Experimental Services, Brainstorming & Feedback…

The first of the Experimental Services is the Lemurian Puppet Scheduler. I think the blurb in the Footer explains my thinking behind the Phases of the Moon and the relevance to NationStates.

So, here are the questions: What are your thoughts on the uses and what other comparable & outside-the-box kinds of things might we use to make NS more enjoyable and easier to play?

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The LPS was taken out of the Footer for a limited time as it was interferring with connectivity for some members here. I'm not really sure why.

I can explain why... if the moon phase image server was down, Internet Explorer tends to crap out on the page because the printing of the image is handled by a JavaScript. We experienced the same problem on the CDQ forums a few months back when my university server, which hosted our banner there, went down for a few hours. The only way I was able to get into the forum and let the mods know what happened was by using something with a Mozilla kernel. Needless to say, Microsoft's error handling in their javascript services is subpar.

I noticed a few days back that the image was not available and the calculatorcat.com servers were out of comission. It's more than likely that this blocked proper display of the page. You've got a choice. You can remove it each time the server is down (which may not happen very often, or it may... I have no way of telling) or you can just discountinue the service altogether. However, perhaps you should contact the people who maintain the site and ask if their servers experience frequent down-time. If this was just a momentary thing, I wouldn't worry about it greatly.

I caused a lot of havoc with my computer. I could load the page but couldn't view anything. It kept cutting out.

Edit: It also seems to be slowing done my system now as well.

I'll suspend it again until I've chatted with Galdago and with Calculatorcat.

I can state categorically that there's no way that javascript can "slow down" your PC, even with Internet Explo--err, never mind, I forgot that application's a piece. However it's still highly unlikely. The only thing it can potentially do is render the page unviewable in IE.

That's sort of what I meant. It takes forever for the threads to come up, and posting is very slow. Now that it is't there, everything is fine again.

i must admit I liked the info on the Lunar Phase, just wished it could be called up like a thread instead of always being present.

That's largely the problem with the calculatorcat script. Since it's handled by javascript, your page load time is at the mercy of the efficiency of the calculatorcat host server. Until IE gets a hold of that image, it simply WILL NOT load the remainder of the page, which we all know is an incredibly pesky aspect. I'll work with Thel on some other way to possibly display the data.

Thank you. (Now the rest is due to a dare) You are truly worthy of my undying love.