Good idea & excellent work, guys!
@ChickPea : I'm no expert, but I think you're probably right. The name is part of the url, so a changed name seems to be a confusing thing...
@ChickPea, thanks for putting in the time to go through and relink all these things.
Some of the CG announcement threads, and therefore some of the thumbs, don't link to the big image in the original threads. Such as "Kaiserreich Drachenstein by Veuxin" and "Etrakien Revisited by Clercon" and "Plumton by Crayons".
I just had to poke around.
(I haven't done much of anything with software in a very long time, and I was curious.)
The spurious images are from one of geoff_nunn's albums https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...p?albumid=4052
Don't know if that helps...
@falconius Once we figure this out, I'll go through everything and make sure it's all correct, starting with those threads!
@bkh1914 Thanks, that's very helpful. I knew I'd seen those pics before but I couldn't remember who the artist was. I note the album ID in the URL is 4052, and the link to the CC award post also contains 4052. I don't think that's a coincidence. I hope Redrobes or Robbie can figure it out.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Great stuff ChickPea !
I looked at the issue and I cannot find out what is happening. Its an old thread and the format for threads have changed. It seems that the PHP and SQL used to pull up the list is adding these extra entries for some reason. Maybe they got added to the choice maps by mistake and then got deleted and the SQL is not filtering out deleted ones. But I dont think so. Something very odd.
Well to fix it I have dropped all the thread=499 entries so that we lose them but we also lose that correct greyscale map too. If you fix up some others and then numerous or wrong images appear then let me know.
Last edited by Redrobes; 08-17-2018 at 09:46 AM.
I've gone through everything, and I think all the thumbnails are in the gallery now, excepting our problem thread. It didn't take anywhere near as long as I thought it might. I've also fixed the small maps linked from the thumbnails, though some of the oldest maps are very small anyway. If there was a bigger version, I think I've got it linked, but if anyone spots one I've missed, let me know.
There don't seem to be any other issues with thumbnails. I think that was one rogue thread, and we'll just need to live without it in the gallery unfortunately.
Next thing I'd love to see is a gallery of old challenge winners, but I'm not quite certain of the best way to achieve that....!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Thanks ChickPea for all the effort - I am sure it was quite a task, ill have a look at it in all its glory in a mo.
Old challenge winners - Ahh well now that may be a mighty difficult thing to address. You have two per month and many many entrants. You would need all those WIP tags included in order to know which one was the real McCoy. I think we could put up a thumbnailer for the archive dir and since all the threads were locked then it would group them all together by date so that you would get blocks of thumbs for the right month but it would be an awful lot of images. It would only go back as far as we were doing the WIP tags but its a tougher call that one. Many people took their entries and made them into finished maps in any case - although lazy sods like me didn't.
@Redrobes I've been thinking about how to display old challenge winners, and I wanted to run something by you.
I don't know much about the thumbnail scraper, but I assume that 'Latest WIP' is really just a variable, so could it be changed? What I'm thinking is this...
Would it be possible to create a copy of the script, but change it so that instead of searching for ### Latest WIP ###, it looked for (for example) ### Winner ###. I was updating links in the (regular) Mapping Challenge Hall of Fame thread, and with the ones I added from 2014, the link goes directly to the comment with the winning map. Those comments should already have ### Latest WIP ### in them, and it wouldn't take too long to change each tag to ### Winner ###. (The older threads will need a little more work, as well as all of the Lite Challenge winners, but I could go through them. There's no deadline on this.) So, the thumbnail crawler would go through every thread in the Mapping Challenge archive folder and look for the ones with the Winner tag, and it'd build the thumbnail gallery from those. Going forward, (if they remember!) Bogie and Diamond could change the 'Latest WIP' tag to 'Winner' when they award the compass. Even if they forget, if we keep on top of it, it's not too big a job to keep it up to date.
I'm not certain how it all works in the backend, so I don't know if there would be any technical 'gotchas' with this idea (perhaps issues with running two different crawlers), but I thought I'd put it to you anyway.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Well now, if your prepared to go through a load of threads and add a new tag to them, and all of these threads are in one forum folder such as the Challenge Archive, then I think that changes things and is a goer. The issue was trying to cross reference a winners list with the links there to the winning thread and post and then collect the attachment - all just in SQL. Its a whole lot easier if the winning post itself has the tag on it as I can ask it to give me back all the posts with the correct wip tag from forum 59 (the archive).
The tag was something I chose a long time ago when the original scraper was done in perl and I could easily look for the tag. Its completely arbitrary. It was something that was absurdly unlikely to appear in the normal text of someones post.
A copy of the existing thumbnail scraper for the challenge entry threads could be modified and we could have something very similar looking with the new tag. I guess all of the lite and main challenge entries are put into the same archive but it would not be a bad thing to mix the main and lite winners together in the thumbs page. If you wanted two lists, one for main challenge winners and one for lite challenge winners, then could you have two tag types and ill just look for the correct one per page of thumbs.
If you like that and want to start putting the tags in on the last few winners of each type then let me know the tag you have added and ill set up the script and link. I had better have a couple of posts with tags in to test it to make sure its ok.
Oh and if I am ever away for a while when I should be doing something and it looks like I have forgotten about it then do PM me because its likely I have ! I usually only look at the days latest posts and run down the list looking for titles that are interesting or need attention. If the call to arms runs off the bottom of the latest posts list then I dont see it.
Last edited by Redrobes; 08-19-2018 at 09:32 PM.
Aw thanks for getting on board with this, Redrobes!
I've gone into the posts for this year's regular challenge winners, and I've added the tag...
### Winner ###
So right now there are seven maps with this tag. Your scraper should return the following maps, all going well...
Anaethir, by Ilanthar
The Fall of the Kingdom of Cauldrons, by Abu Lafia
The Big War of Resh, in Frel & Floris, by MistyBeee
Magocracy of Tirasea, by MistyBeee
Stamps from the Grand Thordar Republic, by Tonquani
Ten, by Larb
Iri-Oriand, World of Living Magic, by J.Edward
If you need to check any of the posts, you can find them in this comment.
I don't see any issue with putting Lite & Regular winners in the one gallery.
If everything works, I can get to work on updating the other challenge winners. It won't take much time for the 2014 - 2017 regular challenge winners, as I've already got links directly to the winning maps, and I can work through the older ones, as well as the Lite, over the next week or two. Also... no rush at all for this, if you're busy with other things.
Thanks again for looking at it!
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
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