Site enhancements -- November 22

[Tim Vasquez]

* Tapatalk is up and running again, so feel free to give it a shot with your mobile devices.

* The Stormtrack Chat section is running. I'm not sure if the configuration is complete, but when I dropped in everything looked normal.

* There is no more support for the "Thanks" button effective with V4.2.2. Some users have constructed patches to keep it working, but I'm uncomfortable putting patched files on the site since patch code is not very well tested, and running suspect PHP executables is always asking for trouble (SQL injection exploits, etc). Myself and the moderators will be looking around for possible replacements; if anyone sees one that might work, feel free to let us know in this thread and we'll take a look at it. FYI, the mod we had been running was the "[AJAX] Post Thank You Hack" . There is a chance we may install the patch for it anyway if nothing else can be found, but I will need to look at this in more detail to see if it's something we should risk.

* In case you missed it, I posted an announcement in regard to the Adobe security breach from last month. If you had an Adobe account and regularly use crappy passwords, someone else can easily use the data from the breach to figure out how to log into your account on Stormtrack, Facebook, MySpace (it might even be Tom doing it), and so on. If you've made a decent effort to come up with a unique password that's all your own and didn't write it out in their password hint, it's very unlikely your password can be reconstructed since the password ciphertext is encrypted heavily enough to be unbreakable. It's bad passwords like these that have done many people in. It shows 130,832 people used "qwerty" as their password!

* For about 3 or 4 years we have talked about getting the Forecast Targeting game going. This was the thing we had going in 2004-2006 or so where there was a map of the Great Plains and you picked a target before noon, and the "solution" was graded later in the evening with everyone's scores in terms of distance to the tornadoes. I really, really want to get this implemented for 2014. My wife (who is very talented with PHP) was supposed to get this going each time, but something always intervened. We have a little bit of a cash reserve now to where if she can't do it, I'll contract the work out. If anyone here is a PHP expert AND an established user here and wants to take a look at the code and possibly implement it, feel free to let me know and I'll send the files to you to look at. I believe the code is pretty simple; I've listed the target game files below to show the general structure.

If you all have any other ideas for the board, please let us know.

Tim

Chase target game:

 Directory of C:\DAT\st\game

11/22/2013  12:43 AM    <DIR>          .
11/22/2013  12:43 AM    <DIR>          ..
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          admin
03/30/2004  12:59 PM                58 blocked_ips.txt
03/30/2004  12:59 PM             1,863 del_vote.php
03/30/2004  12:59 PM             2,583 detailed.php
03/30/2004  12:59 PM             1,971 historical.php
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          images
03/30/2004  12:40 PM               157 index.php
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          root
03/30/2004  12:59 PM               359 sol_info.php
03/30/2004  12:58 PM             3,081 vote.php
03/30/2004  12:56 PM            20,143 vote_class.php
03/30/2004  12:58 PM               360 vote_info.php
              9 File(s)        30,575 bytes

 Directory of C:\DAT\st\game\admin

04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          .
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          ..
03/30/2004  12:38 PM             2,795 index.php
               1 File(s)          2,795 bytes

 Directory of C:\DAT\st\game\images

04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          .
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          ..
03/30/2004  12:37 PM           207,332 base-a.jpg
03/30/2004  12:37 PM            98,900 base-l.jpg
03/30/2004  12:37 PM             6,670 base-m.jpg
03/30/2004  12:37 PM               155 error_log
03/30/2004  12:51 PM             2,871 image.php
               5 File(s)        315,928 bytes

 Directory of C:\DAT\st\game\root

04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          .
04/27/2010  06:45 PM    <DIR>          ..
03/30/2004  01:02 PM                58 blocked_ips.txt
03/30/2004  01:02 PM            13,749 solutions.txt
03/30/2004  01:02 PM               837 votes.txt
               3 File(s)         14,644 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
              19 File(s)        363,942 bytes
              11 Dir(s)  147,919,040,512 bytes free