New feature: Pet ratings!

[Feathercircle]

Nope, same URL, same cookie randomly dissapearing without warning even though I have it set to "Remember me" on login.

...this sort of problem is how I wound up with the nickname of "The Eternally Not-Logged-In" on the original forum.

[Joeno]

The site uses basically the same code to handle cookies as the forum, except that it should be less likely to log you out because it doesn't update the forum tables (online-table and other session-handling things) and some similar stuff like that.

It sounds more likely that your cookies in general are handled a bit oddly. As an experiment - the site itself allows you to set different, long-lasting cookies. When you set one of those to, say, change the number of pets on the frontpage, does that get retained? If it is, there may be something wrong that we can fix, if not, it's more likely to be on your side, since the site's code sets only the simplest of cookies that no browser should mess up.

On to other stuff... I've just added a whole load of features that are less complicated than they seem.

First of all, when viewing colours, you now get a link to (re)rate a pet. This doesn't take into account whether it can be (re)rated, so it'll give you the occasional error message there. Don't worry, it's not possible to break anything

Each user's username will also be linked to sort of a small 'mini-profile' that lists a large amount of statistics.

These same sort of statistics - the best and worst ten combinations, best and worst pets and best and worst colours are all listed.

I don't have 'the best colours for a pet/colour' yet. It'll require an updated interface to make sure I don't put more strain on the database server (you'd get ~130 queries if I'd just list all...), but it's on the todo list.

You can basically view the overall statistics, for all users combined, you can watch these for your own ratings on the main page, and the others through the links in viewclrs.php. And it is theoretically possible to provide a link from the forum profile to this 'profile' and the other way around, if enough people want it.

The time you have to wait before you can rate a colour has been reduced to 30 days.

The rating recalculations now have their failure/success entry on the About-page.

Ratings are now shown by default, but can be disabled on the Options page.

I think that's about it for now. As always, comments, bug reports, ideas, marriage proposals, typo reports, and whatever more are always welcome.

[Jazzy]

I love these statistics So much fun. The only things I would change would be:
- change the text on your own ratings to "your favourite ten pets" and "your least favourite ten pets", because I thought at first that my ratings were the overall statistics
- consider removing invisible pets from worst ten pets, because almost all of the pets on there are invisible
- "Here are a couple of statistics" probably needs a colon or something afterwards, or it looks a little like filler text you meant to get rid of.

and unrelated to ratings, can you change "The last five colours" on the front page to "The latest colours:"? When you change the number of colours to display, it still says five, which looks odd.

[Joeno]

I've made the text fixes...

Excluding the Invisible pets would give some performance issues. <tech>The current queries join up rather ineffectively, using an ALL for the initial releasedcombos table, and already using fieldsorts and other ugly inefficient things. Adding a WHERE-clause to these tables would add more overhead to the queries, especially the user-ones, since we're not using a key for it at the moment, and adding one might prove troublesome elsewhere... Hmmm, but I could check that... - And yes, it does help somewhat. Hmmm...</tech>

Also - well, they are, apparently, bad combinations. That might be worth noting here.

I'm considering allowing a way to show a larger group of results. That might help instead.

[Feathercircle]

The site uses basically the same code to handle cookies as the forum, except that it should be less likely to log you out because it doesn't update the forum tables (online-table and other session-handling things) and some similar stuff like that.

It sounds more likely that your cookies in general are handled a bit oddly. As an experiment - the site itself allows you to set different, long-lasting cookies. When you set one of those to, say, change the number of pets on the frontpage, does that get retained? If it is, there may be something wrong that we can fix, if not, it's more likely to be on your side, since the site's code sets only the simplest of cookies that no browser should mess up.

It retains the long-lasting cookies just fine- it's the one for the forums/ratings/etc that keeps vanishing abruptly... and I've never had a problem like this with any site that wasn't an incarnation of Neocolours. It seems can get the forum cookies to work, but only in Firefox... IE and Opera both won't cooperate. I'd prefer not to have to switch over to a different browser just to use this site, so if there's any way you can help me fix this so I can log in normally, I'd appreciate it.

[Silverevilchao]

Hm, is there any way the comments can retain their spaces in the ratings? I mean, my poor ratings look a tad squished (as, I do Pros and Cons, and I usually put a space between them to separate them).

[Gibblywibbly]

FEATHERCIRCLE!

Dammit, WHERE are you people coming from?

[Joeno]

Hm, is there any way the comments can retain their spaces in the ratings? I mean, my poor ratings look a tad squished (as, I do Pros and Cons, and I usually put a space between them to separate them).

If you mean horizontal (more than one space after each other) - no, not just like that, because HTML won't allow it: It's all just swallowed up and displayed as a single space.

If you mean vertical - I disallow any HTML tags in comments at the moment, due to the many problems it could cause with Javascript inserts and so on. I'm not sure whether it's actually possible to properly enable only <br>'s, and how safe that'd be.

Cookies. Okay, if my cookies are working, it's not something related to your browser not handling cookies properly. I'm just going to give a few random ideas that may or may not work, but that might clarify a few things for me...

Do you stay logged in (and does the ratings page work) when you do not click "Remember me"? It forces the system to skip over some sessions check, that may help.

I'll assume that you've tried the simple remedy of removing the Neocolours cookie? Usually found in c:\Documents and Settings\$USERNAME\Cookies\$USERNAME@neocolours.txt (or something similar). It could be that some outdated cookie is being send, but not updated.

If that doesn't do the trick either, could you email the cookie-file to me, jeroen@pkmn.nl? Best results if you can send a couple - after visiting, but before logging in, after logging in, while you still are, and when you've apparently been logged out again. Your password is not stored in the cookies, so don't worry about that.

[Feathercircle]

After logging in and out several times and cut-and-pasting about six different copies of the site cookie, I seem to have fixed whatever it was that was preventing me from retaining login on the forums.

I still can't rate except in Firefox, though.

Edit: Nevermind. Login dissapeared again, now. I wonder if it doesn't like me hibernating my computer or something.