Lord Sinister

An intriguing video indeed. From what I've heard of late about this demonetisation bot, my impression is that this seems to be a somewhat desperate move on Youtube's part; they're testing an AI with the capacity to cripple channels on live data. They obviously felt so compelled that an immediate response to their advertising issue was required that they developed and deployed this immediately with very limited internal testing. It sounds like they may have felt that they didn't have much of a choice in order to continue maintaining the service, considering the loss in revenue. This hasty deployment theory might explain the lack of explanations from Youtube; that they simply don't have any explanations owing to the hasty development and testing process that is likely still going on, even several months on from when this all began (because the task required of the bot is gargantuan). That said, I do wonder whether or not Youtube might potentially be prevented from saying anything about this via agreements with advertisers? As in the development and deployment of this bot may have been part of some subsequent deal with advertisers, but at the same time a stipulation of that deal may have been that Youtube have to keep most of the information regarding this a secret. Still, the lack of information from Youtube on this means that pretty much all of this is speculation based on the observations of what is happening, rather than what Youtube say is happening. Who knows what the future may hold. It certainly sounds like it will make things harder for individuals to start up new channels with the intention of making a living off of them.

I quite enjoyed how Freeman is starting to notice that things aren't quite normal with regards to the 'police' forces he keeps encountering. The Vortigaunt sequence was also entertaining, especially so because the guy with the Vortigaunt reacted in an appropriate manner. Great stuff!

The proposal for the enforcement of links and user-uploads was apparently rejected when the "Internal Market and Consumer Protection" members voted on this on June 8th. Googling finds this handy summary of the vote: https://juliareda.eu/2017/06/imco-copyright-vote/ I attempted to dig out the actual documents on the website (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/imco/home.html), but it's late and I'm not completely sure I found everything/the right stuff, so I'm only linking to the main site, but I've no doubt the relevant documentation is all on there, somewhere. What is there appears to be fairly dry, but is undoubtedly useful. The bottom line is that, for legitimate users, I do not believe we have anything to worry about right now.

Ah, at long last! I was surprised that Freeman didn't remark on the enormous cloud-breaching tower, but I guess he's had a lot to take in very quickly, although he does seem to have picked up that his situation has not improved.

I joined for a bit. I'd only ever played UT2004 a tiny bit, many years ago, but it didn't agree with me. So I played for a bit today and was terrible. Unfortunately, my connection isn't really good enough to handle Twitch, let alone Twitch and a game, so I couldn't follow things too well. I do know that there were stunt jump shenanigans and the like, featuring grenade jumping vehicles and so on. Overall people seemed to be having fun! It's worth noting that there's a 'Help' tab on the window that pops up when you're in-game, which describes the mode that you're on, and how to play it.

I'm pretty sure that talking to yourself like this is supposed to be a sign of madness, whatever the circumstances.

As in stuff posted with the "youtube" tag? It seems to be working for me.

I don't think it's anything to do with his browser(s) unless some sort of proxy extension or addon is being utilised (which, considering the information provided, I doubt is the case); his external IP address could change whilst he's still connected at any time. It depends on the logic the ISP is using to determine when to assign new IPs to the people that are connecting or already connected. I'll admit that it does seem a bit peculiar for it to be changing so frequently. Seattleite, is your router-modem often left switched on when you switch off your machine/stop browsing the internet, or do you switch it off often? For dynamic IP addresses, I believe a new IP would usually be assigned to you every time you disconnect and reconnect your router-modem from your connection to your ISP.

I've worked out what's happening, Seattleite. It's to do with you appearing to have a dynamic IP address. Every time it updates, the forum logs you out when the first three portions of your new IP address don't match the ones in the original IP address you were logged in with (ie the parts with x's in xxx.xxx.xxx.yyy). It's possible for me to adjust this global forum setting to only validate the first portion, or only the first and second portions of the IP address, however your IP address appears to be completely random when it changes, so I don't think reducing it by a slight amount would have any impact; I'd have to turn it off entirely. In addition, reducing or disabling this setting increases the risk of the possibility of user sessions getting hijacked by malicious third-parties, which would obviously be unfortunate were this to occur.

In Chrome, when checking the settings for Cookies, did you also check the 'Manage Exceptions' area? I'm guessing you probably have, but it's worth asking, just in case.

Are you browsing in in-private/Incognito mode for IE or Edge / Google Chrome, respectively?

Unfortunately, not everyone can read minds. I'm still working on the problem. Moderate point of anger for today: Observing the existence of pretentious nonsense in what is considered 'news' these days.

Are there any other remaining issues with the UCP that you are aware of?

I'll investigate how the forum is currently embedding Youtube videos, along with Reputation and Custom Titles. Are there any other big issues that anyone else can think of right now? Post it here! I will have a look back through this thread as well, but most of it seems to be about the UCP stuff.

This should now be resolved. Post if you encounter any further issues with regards to avatar uploading.

Right, I believe I have isolated and fixed the UCP issue. You can also now log out as well. The issue is a syntax error in a GENERATED PHP cache file of all things. I'll need to investigate further to discover why it's manufacturing shoddy PHP, but for now this error shouldn't resurface unless it rebuilds the file, however I do now know where and how to fix that, so it's quick and easy to correct if it does it again before I am able to discover and correct what's creating the code in the first place. Post here if any other issues are encountered, thanks.

I was investigating. Hence the friendly 'disabled' message. Sadly I have not fixed anything yet, BUT I have made progress. I've finally managed to track down the file which which is causing UCP page submissions to fall over. Because of the way I'm having to do this, I've been disabling the forum for brief periods so that the user experience isn't completely shafted whilst I work. I'll be tinkering with this throughout the coming week, but progress has finally been made. I'll post here when I have further updates.

I believe the rep system has been broken for a while. It's on the list.

I believe it's an issue with how it's been merged with Wordpress. There's a plugin being used called WP-United that has had its way with PHPBB's stuff. I made a complete copy of the web-pages and the databases and set them up in a local VM. Without making any changes. The issues didn't present themselves (the UCP pages worked, you can log out, etc). This suggests to me that there may be some global server setting, service, etc, that is interfering, but I've not been able to find any helpful logs on just what the problem could be. It may be something that I can't access. I don't know how 'intact' the forum's database is following the WP-United stuff. It might. I'd want to enable the forum's debug mode and try to enable every possible way of displaying error messages (not a good idea to leave stuff like that enabled as there may be security implications). I need the error messages as a baseline in order to identify what exactly's going wrong. My whole reason for having an offline copy was to avoid the risk of potentially breaking the Live site further during my attempts to fix it. I AM working on the overall problem, but there won't be a quick solution I'm afraid.

Thanks, this has now been fixed. You can have whatever opinion you want. You do NOT always have to share it. This is directed at everyone. Important note: Someone 'may' have the opinion that "All *insert social group* are evil and should be killed, brutally, in front of their families/with their families." A statement along the lines of that may also include a fair amount of swearing to emphasise the 'strength' of their opinion. A statement along those lines could well be the opinion of that someone, but it would also generally be considered offensive to the reasonable majority and does not need to be said. Now you may argue over technicalities, maybe it's not phrased exactly like that, maybe it's about something that 'most' people will hate, but if you can't phrase it in a 'reasonable manner', ie something that doesn't violate the forum rules, then it doesn't need to be said here. The maintenance of free-speech whilst at the same time trying to ensure that the environment is pleasant for the majority is a fine-line, just like in real-life! It will never be perfect, there will be mistakes, things may get overlooked, there will always be room for improvement. Just like real-life. As a general rule-of-thumb, if you have a particular thing you wish to say on this forum, think about whether or not you would go out onto some random street and state what you would have said on the forum to several complete strangers (having gotten their attention), and try to imagine their reaction. Maybe the intended reaction IS to cause offence (although if that's the case, then you already know you're going to be violating the rules anyway). Now people may well try to invoke 'technicalities' in the above ("I have no streets like that where I live" or "No one on my street would be offended by the stuff I'm saying"), however those who do invoke those perceived technicalities would merely be trying to sidestep the rather obvious points I've made above, and no amount of further explaining from me will help. Too-Long-Did-Not-Read?: You really should, but the bottom-line is, be a reasonable person. I'm still looking into this. I haven't been able to replicate the problem locally, bizarrely enough, which has made the task of investigating this issue particularly troublesome.

This should now be fixed, sorry about that.

Ouch, thanks for the screenshot. I've fixed the styling now so if you shrink the window it'll auto-expand, and the button's text will remain on a single line... Anyway, yes, I added it as it's legally required that we notify people about cookie usage. Actually, we already do have this. On the top right of the board index you'll see "View unread posts" "View new posts" and "View your posts" New posts is anything across the whole forum that has new posts where as your posts are any topics you've posted in with new posts. The view I was referring to would be slightly different: It would show threads with your posts, but only if they have replies that you haven't read, ie an 'Unread replies to your posts' section.' Something like that anyway, it was just an idea, however the UCP is a higher priority.

It would probably be possible to create a page along the lines of the 'View Unread Posts' area, showing only threads that you've posted in with unread posts after your previous post. Would that sort of thing be to your liking? I could add it to the list if people think it would be nice to have. I do however want to fix the UCP issues as a main priority.

Whilst this thread is about opinions, I do feel the need to point out here that the initial claim was yours and he refuted your sources as insufficient. The burden of proof lies with you to better prove your claim, not for him to dispute it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof In addition, attempting to incite a debate to descend into argument through passive aggressive insults is not a good way to go. Please don't do it. ### To the topic at hand, I have nothing against tattoos. I have no interest in getting one, but I have no issues with them existing or other people having them. As for the tattoo artwork itself, that will entirely depend on what it is. It's the same thing as with music, or other pieces of artwork; the content of it would probably define whether or not you liked it, but that's not really specific to the concept of tattoos themselves.

I've been meaning to log into it, I do try to log in on occasion where I've been tinkering away, but I haven't done anything recently unfortunately. I may do some more work on it later this week.