First, I'd like to apologize for poking my nose where I guess I shouldn't be, but when exploring the site I found this page:
http://www.sir-toby.com/extend-a-story/ ... locked.php
A lot of the listed locked episodes were not, in reality locked. Is this a bug?
Is this a bug?
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Sir Toby
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This is in reality, a feature.
When I first switched over to version 2 of Extend-A-Story, I changed the episode creation process so that you could lock on episode using a link. I quickly found out that web spiders would follow those links, and thus would lock every single episode in the story. I had written the code so that when someone locks an episode, they have 60 minutes of exclusive access to that episode. If someone stumbles upon that episode within the 60 minute window, they will be told the episode is locked and to come back later. After the 60 minute window has expired, if someone comes to the episode again, they will still be told it is locked, but will be given the option to unlock it. As things progressed, thousands of episodes started showing this behaviour. Eventually, this behaviour led to a complaint.
After the complaint, I posted this message detailing my thoughts about resolving the situation. I can't seem to find a followup post describing exactly what I did, but here is what I remember:
I decided at that time to go back to the old method of locking episodes, where you needed to click on a form button to do it. This stopped the web spiders from locking every episode in the story. I also decided to do something about the strange message that would appear when you stumbled upon an episode that had been locked ages ago. I modified Extend-A-Story so that if you stumbled across an episode that had been locked a long time ago (over 5 hours, I think), the episode would automatically be unlocked, and no message would be displayed.
Now, the list of locked episodes PHP script shows you the list of locked episodes, but doesn't take into account the logic I described above. If you follow the links to any locked episodes in that list that were locked a long time ago, they will automatically be unlocked and you won't get a message about it. If you go back to the locked episode list and refresh it, you can confirm that the episode is no longer locked.
Hopefully that answers your question. Also, I don't really mind people poking around with the locked episode list. I just haven't really gone out of my way to draw attention to it.
When I first switched over to version 2 of Extend-A-Story, I changed the episode creation process so that you could lock on episode using a link. I quickly found out that web spiders would follow those links, and thus would lock every single episode in the story. I had written the code so that when someone locks an episode, they have 60 minutes of exclusive access to that episode. If someone stumbles upon that episode within the 60 minute window, they will be told the episode is locked and to come back later. After the 60 minute window has expired, if someone comes to the episode again, they will still be told it is locked, but will be given the option to unlock it. As things progressed, thousands of episodes started showing this behaviour. Eventually, this behaviour led to a complaint.
After the complaint, I posted this message detailing my thoughts about resolving the situation. I can't seem to find a followup post describing exactly what I did, but here is what I remember:
I decided at that time to go back to the old method of locking episodes, where you needed to click on a form button to do it. This stopped the web spiders from locking every episode in the story. I also decided to do something about the strange message that would appear when you stumbled upon an episode that had been locked ages ago. I modified Extend-A-Story so that if you stumbled across an episode that had been locked a long time ago (over 5 hours, I think), the episode would automatically be unlocked, and no message would be displayed.
Now, the list of locked episodes PHP script shows you the list of locked episodes, but doesn't take into account the logic I described above. If you follow the links to any locked episodes in that list that were locked a long time ago, they will automatically be unlocked and you won't get a message about it. If you go back to the locked episode list and refresh it, you can confirm that the episode is no longer locked.
Hopefully that answers your question. Also, I don't really mind people poking around with the locked episode list. I just haven't really gone out of my way to draw attention to it.