Man           488.87

2   ravnostic       424.80

3   kestrana        376.31

4   orionid         366.38

5   Ranger Joe      363.60

6   BecauseISaidSo  313.24

7   SilverStag      303.21

8   olavf           299.55

9   Ennuipoet       295.38

10   oddmind         283.01

[CauseISaidSo]

Can somebody remind me of the exact phrasing I should be using? I want to add it to the stuff Farktographer sent over so copy/paste is simple.

You can find all the allowable variations at the bottom of this post, but either “Posted OBO Farktographer” or “OBO Farktographer” will work just fine.

[CauseISaidSo]

I should be able to do that for you, Farktographer.

[CauseISaidSo]

OK, I’m going to be more or less offline through the end of this contest to the end of the next. I’ve got everything setup for autopilot, so there shouldn’t be any problems, but you just never know. I’ll also try to check on things at the start of the next one, but in case of unforeseen catastrophic error of some sort, it may have to wait until I get back.

Good luck, everyone!

[CauseISaidSo]

Oh, I didn’t mean that any pulled this week were scarlet R’s (they weren’t) – I just meant that when I thought of entries that were pulled in previous contests, the number that I was thinking was about the average count included those that were pulled for being R’s.

I only know the count because the scraper doesn’t actually delete entries that drop off, it just marks them as “to be deleted later” in case it’s just a hosting glitch. At the end of the contest, any entries still so marked get actually deleted.

I’m pretty certain you got the Brooklyn Bridge one. If this is the one that Kes is talking about, it’s here (assuming you can see deleted entries).

[CauseISaidSo]

Yep, I lost count of how many images I pulled for that reason…

8, which is probably double the number I usually see (maybe more since if they were both entered and pulled between scans I’d never see ’em in the first place.) Oh, and alot of those I do see get pulled are for scarlet R’s, so it’s even more for rules violations this time…

[CauseISaidSo]

Thanks, Els! I was actually disappointed in that ’cause I wanted to make sure it worked properly under real circumstances. 😉

I did notice in scanning the data that there were a lot of entrants this week that didn’t read the part about “no people in the shots”…

[CauseISaidSo]

Wow, has anyone looked at the voting charts recently? This one’s shaping up to be a good one, voting-wise. We haven’t had an above-average vote count since Volcanoes, Waterfalls & Mountains.

[CauseISaidSo]

(I usually don’t ask, but IMO clicking the pops-to-larger is worth it for this one)

It was indeed. I love the mix of stars and fading light.

[CauseISaidSo]

The concern I’d have with closing threads myself is that it would either give me an unfair advantage or at least the perception of an unfair advantage as a moderator who still participates in the contests.

Make it part of the rules that threads close at a specific time every week and that should remove any hint of impropriety. Do it like midnight Sun morning (we don’t get many votes after then anyway) or something early enough for you to be able to make your announcement and then close the thread. As long as that happens at the same time every week, I don’t see how anyone could complain.

That’s easily done on my end if you’re not averse to it on your end.

I didn’t want to push it on you, just see if you (and others) thought it might help swell the ranks of the regulars any. If you wanna do it, I’ll put something together. It won’t take much but it’ll be a few weeks before I can get to it.

[CauseISaidSo]

Maybe keep the same spiel in the thread (“preliminary congrats… results aren’t final… next week’s theme… yada yada yada”) but add something about official results/congrats being posted in the Fark forum thread and here after thread closing? I think we could all live with whatever you need to do to be comfortable with it. If it’s causing you unease, then definitely change it.

While we’re talking about these kinds of things, if you don’t mind, please allow me to throw out another… What do you think about adding to your closing announcement some kind of a welcome message for the newbs that week? Maybe even a “welcome back” for those we haven’t seen in a while. Do you think that would help any with retention? The FSM had the Boobies list for each contest and I could add something similar to cover both new and not-seen-in-a-while participants, in a format that would make it easy to copy ‘n paste.

[CauseISaidSo]

Hey now, squirrels are wild animals, too! Thanks for the laugh, rav, sounds like something I’d do. 😉

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