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Development => Calculators => Calculator News, Coding, Help & Talk => Topic started by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 23, 2018, 12:28:39 AM

Title: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 23, 2018, 12:28:39 AM
(https://i.imgur.com/tWcAshJ.png)

Old timers will get what I mean.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Yuki on October 23, 2018, 12:31:13 AM
Don't forget about Fortnite Quadratic Solver
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 23, 2018, 01:13:25 AM
Well, they didn't even allow quadratic solvers anymore in 2004. xd

(although later they started doing it again because there was a quadratic solver sub-folder). But there was also a sub-folder just for Pokémon text-based clones, Dragon Ball text-based clones, Pokémon clones with graphics and Dragon Ball clones with graphics.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Caleb Hansberry on October 31, 2018, 11:21:59 PM
I get what you mean.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Travis on November 12, 2018, 03:46:26 AM
Somehow this sort of reminds me of one time during the first week of June 2011 where one person suddenly uploaded something like 300–400 files to ticalc.org, all at once and without warning. We had to order an emergency evacuation I think it took me about a week or two to finish processing them. It turned out that over 2/3 of the files were actually duplicates, though, uploaded separately for each compatible calculator, because the uploader didn't know about requesting links. I finally emailed him and let him know about it so he wouldn't have to spend his life filling out three times more upload forms than he had to, haha. Fun times.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on November 12, 2018, 03:51:43 AM
Although this is a lot of files, the fact it took up to two weeks to process them reminded me about how archeological the ticalc.org "admin panel" is. Although I have never seen it myself, I often heard that it was essentially command console-based.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Travis on November 15, 2018, 04:53:49 PM
Yeah, the main file processing program is an ncurses terminal app and looks something like this. Then there's a completely separate web-based admin section for managing screenshots, comments, and miscellaneous things. The most amazingly exciting part of processing pending files is having to wait 15 seconds for the antivirus thing to run first—even if there are 0 files in the pending queue to actually scan. :P

On a more serious note, pending files aren't that bad because in most cases they don't take much longer to approve/reject than it takes me to take a quick look to see if they seem okay. Occasionally things get more complicated like if someone gave the file a name that already exists in the archive. The real pain is moving files. With the "fa" tool, it has to be done one at a time, and if the file has any links it can't be moved at all (unless you manually write down all the links, remove them, move the file, then recreate all the links again, one by one). I eventually got so sick of that that once I learned enough about how the DB backend and fa worked I started writing my own scripts on the server to be able to move groups of files at once, even linked ones.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 08, 2019, 04:47:55 PM
Damn, no wonder why you had troubles hiring file archivers in the past. xd But it's fun and impressive to see how the backend of a website implemented 20 years ago with minimal changes ever since can still work today. (Also sorry for the late post, I am going through unread topics and I had many)

Also lol at the Voyage 400 reference XD (anybody remembers that april fools joke?)
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: DarkestEx on October 07, 2019, 05:40:44 PM
It really is time for a renaissance of calculators
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Travis on October 19, 2019, 11:28:47 PM
Oh... I think this is finally my chance to say, "Holy necropost, Batman!"
/me runs

I somehow completely missed DJ's reply until now anyway, and I didn't even remember this thread until I saw the picture I posted of the ticalc.org archive interface, haha. Also, I realized I made a mistake in the screenshot and forgot to change one of the instances of "v200" to "v400". Darn. Now everyone knows the V400 reference is fake. :P
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: DarkestEx on October 23, 2019, 06:25:17 PM
Quote from: Travis on October 19, 2019, 11:28:47 PMOh... I think this is finally my chance to say, "Holy necropost, Batman!"
/me runs

I somehow completely missed DJ's reply until now anyway, and I didn't even remember this thread until I saw the picture I posted of the ticalc.org archive interface, haha. Also, I realized I made a mistake in the screenshot and forgot to change one of the instances of "v200" to "v400". Darn. Now everyone knows the V400 reference is fake. :P
Gotta keep the site alive somehow. It's an entire necropost otherwise :P
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 23, 2019, 06:48:31 PM
Yeah, on any dying calculator website, necroposting rules pretty much becomes irrelevant. Also MaxCoderz has new posts O.O
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Yuki on October 23, 2019, 11:30:50 PM
Wait, MaxCoderz is still around?
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 26, 2019, 05:28:40 PM
Yeah it's mostly dead and has been pretty much disbanded a decade ago, but tr1p1ea still posts some project updates there and some old members recently showed up to say hi. Ironically, MaxCoderz has far better server uptime now than when it was still alive.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Travis on October 30, 2019, 05:24:26 PM
Yeah, I was kidding around. Admittedly, I haven't been following calc forums much either, both due to lack of activity and my having moved on to other communities/projects. In general, it seems like there's been a sort of trend away from forums and toward IRC and now Discord, as I see a fair amount of activity there in a lot of places despite relatively little forum activity.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 30, 2019, 05:33:01 PM
Yeah true. People are not fans of forums nowadays and they were mostly replaced by either social networks or real-time mediums.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Travis on October 30, 2019, 05:38:57 PM
I still remember when email lists used to be popular, and then it transitioned to web forums. Personally, I always kind of liked discussion lists and still think they had several advantages over web forums and newer mediums, but maybe that's partly because I'm a relative oldtimer. :P
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Zeda on October 30, 2019, 06:15:00 PM
I try to use chat for brainstorming and... chatting, but forums for stuff that should be easily referenced in the future, and that definitely limits my forums activity.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 30, 2019, 06:18:53 PM
Oh wow... email lists. I had totally forgot about the days before forums or back when forums were threaded, text-only messageboards, like Void Productions or ticalc comments. Even HP Museum used such system until like 2013 or so. Mailing lists were great because you were notified by new replies, while with forums you often have to manually enable notifications, if they even exist on the forum software the website runs with.

Right now the main danger about CodeWalrus is money shortage, which is why it's possible that the website moves to a different hosting provider (probably on Walriicraft) and I believe this is why Calc News shut down recently.


As for myself, I don't like forums as I used to, but I don't like Facebook groups that much either, so I am more active on chat mediums overall.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Caleb Hansberry on October 30, 2019, 09:59:55 PM
The practical side of me says that calculator hacking and coding has plummeted in popularity and so we have too many sites in existence now, but I also like the history of it all and don't like history to vanish. So I think we should keep this site online in a low-maintenance mode for as long as possible. Like MaxCoderz, UnitedTI, or Omnimaga.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on October 30, 2019, 10:58:10 PM
Yeah this is why CW is here to stay, including the forums.
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Lionel Debroux on October 31, 2019, 10:43:21 AM
BTW, is the domain name paid for another year / couple years ?
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: Yuki on October 31, 2019, 09:57:19 PM
Not yet.

You can always help here (https://www.paypal.me/codewalrus).
Title: Re: What if TI calcs were still as popular today as they were in 2004
Post by: DarkestEx on April 10, 2020, 10:02:57 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on October 30, 2019, 05:33:01 PMYeah true. People are not fans of forums nowadays and they were mostly replaced by either social networks or real-time mediums.
I prefer forums a lot over social networks. Apart from Twitter and LinkedIn (and perhaps Instagram once a week), I am not using any social networks regularly. Forums are just much nicer to keep track of updates and the post contents tend to stay relevant for much longer.