Anime Addventure Down

Prince Charon

Well-Known Member
#76
Estrecca said:
Prince Charon said:
I asked in July.  Around the 22nd or 23rd, I think.
The 22nd, yeah, and according to my files, I e-mailed you a WeTransfer download link that same day.

I'll include you in the next batch, I suppose.

Also, for those wondering how many people have the backup by now, some seventy people or so.
It's OK, someone else already did, unless that was you, in which case thank you.
 

ssokolow

Well-Known Member
#77
I received a WeTransfer link roughly 24 hours ago and I've started work on a better alternative to manually putting together lists of story starts.

So far, I just finished a script which validates, sanitizes, and dumps metadata. Since I want to keep all the bits together, I set up a GitHub repo for it:

github.com/ssokolow/addventure_tools

TL;DR: It makes a JSON list of of these, with full input sanitization, and it'll run through the entire dump in 40 seconds if you unpack it to a RAM drive (like /dev/shm on Linux):

Code:
{
  "id": 200054,
  "author_email": null,
  "parent_id": 198915,
  "author": "Kwakerjak",
  "title": "Creeping Doubts",
  "tags": [],
  "thread": "Coupled Union - Tick Tock"
}
Now, I'm going to sleep and, tomorrow, I'll try to make room to start work on some stuff to actually use the JSON it dumps.

(Maybe I'll start with a quick little script to reshuffle the JSON to be keyed by ID, followed by a script which uses Graphviz to visualize the descendants of a given episode. That should be easy to turn out quickly.)
 

ssokolow

Well-Known Member
#78
Ok, the "little" script for manipulating the data got bigger than I'd originally planned, so I didn't have time for the visualizer today, but at least that's done.

The GitHub README at the link I posted has been updated with the full details of what the new script can do but, as an appetizer:

1. It can process the first script's output into forms that make it trivial for anyone with any JavaScript web programming experience to re-create most of the missing Addventure UI bits (most = I don't have fuzzy thread matching yet) and then output that in your choice of JSON or YAML.

2. It can convert the data into a CSV or TSV file so you can play around with it in Excel or LibreOffice.
 

ssokolow

Well-Known Member
#79
The visualizer is now partially written, but I'm going to need to do some kind of clustering or multi-level browsing support before Vis.js will be performant enough to display the full data set (It's fine with 1000 or 2000 nodes, but not 44,000), so I'm thinking I'll go for some kind of "Click a thread to drill down to episodes within it" view.

However, the basic single-layer browse functionality has been written and does work with a reduced test data set.

Here's a screenshot

In addition to what's visible, it also has the following features:
  • Click-drag to pan, Scroll to zoom
  • Keyboard shortcuts for manipulating the graph (Because it was trivial. Full keyboard support may come later.)
  • Clicking a node in the graph will switch to showing it in the Episode Content tab
  • Following links in the "Episode Content" tab will update the focused node in the graph
  • All possible kinds of navigation will update the URL, which will ensure the Episode Content tab keeps your place if your browser saves your session.
  • Since starting it up can take a few seconds, there's a loading progress indicator with helpful error messages for situations like "Can't run from file://" and "addventure_graph.json not found".
Once I've got the graph performing acceptably with the full data set, I'm thinking of adding...
  • A search or filter box for easily finding a thread or episode title
  • A list-view tab to resurrect some of the Addventure's more traditional navigation options
  • Perhaps some heatmap-style color-coding when viewing the top-level "tree of threads" view so you can get a feel for how many episodes have been collapsed away before you drill down.
 

ssokolow

Well-Known Member
#80
Getting everything to work together is proving a bit more complicated than I'd hoped and I'm worried about burning out on this project due to the internal re-architecting I need to do.

I think I'll take a break from it until the weekend.
 

ssokolow

Well-Known Member
#81
I just wanted to drop in to say "I'm not dead" and my efforts aren't either.

(I've just been very busy because my motivation for one of my other projects came back from the dead and I'm trying to make as much progress as possible while I have it.)
 
#82
Can I get a copy of this WeTransfer link? And does it include the comments? Because those could include comedy gold
 

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#83
gemmaethanwhitaker said:
Can I get a copy of this WeTransfer link? And does it include the comments? Because those could include comedy gold
I only ever found the comments worthwhile a few times for items other that comments...   normally those where for whatever reason authors decided to post stories in the comments rather than as part of episode lists.   This was the case in some of KLSynth's episodes for example, among others.

I don't have those from KLSynth, sadly. The only one I have from comments was a old christmas spamfic put out by Kender where Akane beat up santa because she thought he was a burgler.
 
#85
Someone with a copy of the dump has put it up on some cheap web hosting: http://addventure.cf/

Please note that this is in at least one way worse then having the dump yourself, as it doesn't handle non-existing episodes well (The link turns purple)
 

AzaggThoth

Well-Known Member
#86
For being read only I've found it is at least handy for searching for titles and numbers for my own index.
 

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#87
gemmaethanwhitaker said:
Someone with a copy of the dump has put it up on some cheap web hosting: http://addventure.cf/

Please note that this is in at least one way worse then having the dump yourself, as it doesn't handle non-existing episodes well (The link turns purple)
The problem, is a raw site dump will not really work well for many people.

Many used the thread utilities to make easily readable story segments. This is actually a bad way to read the stories as you miss a lot of dead end material. But because of that, it shielded the reader from the raw interface.

I actually preferred reading threads in episode order. it has the advantage or reading all paths simultaneously, but the disadvantage of potentially confusing someone whom cannot keep track of potentially a large number of variants of the same story.

Fortunately I had gotten everything off I needed, but I do not have the same raw site dump that was going around so it is worthless to anyone but myself.


My main annoyance was while most of the site was inactive at that point, there were couple active stories there I was still hoping for updates on. With the site down, I have no idea if more were ever made by the respective authors. Like 'Setsuna's Fault-Wonder About Zero', to name just one.
 

Prince Charon

Well-Known Member
#88
On the bright side, it is better than nothing.
 
#89
PCHeintz72, I believe you're confusing AA with BEA, BEA's chain view functions as you describe, but AA's (As of something like two years before it went down, and likely longer) included a full list of branches at the end of each episode, even those unused, I've got some MAFF's if you need proof.
 

PCHeintz72

The Sentient Fanfic Search Engine mk II
#90
gemmaethanwhitaker said:
PCHeintz72, I believe you're confusing AA with BEA, BEA's chain view functions as you describe, but AA's (As of something like two years before it went down, and likely longer) included a full list of branches at the end of each episode, even those unused, I've got some MAFF's if you need proof.
Blinks...

Ehhh... I'm not confusing the two. Of them, the AA had/has much better navigation. But both could be fairly cumbersome.

What I'm referring to is how users utilized the utilities to view the stories. There were several, each with various downsides and upsides.

I personally preferring linking to the chain page showing all episodes associated with a episode chain, and reading them not in order posted, but in numerical order, thus reading all the plot threads in a chain at same time. I almost never actually clicked on those bottom links in each episode.

Some would instead go to a chain page, and read top to bottom, as that would be in order posted, not in order by episode number.

Some would go to a chain pages first episode, and read the rest by navigating the options at the bottom of each thread.

Some, would go to the last known episode of a chain, and go to the utilities and make a custom chain going back x number of episodes, then use the custom generated HTML to read the story, this skips all the other possibilities.

I've heard of a few, that only read eps by specific authors, to do tht, needed to go to author page and look for the relevent thread title , and read in chronological order.

There were other methods, most variations on the above.
 
#91
PCHeintz72 said:
Some, would go to the last known episode of a chain, and go to the utilities and make a custom chain going back x number of episodes, then use the custom generated HTML to read the story, this skips all the other possibilities.
No it doesn't (At least if you want to read them), each episode still listed all it's options.

And I can think of some other problems, threads which branch (Like Setsuna's Fault), threads with have threads inside them (Ami PC), threads which have their root episode in another thread (Setsuna's Fault/Hotaru's Sensei doesn't have a common root in thread). It also presumes that the author of a given episode puts enough information into the episode to allow you to identify which branch it belongs to.

And then there's episode 35337, which I'm convinced isn't supposed to be descended from 33225
 
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