General Updates

[Lunkhead]

i added 20 years ago fights to the home page. I also tweaked the layout for the fight anniversaries too.

Jack Shite reported that the Hxaro Covers link on the homepage was just pointing to a directory listing of files. I found the right link which is the same path but on songfight.net and updated the homepage link to use that.

[BoffoYux]

Thanks for fixing the link. I just noticed that the last 5 or so years of cover songs probably need updating. I can try and do a list of what is missing through the forums, but who would be updating it?

Also wondering is there 'local' SF place that hosts the songs, or is it all at the whim of wherever the songs are and we just link to the .mp3s until the links break? Niv's deep dive into the archives got me thinking of how many of the sidefights are scattered. Not sure the best method to fix that, but it was on my mind, and I'm sure others have contemplated a way to do it.

I'd hate to see classics like 'Masterpieces - A Tribute To The Music Of The Fightmasters' be lost because the link to Niv's old site is broken.
http://www.niveousrayside.com/masterpieces.html

[Lunkhead]

I think historically the most common scenario was that sidefight songs were self hosted by the folks how made them, and yes, that did frequently lead to links that got old and broke over the years.

The Hxaro and covers archive was the handiwork of King Arthur starting circa late 2007/early 2008, in response to that issue of decay and with some agreement from JB to setup an "official" space for these things, it sounds like:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4945

That long predates my involvement as an admin so I don't really know what happened or how it worked. Song Fight's current hosting setup is goes back a very long way and uses mostly pretty old rudimentary tech like FTP and PHP and text files. Probably getting the level of access needed to maintain that archive could be granted to someone who wanted to take up the mantle of maintaining that archive. I don't really have the bandwidth to take that on though personally.

[jb]

DM me if you want access or an archive or space for a sidelight. Song Fight is happy to provide hosting resources to people in the community, flowing around the .net domain.

Happy to set up subdomains if needed, though keep in mind it’s a Dreamhost “shared hosting” account so you’re not gonna be able to host like, your own daemons or media server or whatever.

It’s all on the honor system, y’know if you’re like King Arthur and I’ve known you since way back when he was in his fifties.

JB

[grumpymike]

The Nur Ein database is contest-neutral and can accommodate all sorts of contests. I just never got to it, but it is a possibility if it's something people want. I was going to try it with the Circle of Songs a few years ago...

[Lunkhead]

I just quickly hacked together a download link and put it on the homepage. It's extremely rudimentary for now which means that it's going to load and zip up all the files when you click it, so it will be a bit slow. It will include every song from the current fight, though, including late songs. When I have more time I will make it more sophisticated so that it only creates the zip file if necessary.

[jast]

I guess that means I'm useless now...

[Pigfarmer Jr]

I guess that means I'm useless now...

Isn't that your reviewomatic that we are using? Or am I mistaken?

[Lunkhead]

I guess that means I'm useless now...

Hopefully I haven't offended you. I did it in response to this post:

viewtopic.php?p=229886#p229886

WreckdoM missing from the "Song Fight! Review-O-Matic & ZIP mirror" and when I clicked the "trigger an update" link it just told me that the most recent songs are already there.

So OK, I'll just do this the old fashioned way.

My memory isn't so great because between the last time this came up and now I've have 50 million other things pass through my brain, so maybe my response wasn't totally accurate. I just though if I could make a "first party" zip download that would include late songs, and if I could spend very little time on it, that I should just go ahead and do it.

[jast]

Hopefully I haven't offended you.

You're going to have to try a whole lot harder to offend me.

As I said previously, and maybe this is a good place to repeat it, there is an undocumented way to re-generate an existing ZIP archive on my site:

append an "allow_redownload=1" query parameter to the page URL.

[Pigfarmer Jr]

As I said previously, and maybe this is a good place to repeat it, there is an undocumented way to re-generate an existing ZIP archive on my site:

append an "allow_redownload=1" query parameter to the page URL.

While it would be more work for you, perhaps a simple link/button labelled "hit this for late entries to be included" would solve the problem. I'd be remiss if I didn't thank you for having all this set up. I've used it a fair bit.

[jast]

It would be trivial to set up a button like that but I don't want it to be hammered by bots and such. I'll have to think about how to extend the current rate limiting scheme.

[fluffy]

If you're using playlist.txt, you should be able to use if-modified-since/if-none-match for version control.

[jast]

TIL about playlist.txt.
I'll look into it just as soon as I have time.

[Lunkhead]

I've added a "review" button to the home page under the "download all" button. It links to this new page I just hacked together:

https://www.songfight.org/reviews.php

That page will dynamically generate a review template based on all the songs currently in the current fight. So if a song gets added after the fact it will automatically get included in the template from then on. When you click "preview" it takes you to a post editor form in the review thread. There's an error message but you can ignore that and fill in your reviews then preview/post from there.

Try it out if you get a chance and let me know if it works. You have to be logged in to the forums first for it to work, fyi.

[fluffy]

Hmm, with the difficulties people are having with phpBB's preview interface (which is, to be fair, awful), maybe it'd make more sense for the textarea to just have a thing where if you click on it, it gets copied to the clipboard. Or maybe there's a better verb to bring up the full post editor than "preview."

Or maybe there's a hidden phpBB API that can be used to prefill the composer or something. It's been a while since I messed with that (2.x era) so I have no idea what the current state of things is.

[ujnhunter]

Not sure if it's just me, but clicking on that Reviews, Preview button just keeps bringing me to a Log In page (even though I've already logged in) and then nothing shows up.

[Lunkhead]

Not sure if it's just me, but clicking on that Reviews, Preview button just keeps bringing me to a Log In page (even though I've already logged in) and then nothing shows up.

It's not just you. When you log in to you check the "Remember me" checkbox? It seems like so far not doing that is what leads to this issue but I haven't really verified that, I've just had a couple other folks have the problem you're having and say they don't use that checkbox. (I do use it.)

[Lunkhead]

I'll probably just have to do like what fluffy suggested and make it less useful, and have it just copy the review template and take you to the review thread.

[ujnhunter]

Looks like Logging Out and then Logging In again with the Remember Me Checkbox fixed that issue for me. Thanks.

[Lunkhead]

I have tried to kludge into place a very bare bones validation that votes being received are actually for the current fight, and not for a previous or non-existent fight. If you get a new error message when voting, you may have had a cached version of the homepage that you were voting from, or maybe a version you loaded in some browser tab you'd kept open for days/weeks and hadn't refreshed. The "workaround" is to vote again.

[frankie big face]

I have tried to kludge into place a very bare bones validation that votes being received are actually for the current fight, and not for a previous or non-existent fight. If you get a new error message when voting, you may have had a cached version of the homepage that you were voting from, or maybe a version you loaded in some browser tab you'd kept open for days/weeks and hadn't refreshed. The "workaround" is to vote again.

I demand a recount of all the fights I lost! (But not the ones I won.)