General Discussion Thread

[Jitter]

Wyrm, along with Onni of course 

[Purple Wyrm]

Wyrm, along with Onni of course 

How did I miss that!?

[Groupoid]

Being lazy, I thought about automating my votes for SSSS, RTD and other comics on TWC. And I noticed that the captcha (the "verify that you’re a person"-check) is very weak, making it very easy to do so. I won’t go into details in this post, just know that I found two "broken" mechanisms, that each on their own allow easy automation of voting. There’s a technique available using which it’s possible to vote multiple times a day (also applicable to manual voting). Using this we can conclude: It’s possible to automatically vote multiple times a day on TWC, if one wants to.
It’s very well possible, that some people are already (ab)using the TWC-voting to get their chosen comics more votes. But I have no evidence to support this.

I’m conflicted about automating my votes, even if I’d only vote once a day. Now that I know how easy it is, I’m unsure about doing it. Even questioning whether I should vote at all. I just wanted to get it out somewhere, that the TWC-voting is "broken" in, in that it’s easy to automate it. It makes voting feel very abstract and purposeless to me, since it decays from "which comic has more readers that vote" to "which comics do the people that have voting-bots choose to vote for?". But I feel tempted to abuse the TWC-voting during one month, just voting everywhere and/or messing with the ranking. Just for show.
I haven’t written to TWC about this, because that’s more difficult for me.

Slightly different matter: Has anyone ever found voting-statistics of previous months?

[Mirasol]

Slightly different matter: Has anyone ever found voting-statistics of previous months?

Well, not sure if this helps, but there is a disqus-user (whose username I sadly forgot. Maybe it´s multiple people too.) who usually posts the amount of votes at least SSSS and Artd got and what spot they made into the comments every month. You´d have to look for it though, and know which pages were the end of a month. So probably not what you´re looking for... ^^"
I don´t really know how TWC works past how to click on vote in the reminders, so I´m afraid that´s the only thing I know.

Also, "That´s so previous millenium!"??? I so have to use that!

[Róisín]

Yastreb, I’m sure you have heard Star on the subject of his having asked people at his work, in late 1999, whether they needed the report this or next millenium.

[JoB]

I won’t go into details in this post, just know that I found two "broken" mechanisms, that each on their own allow easy automation of voting.

The HTML page that the TWC site hands out has the correct answer listed right in the web form, in addition to a numeric ID of the challenge. That's not a "broken" mechanism, that's removing half the facade in case the burglar misses the key under the doormat.

It’s very well possible, that some people are already (ab)using the TWC-voting to get their chosen comics more votes. But I have no evidence to support this.

Ah, you obviously haven't seen the times when certain comics - yes, plural, over time - made #1 on TWC with ten times or so the votes of #2, then ...

there is a disqus-user (whose username I sadly forgot. Maybe it´s multiple people too.) who usually posts the amount of votes at least SSSS and Artd got and what spot they made into the comments every month.

Greenwood Goat.

[Groupoid]

The second way is, that you can do a kind of "replay attack": You request a challenge once, then extract the solution (or solve the challenge manually if they’d stop sending the answers). Now you can re-use the response to this challenge on every comic & at any time you like. (I don’t know whether they rotate or shuffle their challenges) And since the voting doesn’t use any kind of session mechanism, voting once on one comic reduces to a one-liner with curl.
It’s just... There’s money involved in TWC, it isn’t just an "irrelevant" toy. The ranking matters for comic authors, resulting in exposure & income for them. Of course not for everyone the same amount. The usage of TWC produces income for the owners of TWC via advertising. And such software has the above issues. They may be intentional, they may not be.

I saw some of the comments by Greenwood Goat. Thanks for thinking about it. This makes the TWC website look to me even more like an artefact of previous internet ages. Something of the previous millennium perhaps?

The millennia and their starting dates... Either on January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001. One of these cans of worms concerning calendars. The way it’s relevant for me is a bit obscure: Either I’m born in the previous millennium or not. And those other technicalities: if millennia should have 1000 years, and we let a new millennium start on January 1, X000, then we have to include the year before 1 CE into the first millennium, which is often denoted by 1 BCE. Messing with the millennium-numbering for BCE dates... Oh, why didn’t they include a year 0?! It would have made such things easier. But no, Ancient people thought zero was not a number etc.
Somehow calendars are cursed to not make sense and not be aesthetically pleasing. But they’re pretty good at keeping the time and for organizing events I hear.

[Jitter]

Groupoid, you are right with your worry. A couple of years ago when I started, SSSS was often #1 and always in the very top positions, and then we suddenly crashed to the around #20 we are now. Often months open with one or several comics gaining thousands of votes at the very start. So there definitely is foul play involved.

I’m under the impression that TWC sometimes takes measures to weed out automatic voting, but then leaves it for a long while. This is just a hunch though.

Some comics apparently provide often updating vote bait pictures which are in in line with the adult content, which also draws votes from their communities. This is not foul play as such, but it’s also not something we can (or want to) repeat. You’ll notice how many of the top ones seem to have the recurring theme of boobs.

[Purple Wyrm]

Somehow calendars are cursed to not make sense and not be aesthetically pleasing. But they’re pretty good at keeping the time and for organizing events I hear.

A someone who sometimes tinkers with calendar reform I could not agree more!

Top Calendar Reform Tip: Forget about the moon. You're not going to make it work!

[Maglor]

You’ll notice how many of the top ones seem to have the recurring theme of boobs.

Sex sells, yup. But hey, a good art isn't meant to be liked by many. I believe Shiller said smth like this.

[JoB]

Oh why didn’t they include a year 0?

Because they started out as ordinals, and to this day, a coronation begins the first year of the reign of king Math-ew the Odd-Numbered, not the zeroth.
The fact that zeroes were not in common usage back then, if at all - remember, no zero in Roman numerals, for example - just added the Icing of Apparent Systematicity onto the Cake of Not Sufficiently Obvious Zero-Shapedness.

[JoB]

I’m under the impression that TWC sometimes takes measures to weed out automatic voting, but then leaves it for a long while. This is just a hunch though.

That seems to be the case, yes, though it's only ever been noticeable (to me) when it stopped the by-orders-of-magnitude winners. Who usually had been doing that for the better part of a year or more at that point.

On the other hand, TWC is sufficiently disinterested in "proper procedure" to the point that it seems impossible to nail down when exactly stretches of time - namely, "every 24h" and "every month" - start and end; It seems to neither align with the time you / your public IP last voted, nor a fixed timezone.

[Groupoid]

On the other hand, TWC is sufficiently disinterested in "proper procedure" to the point that it seems impossible to nail down when exactly stretches of time - namely, "every 24h" and "every month" - start and end; It seems to neither align with the time you / your public IP last voted, nor a fixed timezone.

For me the end of the 24h periods always coincides with my local midnight when I check. I haven’t ever tried to vote directly after midnight though, and didn’t do experiments with IPs in other timezones (mine is CET = UTC+1). Maybe they use some kind of GeoIP-lookup to match IPs to timezones.

Top Calendar Reform Tip: Forget about the moon. You're not going to make it work!

You made me have ideas: People probably tried to make moon-based calendars because it was a very handy way to tell the approximate date (as long as it wasn’t cloudy). This way you wouldn’t need to count days accurately but could still orient yourself by full/half/waning/waxing moons. Since we have calendars and clocks everywhere and always on hand, such requirements or benefits of moon or natural calendars have become less important for many people. (Agh! Who is "we" here? Such an egocentric sentence.)

[JoB]

You made me have ideas: People probably tried to make moon-based calendars because it was a very handy way to tell the approximate date (as long as it wasn’t cloudy). This way you wouldn’t need to count days accurately but could still orient yourself by full/half/waning/waxing moons. Since we have calendars and clocks everywhere and always on hand, such requirements or benefits of moon or natural calendars have become less important for many people. (Agh! Who is "we" here? Such an egocentric sentence.)

Actually, solar calendars are way older than the age of "tech gimmicks everywhere"; after all, the growth periods of the plants on your fields, migration of the game animals you hunt, etc. etc. are tied to the seasons, and thus the sidereal year, rather than the moon phases. See the Golden Hats, for example ...

[Groupoid]

I’m surprised that scholars believe that people actually used the golden hats as headwear. They look kinda impractical and very alien to me.