No Tights For Me

May 1st, 2004 - 22:15 | 9 comments

I finished my OU assignment! Woohoo! The last part was a write-up of an experiment, which to be honest was a piece of cake given all the practice we had at those in school. Even better was that this had a word limit, so there was no need to waffle on for pages with the myriad of ways the experiment could be improved etc. Despite having finished, I have so far resisted the temptation to buy City of Heroes. I took a deep breath and forced myself to carry on playing Broken Sword 2, which as it happens I completed. I still didn’t buy CoH, but instead moved onto Runaway, which, so far, kicks ass. Adventure Game + point & click + great graphics + a good storyline (so far) = a happy Andrew. I had it shipped from the US a few weeks ago as it’s been continually delayed in this country. With the current exchange rate it was only £18 total, which is pretty cool.

Still…superheroes. I agree that it would be fun to play as a villain, but then you’d want PvP, which always causes problems. It’d suck if you were a newbie and some high-level villian kept killing you. The nature of the game is that you can be a hero at any point at any time, so you couldn’t really confine pvp to certain areas. You could impose limits on who could fight who, I suppose, but it’d get fairly limiting then.

Superheroes superheroes superheroes. UPDATE: This review, as with all I’ve read, seems to like it very much…

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9 Responses to “No Tights For Me”

1 Simon May 1st, 2004 at 10:48 pm

Yeah, its just, not knowing a lot about the game I am some what reliant on other peoples views/reviews. Now, I don’t know if I would want to be a villain and those are good points, but as penny arcade pointed out, why would someone (ie computer small time villain) mug someone in a city with 50 heroes per square foot? Apparently there might be a City Of Villains game, which I presume would have PvP since while super heroes, at least the normal kind not the cooler anti hero kind, wouldn’t go around eliminating their rivals, to the best of my knowledge villains obey no such code.
2 Simon May 1st, 2004 at 10:52 pm

Hmm, my first attempt to post was blocked for questionable content. I had the word ‘go’ followed by the word ’round’ until I changed it to ‘around’. Apparently the ‘go’ followed by a space and then the ‘ro’ trips the spam filter. Now, I have seen similar things happen on forums with filters etc. Normal words get blocked because a substring contains questionable content. Is it too hard to check for complete words? Just add punctuation/whitespace to the end of the filter. Note, this is aimed at whatever tit designed your spam filter. It is a shame such things are necessary. Like the copy protection on cds such things mainly stand to only harm the legitimate user.
3 Nodster May 2nd, 2004 at 12:59 am

..in the company of a mysterious striptease dancer..

so your enjoying runaway then huh
4 Andrew May 2nd, 2004 at 10:04 am

It is vaguely possible that the creative team on this game was mainly composed of men
5 Andrew May 2nd, 2004 at 10:07 am

Hmmm, I’ll check the spam filter to see if your phrase (which, stupidly, I just typed and tried to submit) is included when it shouldn’t be. Sorry to be a pain, there!

There are various levels of bad guy in this game, and all the street muggings etc. tend to be perpetrated by the ‘minions’ - basically dumbass thugs. Thinking back to school, there were definitely people there who would mug somebody in a city with 50 heroes per square 0.3048 metres
6 Andrew May 2nd, 2004 at 10:23 am

this is a go ro test…
7 Edward May 2nd, 2004 at 1:43 pm

Simon: the blacklist is normally very good. There was a correction to the entries in the blacklist:
\bgo.ro
was changed to:
\bgo\.ro\b
but mt-blacklist normally just adds extra entries.
Ah well. I’ll write to the author and see what he thinks - we need an update that allows entries to be removed from everyone’s blacklist to ensure that there are no mistakes (like this one).
8 Lynsey May 2nd, 2004 at 3:37 pm

why is go ro rude?
9 Edward May 2nd, 2004 at 4:35 pm

The blacklists are to try and stop spam. Authors of sites try and post lots of comments with links to their site in them. This would result in their sites being ranked more highly than others, and so this is essential for spam / advertising since it means more people go to the site and then more money.

The MT-Blacklist plugin works like this:
1. User comments on blog
2. Comments are then checked against a list of sites. The list is more complicated than just a list though. It uses regex (regular expressions) which means that it can do powerful searches
3. If the search picks something up it blocks it, otherwise it allows the post to be commented, and the web site rebuilds and the comment arrives on the site.

Part 2. is more complex:
Example URL fragment

([\w\-_.]+\.)?(l(so|os)tr)\.[a-z]{2,}
== Catchall regex for l_s_o_t_r.xxx and l_o_s_t_r .xxx with or without a subdomain (remove the spaces to read this properly)

(levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|z yban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_. ]*\.[a-z]{2,}
== Super regexp for domains containing levitra, lolita, phentermine, viagra, vigrx, vig-rx, zyban, valtex, xenical, adipex and meridia

The idea is that spammers need to post the same sites over and over, and they’ll re-use the same words too. So, we do a search for all these bad words.

Now what happened (it appears, I’m only guessing) was that there was a mistake in the entry of the blacklist. The period in \bgo.ro means that any letter can be inserted in between the go and ro. What needed to happen was that the period needed to be included to stop go.ro, and to do that you use a \ (I think) giving:
\bgo\.ro\b
There’s a page on my blog about regexp:
http://cgi.eaglecentre.force9.co.uk/blog/archives/000280.php

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