Today we will be talking about scalability. Don’t know what I am talking about?
Wikipedia describes it like this:

In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged.

Or for some of our readers who found this sentence to long: does stuff break when it has to do more work.

Now I could go into technical details about our database and all that technical shenanigans, but I won’t. Because today we are talking about game mechanics on whatthemovie.
First, let’s have a look at something that does scale very well: Solving snapshots.
We do not care if there are 100 or 1000 people on the site, solving snapshots (again, from a game mechanics perspective, technologically we would of course need more hardware).
If we doubled our user base, your personal experience solving shots would not be altered.

So to find things that do not scale well, we are looking for something, that does become worse the more people are playing. For whatthemovie that is the “New Submissions”-section and shot uploading in general.
The more people are here, the worse is the uploading experience. Since we can only approve a limited amount of snapshots more shots in the queue also means more shots not accepted. And shots that are not accepted make our users sad. And since we want happy users, we have to do something about it. At the moment there roughly 300 shots in the New Submissions. If we would have double the amount of players, there would be 600 shots. You see the problem.

Now we are at the central point of this blog post: The current uploading system does not scale.

There are some options we have to improve the situation for now.

• The first option would be increasing the number of shots we accept. Would flood “Feature Films”.
• Second option would be to decrease the slots per user. Would make the users sad.

What is even worse ist, that these options will not scale well. We could half the available upload slots and after twice as many people have signed up, we have the same problem.

Still lost in what I am trying to say? Look at this clip from Futurama:

One idea that would scale is: make multiple whatthemovies. All separate from each other, separate users, separate “New Submissions”, separate “Feature Films”. Yes, this is obviously a bad idea, we’re not going to do it, but it is an example of what would scale.

So, we are asking you to post suggestions, hints and ideas at the forum. And if you have a suggestion, ask yourself “does it scale?”.

As you might have noticed whatthemovie is down as of 7th of June, 23:00 CEST.

We expect to be back by 8th of June, 01:00 CEST.

We are back!

Our operating system has decided that after it had a little screw up in the hard disk management code it maybe should recheck the disks. That in itself is probably a good idea. The problem though is, that it also takes quite some time to run that checks.

We have decided to take the site offline in the meantime so the checks can run faster. Our options were 3 hours no whatthemovie at all or two days of horribly slow whatthemovie and we opted for the 3 hours.

As usually in situations like this, we try to keep the blog, the forum and the chat (scroll down) up and running.

And while we are waiting for the disk check to finish, have you thought about becoming a supporter? The donated money goes into financing the servers. *hint*

We hope to be back soon and wish you a nice time on whatthemovie (as soon as we’re back up)

PS: Also, if you like a view into the coding monkeys (read: my) brain, check out my blog

PPS: If you like nice looking blogs you better check out the design monkeys (read: naut) blog which looks way neater and has pictures of bunnies (no guarantee on that)

You know those scenes in sci-fi movies when the hero needs to learn something really fast and it gets uploaded to his brain through a series of flashing images? Awesome.
And you also know that depressing feeling that you might have forgotten a few shots in the archive? Sad.

But fear no more. Via brand new technology recently acquired at an alien abduction it is now possible to upload The Archive directly into your brain. It’s pretty much what the same process Hypnotoad uses. Be not afraid. It won’t hurt (Well perhaps your eyes a little.)
WARNING: There’s some serious blinky-flashy-stuff going on here and that might induce seizures, involuntary urination and/or spontaneous self combustion. If you hit your head on the desk, spoil your pants or make your house smelly smoky, it’s not our fault. (Seriously, it’s blinking as hell, be careful.)
If that does not dissuade you from viewing, move your chair closer to your screen, full screen the video and click play:

No animals were harmed during the production of this brainlink.

Today: Searching trough twitter for a flattr invite code and then signing up with it.
If you are on a unix and have ruby already running a simple gem install twitter mechanize should install all prerequisites.

require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
require 'mechanize'
 
loop do
  Twitter::Search.new('flattr').each do |r| 
    puts r.text
    if matches = /[a-f0-9]{17}/.match(r.text) 
      agent = Mechanize.new
      page = agent.get('https://flattr.com/register')
      form = page.forms.find{|f| f.action =~ /register/}
      form.inviteCode = matches[0]
      form.username = 'USERNAME'
      form.email = 'EMAIL@EXAMPLE.COM'
      form.password ='PASSWORD'
      form.passwordConfirm = 'PASSWORD'
      form.checkboxes.first.check
      page = agent.submit(form)
      exit  
    end
  end
  sleep 60
end