Oct
8th
2014
A warning about the new bookshelves · 5:58pm Oct 8th, 2014
I'm working on a system to recommend fimfiction stories based on your favorites. Actually, I did most of the work over 2 years ago when I first got here, then put it off and put it off. But I plan to finish it.
This system CANNOT WORK FOR YOU if you create a bookshelf called "Stuff I would recommend" and put your favorites on that bookshelf. It can work only if you put your favorite stories in the default "Favorites" bookshelf.
BTW, I love most of the upgrade, but I hate that now, by default, I can't see other people's favorites. That was one of the most useful features of the site.
I assume this is an issue with the title of the bookshelf? I couldn't, for example, create a bookshelf called, "A List of Favorites for Bad Horse's Thingy"?
Obs said it's going to come back soon.
2517934 The "favorites" bookshelf is different from other bookshelves. The special address
http://www.fimfiction.net/index.php?view=category&user=25781
links to my favorites. [EDIT: No it doesn't.] Other bookshelves are linked to
in complicated ways found through parsing web pagesin non-default ways.2517948
That link is to the list of stories you've written
2517948
My other bookshelf links don't look that complicated. They look like story links, actually: http://www.fimfiction.net/bookshelf/591566/shipping-fics
Unless you mean something else.
I'm keeping all of my favorites in my favorites anyway, and just using the shelves for subgroups.
2517944
God, I hope that's right, probably 2/3 of everything I've read on this site I found by following the Favorites list of authors I like, Wikipedia style.
The chronological order of my fic reading history begins with cap'n chryssalid's Best Night Ever followed by Flight of the Alicorn because he has it favorited and then it just snowballs from there.
2517961 Well, of course. Those are my favorites.
No, seriously, I copied the wrong link from my Perl code.
2517987 You're right; I just hadn't looked into it yet. In fact, the old way of finding favorites doesn't work at all anymore. Point is, the code will look in the default place.
Admittedly the primary way I found good stories is by following peoples' recommendations, as well as browsing groups and looking at the highest rated stories.
Actually that's not true. The PRIMARY way I found good stories is by finding an author who wrote one good thing and then reading other things they've written. I found Absolute Anonymous very early on and read literally everything she wrote, which also happened with Bookplayer. I've tried to polish off other folks' works who are good as well; I'm not sure how many I've succeeded at. Right now I'm only two stories off of finishing you off, Bad Horse.
One thing which is very weird is looking back through my favorites list and finding a whole chunk of consecutive high-tier stories, all of which I would recommend to others. I suspect it was because I was going through Kits/The Descendant/Absolute Anonymous/Eakin all at the same time.
When will said system be finished because that sounds awesome.
2518032
Couldn't you make the script take a URL as an argument and scrape that URL specifically? Or is there a larger structural problem? I could see this update complicating things immensely if you were building a 'users who favorited this story also favorited...' kind of algorithm.
Duly noted. I'll need to correct the shelves on my lists, then.
I wonder how many will be statistical anomalies?
2518158
Yes, but it would be a pain in the ass for me and for users, and data from people who didn't use the system and change their "favorites" name would be inaccessible.
2518052
2518116 When I learn how to use Grails. The algorithms it uses are too computation-intensive and memory-hogging to do in PHP or Javascript, and I hate passing lots of data and function calls between three different languages, so I figured I'd write the whole website in JSP.
2518213
...that came out as surprisingly threatening.
And to think that I wondered why my old boss thought I was a serial killer.
Ditto. I haven't checked the front page or the featured box in months and months but I could always find things to read by looking at the favorites lists of quality writers.
2518052
Ah, but how did you find authors that wrote one good thing, in order to look at the rest of their stuff? For me it was through people's favorites.
2518205
Tsk. My Michelin star favorites system is going to be a problem, then.
I'm really excited about this system, because it works better for how I read my fics. I admit I haven't really used other people's favorites list that much to get new material to read, instead relying on blog posts in my feed.
Say, Bad Horse, since this update reveals you to be somewhat technically skilled, perhaps you could help me with a problem I've been having with this site, if it's not too much of an imposition.
I think it's some kind of conflict between Java and Firefox but I'm not sure. What I do know is that a while back a bunch of my buttons stopped displaying properly so that I have to mouse over them to figure out what they are. For example, looking at the buttons above the comment box right now the first button is
F0
32
The second is
F0
33
and the third
F0
CD
They still work when I click on them, but it's quite annoying.
Well, what if you put a story on both bookshelves?
Is there really no practical way to make this work on shelves other than the default favorites? I'd love to use this system, but I unintentionally deleted that one while reorganizing.
(I probably should've known better than to start editing right after the update went live; cursed lag.... At least my habit of keeping backup links paid off.)
2518016 That's a darn good start.
By default, the Favorites bookshelf is public; the problem right now is that there's no well-defined way to browse someone's public bookshelves. I'm gonna sit tight on that one because it seems like an obvious oversight to fix as they move forward and iron out the bugs.
2518720 It looks like the new path just uses the word "Favorites" in the URL, so you should be good if you create a new shelf and name it "Favorites".
2518481 You mean the B for Bold displays as F0 32? I have no idea. I just looked at the HTML, but... I'm not a web dev guy.
2519339
That's correct. Well
F0
32
As it's two lines, yes. It's hideously inconvenient because I have to basically mouse over every button and look at the pop-up yellow box of text to find what I'm looking for. Well, not every button. Save and Cancel still say save and Cancel, but they have little boxes in front of them that say things like
F0
5E
on them.
I suppose I'll try asking Obselescence, then, he's a Mod so maybe he either knows something or knows who to ask and he was just asking for questions about the site (even if this probably isn't related to the update).
2519346
That sounds like it might be a fontset problem. Is there a little box around the [ F0 32 ]?
(And, on a related note, are you using Firefox with the addon NoScript?)
2519480
Yes that is correct, it's in a little box.
I don't see NoScript specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the ones I do have did something similar.
2519480
Let me thank you profusely for pointing me in the right direction. I just googled "Font set errors Firefox" and found a way to fix this.
Since before your help I had no idea what was causing the error or what it was called, I was unable to do so previously as attempting to track it down based on symptoms was not working (putting things like f0 32 error in searches got me nowhere).
2519496
Nope, so far as I know none of those would do it; unless one of them blocks @font thingies.
NoScript will kick the pants off anything else for protecting you against web-only attacks, short of disabling javascript altogether. The trade-off is that it makes the web a lot harder to use, although it adjusts. I just remember there being some post about it being at fault for some font problems a while back.
2519532 So what was the fix?
2519680
Going into my settings and checking a box that had somehow become unchecked saying "allow sites to supply their own fonts".
Where and how it became unchecked I have no idea. It might even have been something a security update did.
You can now access bookshelves without knowing the name.
2518213
I believe Java, Ruby, and and Perl all support (or have libraries that support) mmap with MAP_SHARED. If you're running some linux, you can create a ramfs mountpoint, create a file in it, then mmap MAP_SHARED it on all programs.
I've actually been mulling around the idea of creating a recommendation system too. This blog post convinced me to start writing one now. Maybe we can compare notes once we both have something up and running.
2518260
Same, I think i have all of DGD Davidson's fics favorited within a few days of each other because i just read them all as soon as i found out i much i liked his style, but i found him because Cold in Gardez has Demon Slayer favorited, and from DGD i found Ascend by xTSGx. The web goes on and on.
2519929
Um... why is that relevant?
2522048
It's to avoid passing large amounts of data between languages, and it makes cross-language function calls easier. I assumed you were using Java, Perl, and Ruby. (Ruby since you wanted to use Grails, which I found out afterwards was a Java thing).
Now, I got curious, so to clear this up:
What this does is look at everybody's Favorites list, and look at "your" Favorites list, and then say something sort of like "people who Favorited x also Favorited _______". (Except obviously with a lot more math and data-corelations.) Right?
2526543 Yes, except the math isn't always that direct. What I've got is 5 different methods (heat, ratings, what the people you follow like, what people who liked your favorites like, and principal component analysis), and 5 sliders so you can adjust how important each of those things is. PCA looks for patterns in what people like. It creates categories that seem to go together, so it should discover groupings like "romance", "comedy", "hopeful" etc.
And another downside.... I have to actually CHECK that the page properly loads. Otherwise, I have to keep reloading the page.