Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Another new stupid Twitch feature

    Recently discovered another new feature on Twitch TV chat. Seems like any viewer is now able to show deleted messages in the channel chat. All you have to do is click the <deleted message> to show what was actually said. Why oh why??? Those messages get deleted for a reason! Why on earth would Twitch decide to make them show? Yet another stupid feature implemented, totally useless and risky. What if there was a link showing that leads to a porn site or download for some virus? Now viewers might get tempted after all. What if there was some really abusive chat? Viewers can now see it anyway...
    I run a chat bot to purge those links being sent to my channel to prevent anyone from getting into trouble or being re-directed to some sick or inappropriate site. Repetitive characters, emotes, or stupid chat interrupting ascii art also gets purged by my bot for a reason. So now another viewer can just click the <deleted message> and copy some nice artwork with characters that spreads across 15 lines to use for another channel? Abusive chat or anything being said that doesn't fit my rules gets deleted by my moderators or me as the channel owner myself. I decided I did NOT want to show any links posted without permission. I want my chat to be clean and respectful. Now Twitch is making decisions for me instead and tempting viewers to see whatever was there anyway. What the fuck is wrong with you guys at Twitch? I never asked for this and it will make my bot pretty much useless since curiosity is human nature!
    Now if this would just work for moderators and channel owners, I might perhaps understand. Just to check if the timeout was actually reasonable or maybe to report after the message having been purged. However you don't even have to be logged in, anyone can make it show. Not happy, once again.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Moving away from Twitch, please sub to me on YouTube!

    I am so fed up with Twitch TV that I decided to move away from Twitch TV as soon as possible. Old problems like the chat and server capacity have never truly been solved and I strongly dislike most of the changes that Twitch decided to push. Streaming quality is now worse as ever resulting in losing connection to Twitch servers and frames being dropped on their end. Chat is usually derpy as fuck. They still can not deal with big Live events going on. The list is ongoing as for streaming to Twitch TV.
    As a viewer there is partly the same list, but also the fact that streaming quality is not as supposed to be and now way more resource heavy as well since the changes. Where I used to be able to watch 1080p perfectly ok, I am now not even capable of watching 720p (high) without flash telling me the video seems to 'stutter'. I am thus forced to watch supposedly 480p (medium) settings. Those settings pretend to be even more about quality compared to the old resolution settings. Therefor there was no need to even change this. However this has been Twitch's reasoning for pushing those changes.
    As for the looks of Twitch, they promised to listen to the community, but instead forced us all into the new layout, which has SOME inprovements, but is mostly terrible. Just the info section alone sucks terribly and has been downgraded to limited markdown where it used to be HTML 4. Page load is even longer now and causes all sorts of problems. Some problems even persist until you clear your cache, which should not even be needed in the first place.
    All in all, ever since I was forced to move to Twitch in June 2012, I ran into all kinds of bullshit problems with promises for them to be fixed. Instead of fixing things, the main problems still exist and the amount of problems and bullshit has only increased. I have been patient for a long time hoping for things to get better. I am fed up now and do NOT wish to continue streaming on Twitch TV anymore. They make shit loads of money, but this seems about all they care for, instead of spending it 'wisely'. Even though the community on Twitch is great, I do realize there is no true 'good' alternative with such a wonderful community, which is main reason for everyone taking their crap. I have been looking into alternatives and my best option would be to go to YouTube instead. As soon as I get 100 subscribers on YouTube, I will be able to start streaming there.

So ... PLEASE SUB TO ME ON YOUTUBE, so I can move away from Twitch TV and enjoy streaming again.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Website reached 10k views!

Today on October 15th 2013, my website reached the milestone of 10.000 views. Thanks everyone, love you all!

Monday, October 14, 2013

Update to the Broadcast page

Finally got to work on the 'Broadcast' page/tab. Been planning to make some changes for quite some time. For now I rearranged the video and chat to show two channels side by side and the chat below. Text input fields now allow you to change channel one or channel two on the go after clicking the button next to it. Still thinking of using the full screen and have some auto-re-size feature and options for selecting the amount of channels to show. For now I am happy with it. It enables watching dual streams :-)

TeamSpeak and Minecraft are back up!

The servers seem to be back up again. Sorry for the inconvenience and downtime. Lets continue to have fun ;-)

Saturday, October 12, 2013

TeamSpeak and Minecraft

Both the TeamSpeak and Minecraft servers are down at the moment. The host is working on fixing it and hopefully we will be back online soon again. This means I can not stream on Twitch TV either until this is resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

LUA program for ComputerCraft to send server messages

Today I updated a quick program I made to be able to send server messages to the Minecraft server. It uses an Advanced Computer and a Command Block. Of course you need to enable Command Blocks in the server.properties file and in the config file for ComputerCraft. The program actually consists of two programs. One is the 'startup' program to actually send the server messages and the other is the 'Broadcast' program. This last program will ask you on which side of the computer you place the command block, how many messages you want it to send, what the messages are and at what time interval you want the messages to be sent. Those variables are then stored in a file called 'Variables' and it will run the 'startup' program. The 'startup' program will check if the 'Variables' file is available and if so it will run using those variables. If the 'Variables' file is not available it will run the 'Broadcast' file to ask for the variables needed and then store them to run 'startup' again. The file actually sending the messages is of course called 'startup' so it will continue to run even after a server restart. To stop it from running and change the variables, just hold <ctrl> + T for a few seconds to terminate and then run 'Broadcast'.

Here are the pastebin links for both files needed:
'startup': http://pastebin.com/vsA51u6Q
'Broadcast': http://pastebin.com/Fgh82w5y

Click below (read more) to read the full code for both files.

Monday, October 7, 2013

Fun Paradise III - Notice

The server problems seem to be fixed for now, just not sure what will happen once we try using solar panels again. Since I do not have access to the TCAdmin Web Console at the moment, there is no way to control the server. I can only get access to the file system for FTP backups. Until problems with the control panel are solved we just have to keep our fingers crossed the server does not start crashing again.

Fun Paradise III - NOTICE !

The Minecraft server might be down for a while considering I have been awake for way too long and desperately need some sleep, while the server crashes on IC2 > Bad timing ... *sigh*, but I will try to fix it as soon as possible. Currently uploading a backup while looking into the problem. Please be patient and my apologies for the down-time and disappointment for not being able to play for now. Truly hope to have it back up soon.