Snafu Tales

Please not to be deleting this page half way though a discussion

I have a cunning plan... (Baldrick; BlackAdder?) but I need people to help me out here. The first web-site I ever designed (and I really mean my absolute first ever attempt at programming/HTML so don’t laugh) was to build a site called SnafuTales which was supposed to be a site based on a game I played with my friends as a kid.

You need at least two players but the more the better. Each person has a piece of paper and writes at the top the first sentence of a story (about two or three lines long), you fold the paper over so you can only see the last line of what you've written and then you pass it on to the person next to you, they write another bit that sort of follows on, fold it and pass it on and so on. When you get bored or the story is long enough you open up the paper and read the story out to your friends. It's great fun to play, it's really silly and kids especially, love it.

The problem with the web version was this - I think I have to learn Perl to make it work, and I don't think I'm up to that yet. However, recently I've been thinking - what about a kind of mutation of the wiki technology made to serve that purpose, the more I think about it the more it seems possible. That's why I need peoples help... HOW if at all could this work? -- SusannahWilliams?

Sounds like a fun game. I have seen a similar one that some Sci-Fi authors played, and even published the results of. The authors alternated writing chapters, trying to get their favorite characters out of the messes that the other author put them in.

What if "browsing" a page first took you to a screen where the last line of the page was printed, followed by a text editing area. Typing something in the text area and pressing submit appends the contents of the text area to the page, and then shows it to you. That way, you have to contribute before you get to read.

You could take out some of the magic like WikiWords, and picture links, etc. You would also need a "main" screen with a list of the current pages, and a way to create new ones.

Later, you could provide a way to "complete" a story, so that everyone can just read it without ever adding to it again. -- DougKing

That's the kind of structure I was thinking of, how would the actual back end work? would I need to intergrate a form script of some kind? -- SusannahWilliams?

I played this in college (wait, I'm still in college. Last year, then). Almost every story turned into porn by the end. Shows what's on college students' minds.

Anyway, yeah, you'd need a CGI script of some sort. It could be really simple though. Open page file, write to browser, display a footer with the text box. When you get a submit, open page, append text of submit, close file, display changed contents. Maybe a dozen lines of Perl or so. -- JonathanTang

• 14 lines if you use MySQL instead of a flat file.

could you add an expletives filter like in a chat room? -- s

• ThereIsNothingPerlCannotDo, nothing!!!! :-)

1-2 lines of Perl. I should try to implement this when I get home, but I don't currently have a Perl interpreter handy. -- jt

• You can implement a Perl interpreter in only a line or two of perl (Perl 6, that is). ;-)

When you say 'you' do you really mean me or do you mean 'some person who can program already.' Perl just sounds an incy bit frightening.

• PerlLanguage is a weird one, particularly for someone coming from CeePlusPlus (or VisualBasic or JavaScript) who has little to no experience with UnixOs. It's the screwy-looking UnixCulturalAssumption language which inspired RubyLanguage, which is a whole lot easier on the brain than Perl for a C++-like person.
• Not for someone like you who is well on her way to learning 4 languages already. For instance, this really short and clear perl snippet will calculate the phase of the moon and warn you when to avoid werewolves: DGNM &D"\ ,f>;] e<rD }jE y3dU e}5S M!' h|1Y ,_O@& %`OK YDt) PW|e8 C:J2 Q3!# _~3G , !' ^=H -% G57j YlCd?[n i1;5& ;h?EZ0( y=VS o}DD a 48i cfi] `1RVW 5x78 iemD <5]E {X?9 :}]S >-M@ k*j9Q 6d<Sq G Yx E8l &4:; ~o hV -Ujoe .I>z s&+! SX {W K!R|# ez H#}
  • P.S. That may look slightly odd if you're used to Perl 5 -- it's Perl 6 syntax. See the latest Apocalypse.
  • Y'know that IncompatibleTimeSharingSystem had a bug that depended on the phases of the moon? http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9403311625.AA03462%40galileo.think.com
  • Jargon file entry: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/phase-of-the-moon.html

To filter the expletives in a simplistic manner, just pass all lines through a series of substitutions like s/\bexpletive\b/*/gi -- one for each word. (That gobbledygook is RegularExpression syntax.) The g and i are important to replace all occurrences, and be case insensitive. The problem is that they can still make it obvious what they're saying by adding spaces or any kind of punctuation. For example, if "asdf" was an expletive, they could just type "a s d f" or "A.S.D.F" to bypass the filter. If you make the filter generic enough to catch all the expletives, you will also likely catch a lot of non-expletives.

You could have a server-side script that goes through all content once daily, and mails you about any new suspect content, which you could manually edit or ignore. The problem with that is that once you start moderating it, you will be expected to keep moderating it... -- dk

• In some countries (certainly in the U.S.) it may also provide certain legal obligations to continue to moderate, and to do it quite carefully -- once you start, then if you fail to do so, it can be actionable. The U.K. slander laws would make me nervous; they're much more onerous than those in the U.S. (being true is no defense; argh). Auto-moderation is the only way to go.

CollaborativeFiction sounds like your SnafuTales game. You might like to check it out.

Yes, that is very much the vien of the idea I'd like to bring to life. I don't think I'd want the anyone edit any feature (that would be wiki and not my game) so, as some people have said, it will probably need a lot of moderating and a few anti-expletive scripts. I'd use PerlLanguage for the back-side (probably not the most appropriate term) of the thing, and I already have half a front-end going. I need to get a serious amount of work done before I can knit the two together, though. -- s