Top questions:
Creating episodes questions:
Text formatting questions::
History or functionality questions:
Unending BE specific questions:
Dictaphone specific questions:
Top questions
The original "Creating episode" page is stuck in your browser's cache. Try hitting Refresh (F5) or Ctrl+Refresh. If that doesn't work try clearing your browser's cache or temp files. Or just try stopping your browser completely and restarting it.
There is a process that runs every half hour that cleans up episodes that have been Under Construction for more than 2 hours. So if you wait between 2 and 2.5 hours, the episode will be available again.
To avoid this problem, if you change your mind about creating an episode you should ALWAYS click on the "Cancel" link at the bottom of the creation pages. This will clean up the "Under construction" page immediately so you (or someone else) can try again.
Our host site, the BEA, made a requirement in 2005 that certain words be censored on the site. Here's the complete list:
The best way is to add a comment to the episode asking for a fix to be made. The admin checks comments multiple times a day and usually responds within 24 hours.
Because years ago the sysadmin asked us to put a throttle on the usage of certain search functions, so that if the system load average was greater than 1 then the function would not run.
Creating episodes questions:
Firstly, you can only link to episodes that are marked "Linking enabled" at the bottom of the episode.
Secondly, when you are creating your episode,
When you create an episode, on the second creation page there is a checkbox for "Send mail when the path is extended". If you check this and put in your email address, you should receive an email notification when your episode is extended or when a comment is added. You must check the checkbox, just filling in your email address isn't good enough.
Note that sometimes email notifications are blocked by users' spam filters.
Text formatting questions:
No. The Addventure only supports straight-up HTML code. There are numerous resources on the web for how to code basic HTML formatting.
See this
w3schools page. The minimum requirement is
<img src="image url">
but you can use other properties on the img tag to set things
like size and alt text.
Not in the body of the episode. Those are blocked by the software. However you can put external links in the title or signature. Alternatively you can put the raw URL in your episode, and leave it up to the reader to copy the URL into their browser.
Because whether they will display properly depends on what the reader's browser's default character set is. If the setting is wrong then these characters will often appear as garbage characters.
That doesn't mean you can't have special characters in your episodes. But to be safe, you should replace these with their corresponding HTML codes.
Some examples:
| non-ASCII symbols | HTML codes to use instead |
|---|---|
| “ | “ |
| ” | ” |
| Дж | Дж |
| 月子 | 月子 |
There are many sites on the Web which document what those codes are. Here's one:
https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
For non-English characters (such as Japanese, Chinese, Russian, but also certain letters in French, German, Spanish...) there are many sites that feature free Unicode-to-HTML converters where you can paste your text in. Here's one:
https://onlineutf8tools.com/convert-utf8-to-html-entities
Historically on this Addventure, the Japanese episodes are examples of doing it the right way, and the Russian episodes are examples of doing it the wrong way. (See the Other Languages page)
History or functionality questions:
The Addventure code was originally created by Allen S. Firstenberg (prisoner) in the early 1990s. He used it to run the original Addventure site, which had 3 separate games running on it before it was locked down in 1998. A lot of writers came over to the UBEA Addventure from the original Addventure's Game 3.
The Addventure you're looking at was set up in 1998 by MarkT, using the software version originally released by Firstenberg in 1995. It has been heavily enhanced since then by MarkT and Adama with some contributions by dmuk. This Addventure was administered by MarkT until he handed over the reins to Adama around 2004.
I didn't want to have a situation where multiple processes might try to update the same episode at the same time -- which could lead to the episode being corrupted. So any function which will update an episode is sent to a queue, and a single daemon process which runs every 15 minutes reads that queue and updates the episodes as needed. Thus no corruption, but it does mean that episode updates may take up to 15 minutes to appear.
An episode with little or no body, which exists mainly to provide a list of branching options. Sometimes this also refers to an episode whose body is just an echo of the previous episode's body, or which just contains a longer explanation for the options. Basically, an episode with zero story content.
Frequently authors will chain a lot of these list episodes together as a way of getting round the 6-item limit on episode options.
No. MarkT did install a search engine -- I believe using Excite? -- early on, but he disabled it after some time (this was before my time). Currently our only options are Google or other external search engines.
(For example: http://old.bearchive.com/~addventure/game1/docs/826/826374.html)
Back in 1999 the Addventure code started getting errors, and MarkT figured out it was due to the software having issues reading directories with a large number of files in them. He revamped the software so that episodes and their related files are now stored in subdirectories, whose name is "episode number / 1000" (zero-padded to three digits when needed).
Each comment causes a notification email to be sent to the Admin with the contents of the comment. The Admin then reviews the emails, mainly to check for fix requests but also to keep an eye out for flamewars or other potential problems.
Unending BE specific questions:
Authors started voluntarily adding storyline prefixes (such as "HH:" or "Nickophrena:") to their titles so that readers looking at episode lists could more easily tell which episodes belonged to storylines they were interested in. The first prefix was used in 1999, but they got really popular starting in 2000.
Dictaphone specific questions:
Yes. This hasn't been going on long enough yet to establish regular procedure, but at the moment I am asking Hydro to send me updated chapters after the end of each month.
Because it's always been an optional setting in Addventure games (the original word was "room") and I wanted to try a different setting.
Because the person who wanted the import asked that imported episodes have extra options in case someone wanted to add onto old threads.