Challenge #783 Voting CLOSED

[Helge]

This week’s theme:

Warp drive

• Peetie
• LordVoldemort99
• Napivo
• VjaceslavT
• fdo
• purbosky
• caz747
• fcharr
• Eru_Iluvatar
• joshwinkler3d
• Millani
• icyou520

After 2 days of voting, a winner is declared: The voting will close on: Wed, Jun 27, 2018 11:00 PM.
The winner picks the theme for next week.

[ If the winner doesn’t supply a theme before Thursday 22:30 GMT, the organizer will select the theme. In this case, the winner’s theme will be used the next time we are lacking a theme on Thursday 22:30 GMT. ]

Having selected the theme, the winner will not be eligible to enter that week. They may however still submit an image, but it won’t be included in the voting.

This week’s winner:

Pure Entries

• Peetie: Basic Warp Drive

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• LordVoldemort99: Strange New Worlds

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• Napivo: Friend or foe?

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• VjaceslavT: VjaceslavTissen_WrapDrive_Organic

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• fdo: Spaceportal

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• purbosky: A Race Against the Light

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• caz747: Pie in the sky.

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• fcharr: Stellar Slog

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• Eru_Iluvatar: Warp Drive

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• joshwinkler3d: Warp Core

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• Millani: To the Edge and Beyound

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• icyou520: Imagination

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Non-competing Entries

• OLG: Breaking Warp Drive Barrier

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• RobertT: PHI.DRV (DIVINE PROPORTION WARP DRIVE)

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• Photox: Nuclear Seasons

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• 3dmad: Warp Drive (music by Kevin MacLeod - incompetech.com)

https://vimeo.com/276964724

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• Helge: Impulse

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[3dmad]

I’m pretty sure that was not my title Helge, although it’s probably better then the one I chose ;-):

“Warp Drive (music by Kevin MacLeod - incompetech.com)”

I assume it was your script that made this error? I’m guessing it hit the url in my title and didn’t like it, so it just jumped to the last line in my post? As I’m the only one doing that I’ll make sure not to it again so you don’t have to waste your time fixing your regular expression

[caz747]

Great job by 3dmad and very funny too.

[Helge]

Sorry about that. In fact, your title was just a little too long. The script is using a bunch of checks in order to guess which words could be the title. (Actually, I just updated this part of the script based on Peetie’s and Napivos entries. Titles starting with “title:” are now easily detected. )

In your entry:

• line 1 was a little too long. Quotation marks are a good title indicator but if the text is too long, it could just as well be some kind of random quote,
• line 2 contained the word “competing”,
• line 3 contained the word “eevee”,
• line 4 is too long
• line 5 is a single word, not too long and isn’t the username… <= It just had to be the title!

Usually, I double check the results manually, but in this case the video link obviously attracted my full attention.

[Napivo]

Helge,

I have always tried to make your life easy by doing that.

You will always find the word “Title:” in front of my title, so there is no confusion, and it Is usually (I think always) the line before the image.

Explanations come afterwards.

Hope this helps you

Napivo

[fcharr (Francisco Charrua)]

I think the easiest way to this, is: Just write out the title before the image, because putting something like “title: actual title” makes Helge have to then edit the poll in order to remove “title:”

[Napivo]

Lol why doesn’t he just remove it by script…

I don’t know what the coding language for this forum is but I write code in c# all the time

let’s keep it generic.

Line is detected starting with lowercase “title”
Find where it starts and end detecting the next space
“Title:”, “Title…”, “title:” and “Title/”

Then remove the “Title” whatever from the line.

Maybe remove "

Does not sound that difficult… if it can’t be done just leave the “Title:” in your string I don"t mind.

Napivo

[3dmad]

Thank you @Helge and @caz747

As Helge has already kindly pointed out in the previous thread, it’s not a particularly original concept (just one of the many problems when dealing with other trekkies, like you lot ;-)) however coming up with good ideas and executing them isn’t easy, even without the time constraints of the challenge and just life in general.

The good news is Eevee is definitely continuing to improve and become more stable all the time, so I imagine it won’t be long before many others here try and bring their creations to life a little bit more as well :-). Assuming video it actually a valid entry type

@Helge
Obviously I was vastly underestimating the intelligence of your script Helge I sincerely hope you have safeguards in place to ensure it doesn’t decide to turn on us all ;-). I’m sure if rarebit was around he would be designing some kind of neural network so it could learn from it’s mistakes and eventually start to teach us ;-).

@Helge

In your entry:

• line 1 was a little too long. Quotation marks are a good title indicator but if the text is too long, it could just as well be some kind of random quote,

Just to clarify Helge, when you say my title was too long I assume your script is not stripping the HTML URL tags that this forum automatically adds before evaluating the length of the string? so it sees something like:

“Warp Drive (music by Kevin MacLeod - < a href=“http://incompetech.com” rel=“nofollow noopener”>incompetech. com)”

and considers that too long? or does it really consider 53 characters too long? and if so what limit has our new overlord chosen to give us all?

@Helge

but in this case the video link obviously attracted my full attention.

When you say it like that Helge your errors make perfect sense to me

@fcharr
Really? So Helge’s script detects but doesn’t strip the word “title” from the string? Perhaps we are all safe after all

[Napivo]

OK helge I wanted to quickly build a nice c# program to build your next posts… when I downloaded the entire HTML of

Challenge #783 (22/06/18) Entries CLOSED

Theme #783 for Friday 22th of June 2018 is: Warp drive Entry closes on Monday, 22:30 GMT (Tue, Jun 26, 2018 12:30 AM (Europe: Paris), Mon, Jun 25, 2018 3:30 PM (America: Los Angeles) (UTC)) “There are two main goals for these contests: Fun and Glory. Fun: You get only 4 days to create a cool image, based on the theme for the week. Glory: After 2 days of voting, a winner is declared. The winner picks the theme for next week.” Please remember to state if your entry is pure, open or non-compe…

I got “only” 1120 lines of HTML code. Most of which I’d have to wade through to, line by line, getting the different blocks for each posts. examining them and parsing them. See if they are posts with pictures or only comments, finding the title, find out competing or not, and then build a new post.

I can do it for sure but it will not be as easy as I lead on. It will not be done in the next month, I fear.

Nice challenge for me tough, I will give it a try as I haven’t used HTML for such a long time (been offline for the better part of 2 years a lot has changed) and I have always loved data mining.

My sincere apologies.

Napivo

[3dmad]

@Napivo
I would guess Helge is using PHP not C#, so it would probably have limited use even if you did make it

[Napivo]

@3dmad
I would not be sure of that.

If you have a local program that can read any post and generate a copy paste version of the output post, it could be useful.

Especially if you could review and change the usernames, titles, picture links and the “competing, open or non competing” status before building a post.

Of course, I would need to learn the entire syntax for posts on the forum and I still haven’t had the time for that.

And there will be bugs, I assure you.

Napivo

[3dmad]

You are quite right Napivo, I was just assuming from previous talk he was running the script server side so assumed PHP but he doesn’t need or might not actually be doing that. In either case I don’t think you need to start from scratch and perhaps Helge would provide you with a copy of his script.

[Helge]

@Napivo

I have always tried to make your life easy by doing that.

Actually, you did. So keep it up.

@fcharr

Just write out the title before the image,

That is one of the first things the script searches for. Making it bold or putting it into quotations marks is also very helpful.

@3dmad

Obviously I was vastly underestimating the intelligence of your script Helge I sincerely hope you have safeguards in place to ensure it doesn’t decide to turn on us all

I do. I really don’t want to be converted into paper clips some day.

@3dmad

or does it really consider 53 characters too long? and if so what limit has our new overlord chosen to give us all?

It depends on the circumstances. In most cases (and after stripping the markup) the script is allowed to consider everything between 5 and 40 chars a title. This has proven to minimize the number of false positives quite reliably. However, this is like Star Trek - there is always a manual override. So, there is no real limit to the title length.

@3dmad

@fcharr
Really? So Helge’s script detects but doesn’t strip the word “title” from the string? Perhaps we are all safe after all

This is just like Amazon showing you ‘personalized’ advertisements for things that just don’t make any sense. They just try to keep you calm and hide their real evil power.

So, don’t worry guys. The current script is working just fine.

For everyone interested: The new version I created for Discourse is almost completely JavaScript based. (I only use PHP for downloading the JSON files (which make things A LOT easier - compared to the old forum’s HTML) from blenderartists.org in order to get around any cross domain issues.)

There are three main reasons for choosing JavaScript.

1.) I like it.
2.) It is great at fiddling with HTML and JSON
3.) It doesn’t matter where I am. I could even look through the latest posts or edit things the script may have misunderstood from everywhere in the world. (And on every device. And every OS.)

If you are still reading, here are the details on what the script does:
Every time I run the script, it piles up the necessary JSON files and detects all the new posts. For every post, it ‘guesses’ if it is an entry and tries to detect which kind of entry it is (pure, open, non-competing, …). The participants name and last edit date are easy (these are part of the JSON file). Finding the title and correct entry image is a little tricky. So it tries to guess as good as possible. (And it removes “title:” from the title strings. )

After this has all been done, the results are inserted into text input fields which (as @Napivo suggested above) can then be edited by hand. IF I notice an error, I correct it and save the latest changes. I do this every once in a while, whenever I find a minute or two. This way, almost all entries have already been covered before Monday evening. (Currently, the voting thread starts at about 1AM in Germany, so setting things up should take as little time as possible. ;-)).

After that, all that is left to do is ordering the entries (by edit date and type) and creating the voting/post text/source which can then be pasted into the forum.

Done

[Napivo]

@helge
There are three main reasons for choosing JavaScript.

1.) I like it.

• I thought so looking through the forums HTML witch is mostly javascript. I love c# for the same reason… it is a cosy blanket.

2.) It is great at fiddling with HTML and JSON

• No discussion here, while I have libraries to read HTML and most of the standards for Json are integrated in .net… Javascript is way more advanced in this way.

3.) It doesn’t matter where I am. I could even look through the latest posts or edit things the script may have misunderstood from everywhere in the world. (And on every device. And every OS.)

• Lol you just need any browser and an internet connection not even a fast one.

I must agree 100% with your choice.

I must be getting old… I turn 46 years old soon and I am sometimes stuck in my old ways.

Thanks for your reply.

“Best of both worlds”
(sorry could not resist adding this)

Napivo

[3dmad]

It was very kind of you to take the time to explain all that to us Helge I personally don’t really like using Javascript and like others I think I’m getting a little old and like my reliable intellisense and would choose Haxe or even MS TypeScript (not that I’ve used that one much) to avoid having to program in it directly.

Anyway, it’s sounds like you’ve got most of your bases covered now hopefully and by running your PHP on some server somewhere and serving your javascript you can be in any location on any computer and still perform you assigned duties, which makes a lot of sense

I guess one could argue that you have made your life a little tricky by simply not providing rules on how to properly format our entry posts, but of course even if you did I guess some would probably just not notice them… they are not there are they?

[Helge]

@3dmad

I guess one could argue that you have made your life a little tricky by simply not providing rules on how to properly format our entry posts, but of course even if you did I guess some would probably just not notice them… they are not there are they?

You are certainly right about that.

Right now, most of the posts/entries can be handled automatically well enough. Even if there were rules regarding the entry post format (and I could get a few people to actually read/follow them), I would still have to double check the results manually. In the end, I probably wouldn’t save much time - while making things more complicated for everyone else. Utilitarianism says we are fine.

[3dmad]

Obviously I think the best solution Helge would be to have a proper entry form when posting in the entries thread, and then doing something like limiting the number of posts a user can make within those threads to only one. Then I guess the rest could be easily automated, and do you entirely out of a job completely.

I would imagine it wouldn’t actually be that difficult to achieve, especially for someone that is already familiar with this Discourse forum, so I guess it’s something to think about should the number of entries get a little too much to handle, or if you decided you just don’t want to do it anymore and nobody else really wants your job ;-).

oh! I forgot we would need a way to get the winners theme choice or generate one randomly if they didn’t provide it within a set period

Humm! Your doing a good job Helge! and I, and I would imagine everyone else, appreciates it a lot

All the best,
Damien

[Helge]

@Napivo

I turn 46 years old soon and I am sometimes stuck in my old ways.

Ha! I’m 36 and thinking the same thing. So, don’t worry.

@3dmad: Thanks, too kind.
And I think you are right, Discourse could probably be extended to do most of the tasks by itself. However, there probably are a few (maybe a million) items on the todo-list before that.

[Millani]

And now that I know the internals of Helge’s script, I think I’ll call my next entry “Millani and the Competing Eevee Running in Cycles with an Open Blender”.

I wonder how it handles unicode and emojis on the title…

fsck the system

[Helge]

I had a feeling something like this would happen… That is why the script isn’t allowed to play outside alone.