Archive Binge

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Known issues

  • Lightning Made of Owls images all default to JPG, not yet working for PNG comics.
  • Some comics not displaying title text or alt text in feed. This is a database population issue. We hope to get all the relevant data, but it may take some time.
  • Images not showing up in some feed readers/aggregators where referrer restrictions are used. Can be got around by explicitly allowing a common list of readers. My non-exhaustive list:
    • attensa.com
    • bloglines.com
    • feedlounge.com
    • google.com/reader
    • gritwire.com
    • newsalloy.com
    • newsgator.com
    • pluck.com
    • rojo.com
    • yahoo.com

The following .htaccess command extract works for me --Tranquility 13:20, 2 September 2009 (UTC): 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?(archivebinge|attensa|bloglines|feedlounge|gritwire|newsalloy|newsgator|pluck|rojo)(\.com|\.net)/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?google\.([a-z]+)(\.[a-z]+)?/reader/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://([a-z]+\.)?my\.yahoo(\.com|\.co\.jp)/.*$ [NC]

Bug reports

If you have something odd with your feed, please provide the feed number, do not edit the feed in an attempt to correct the weirdness, and sign your entry with "~~~~" which will automatically insert a timestamp.

  • I created a feed showing 2 strips per day. Immediately after creation it had 1 strip in it. I would have expected either 0 or 2. Shishberg 21:46, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
    • This is a "feature", not necessarily a bug. It is addressed in the FAQ. -Dmmaus 05:10, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Really? The FAQ says "You need to wait 24 hours for the first update and parcel of new strips." That sounds like there should be 0 comics in the feed immediately after creation, not 1. Shishberg 07:04, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I created two feeds that should show 10 strips every day. There was nothing on sunday. - Dliessmgg
    • What are the feed numbers? Also, Sunday's not over yet! Because of caching (to reduce server load), it's possible your feed will be updated a bit later than you are used to on some days. -Dmmaus 10:45, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Feed number 2127 appears broken. Shishberg 07:11, 14 September 2009 (UTC) 
   <item>
     <title>Girl Genius: Strip 0</title>
     <description></description>
     <pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:09:06 -0700</pubDate>
     <guid>ERROR: Database problem #1</guid>
   </item>
    • Why for you hack my coding?? (Okay, okay, I should probably insert some error checking for that.) -Dmmaus 09:48, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
  • All entries for a day seem to have identical timestamps, and they are in newest-first order in the feed- so Opera, Firefox, and Google Reader all display a parcel's comics in reverse order. Tangent128 18:26, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Please fix this! Its really annoying to see the feed in the wrong order :( I'd even be willing to write the patch myself if you'd trust me with your code.Winstonewert 02:23, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
  • When I "fast forward" a feed, i.e I change by hand the current start point of the feed, I get in a few hours all of the comics between the old start point and the new. Usually I do that when I read a few strips on my own after reading a bunch sent to me by Binge. --Rgoro 14:19, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Certain strips, such as Arthur, King of Time and Space, do not fit so I only see about half the strip. There should be some way to resize it or something. --Dellcartoons 14:19, 07 December 2009 (UTC)
  • No Need For Bushido seems to have changed its link format, causing 404 pages from the rss feed. 4426 is my feed. Samlh 23:56, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
  • My Girl Genius feed (972) just gave the March 14, 2007 comic again as the March 21, 2007 comic (i.e. I got the 14th twice, and the 21st not at all). ConMan 12:58, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
  • The Dr McNinja comic has stopped showing images. I think the images have been moved to a different location (using a different pattern for fetching) Rodeoclown 05:19, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
  • My Dinosaur Comics feed has thrown up an odd title for the most recent entry (feed 971, comic 1547) - instead of just having the date stamp, it's got some url stuff in it too - "Dinosaur Comics: 2009-09-08; index.php?comic=sometimes a bunch of us get together and call ourselves "the smiletime gang" and this summer we all awarded each" ConMan 06:57, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
  • Hm. Is this meant to be a feature to include the comic title gag (which I didn't realise existed until I read something on TVTropes)? ConMan 15:19, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
  • I have a Legostar Galactica strip, set to five comics per day, on images, that has ceased showing images, and is now providing only links. It started doing this on the 7th of this month. The feed number is 5352. Serifina 08:57, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
  • My Legostar Galactica feed isn't showing images. My other feeds are, and it isn't a problem with the URL. Taneb

Fixed bugs

  • Certain characters in passwords causing password matching and login to fail. - Fixed
  • Two of my feeds got reset for some reason. Legostar Galactica (feed #55) got rolled back from #111 (January 21st, 2003) to #51 (October 30th, 2002), and Abstruse Goose (feed #217) went from #61 to #1. I haven't edited the feeds if you want to check them out. My other feeds are unaffected. --Tranquility 13:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Thanks for reporting this. I've tested the feeds and it seems this effect is a temporary glitch. When the feed is regenerated again without changing the feed settings, it goes back to where you expect it to be, rather than continuing from the "wound back" position. Which is good, as that's a lot easier to understand, knowing how our code works. It implies either (1) the feed generator is getting the wrong time from the host machine occasionally, or (2) the time difference calculation (now - feed_creation_time) is buggy and returning the wrong answer occasionally. Now I just need to figure out why... -Dmmaus 22:02, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Hmmm. Both feeds "rolled back" 60 strips, which is 6 days for both of them. A mod 6 bug in the time difference calculation? -Dmmaus 22:11, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Fixed, we hope! The problem was being caused by the way we calculated the number of days elapsed since you created your feed. Depending on whether the current time is earlier or later in the day than the feed creation time, this could have the effect of making it look like 7 days when only 6 days and 23 hours (say) had elapsed; this means it didn't include strips for those 6 days, because it thought it was a full week's worth. But the part of the code that calculates how many weeks have elapsed got it right and didn't include a week of strips because it thought only 6 days had elapsed. Anyway, we think it's fixed. If you see this problem again, please report it. -Dmmaus 23:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Been using my own strip (feed #207) as a test ('cos I know how it should behave) and today it reached the last strip of the archive. It was set for 10 strips a day, however because the number of strips does not divide evenly into 10 (123 strips), the RSS feed shows extra links to non-existant strips to make up the 10 new strips. Shouldn't the system know it reached the end and only show the remaining strips (even if it's just 1 strip)? Also, there was no "you finished the archiv" message --Tranquility 12:17, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Fixed. Gah! That had been correctly implemented, but got lost in a mix-up when updating the feed generation script. Recovered the necessary code, thanks to the Subversion code repository. Phew. Should be working properly now. -Dmmaus 03:31, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
  • DMM: HTML escaped characters in strip titles are double escaped, resulting in things like "&ouml;" showing up in the title, rather than "ö". I don't know how to fix this. RSS appears to break with such things in the title field unless they are double-escaped.
    • Shishberg: Add an encoding to the RSS feed e.g. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>, then run html_entity_decode on the title. Twice, if necessary.
    • Fixed as suggested. Also changed the database collation to UTF8 to directly support Unicode characters without getting corrupted. There may be some lurking non-UTF8 characters in the database. If anyone sees one, let me know and I'll update it. -Dmmaus 05:10, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I just created an account by the name of "Tjäder", and I can't login with it on Archive Binge. I can log in on the IWC Forums.
    • I've made a change which I think should fix it, but I need you to test it for me. Please let me know if it works. -Dmmaus
      • I still get the same problem, when I try to login it says "No such user.". --Tjäder 15:27, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Bah... Can you please contact me by e-mail? It'll be easier to debug this with a faster communication channel -Dmmaus 22:48, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Fixed with same fix as above bug. :-) -Dmmaus 05:10, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
  • On my Legostar Galactica feed (feed=42) I got 5 comics in one night when I should only get one a day. - Taneb
    • I just looked at it. It currently has 1 strip per each of the 5 days 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 Sept. If you created it on the 11th with the starting point set after the first strip in the archive, you actually get strips for each day in the past week as well - this is not considered a bug. If that's not what you mean, can you describe in more detail? In particular, was it actually 5 strips dated the same day, or merely 1 strip for each of 5 different days? -Dmmaus 11:19, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Fixed - same bug as below. -Dmmaus 05:31, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I have a feed set up for two xkdc comics a day, every day. It worked fine for the first week but today I got 14 at once. What's up with that? Here is the feed link http://www.archivebinge.net/rss.php?feed=1002 Psiclopz 13:04, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Hmmm. I may have caught this too late. That feed looks fine now. Several people are reporting similar things, but I'm still yet to see this bug in action. :-( I'll look at the code and see if I can figure it out. -Dmmaus 22:10, 17 September 2009 (UTC)
      • On a similar note... feed 34 was fine until a few days ago (Sept 15th, according to Google Reader), when I got 10 at once; and it hasn't updated since then. Shishberg
        • But it looks fine when I look at it now. :-( 2 strips per day from 15 to 19 Sept. Given the amount of reports, I'm sure something weird is happening, but every time I try to see what it is, I just see the feeds behaving as expected. I'll monitor a bunch of feeds myself to see if I can catch the glitch in action. I'll also look at the code, since I'm pretty sure I know where the problem is occurring, even if I don't yet know why. -Dmmaus 00:31, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
          • I also haven't gotten an update since the 17th. If you look at the feed now it has through strip 19, but I have through 27 in my feed reader. So it's doing a one-time full week dump and then reverting to normal apparently. Psiclopz 22:56, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
            • I don't understand. :-( This is obviously a serious bug, but I'm at a complete loss at the moment. -Dmmaus 04:07, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
              • Fixed. The problem was a time zone error. I was calculating number of strips to update based on GMT in one place, and the server time in another place, which is 7 hours different. In cases where the GMT difference between feed creation and latest update was more than a week but the server time difference was less than a week, the feed would add an extra week's worth of strips. This would rectify itself on the next update (since the time difference no longer crossed a week threshold) but Google Reader kept the "future" strips in memory, whereas Live Bookmarks forgot about them. I think this bug is truly fixed now, but it will take up to a week until the "future" strips cached in Google Reader get caught up to. -Dmmaus 05:31, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
                • Great, thanks. I just started getting regular updates again, but if you found the problem then I don't expect to see anymore issues. Thanks for your work on this. Psiclopz 13:12, 24 September 2009 (UTC)
  • My 'Brickworld Saga' feed (#209) is broken. It shows new episodes (10 per day), but the images are broken and when I click on the link to the episode I get the following error message on the comic's own website: "Either you've hit the end of the archives, or you've tried to go to a page that does not exist." I know it's not the end of the archives (up to 320 or 344 episodes), has the author changed his archive structure without letting you guys know, or has something else happened? I'm afraid I can't tell you when it started because last week I paused my feeds while I was away and only restarted them yesterday. None of my other feeds are affected. --Tranquility 10:23, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
    • The author has indeed changed the structure, so it should be easy to fix. Praelat 05:17, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
      • Fixed! -Dmmaus 09:11, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Feature requests

Requests for additional features.

  • All strips for a day as one item - I created a feed for Schlock Mercenary of 7 strips a day which I ma reading in Google Reader. Each strip comes in as a separate item. I would like one reader item per days worth of strips.kalmdown ~~~~
  • Ability to include annotations for strips.
  • Minor: A pause button. The "0 comics per update" feature achieves the purpose for now. A better pause feature would (a) have a button on the "Your feeds" list on the account page, that changes to "Unpause" when the feed is paused, and (b) remember your comics-per-update setting when you unpause it. Also, a "pause all" button would be nice. Shishberg 21:46, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
    • An alternate solution would be for Archive Binge to put a tracking image tagged with a unique per-item URI (e.g. archivebinge.net/track.php/[some GUID].png) which gets displayed when the feed item is. If unique images haven't been displayed for the last few days, it automatically puts the feed into "pause" mode, and only resumes when one of those images get displayed. Fluffy 06:06, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  • When updating a comic, store the contents of the <description> tag from the comic's RSS feed in the database verbatim, and put that straight into the binge feed. This could at least be useful default behaviour, instead of having different handling logic for each comic. Shishberg 01:30, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Add field for arbitrary HTML which webcomic authors could use to provide links to ads, shops, etc. - Requested by David Malki !
  • A user writes: It is a little frustrating, if you have set a subscription to, say, 6 comics a day, to receive them all at the same time. I typically check my RSS multiple times a day (usually boredom at work), and so it would be nice to have a comic appear every four hours instead of six every 24. Maybe this could be an optional setting.
  • Another user seconds that. It would also provide a workaround for the "I want comics on tuesdays so I have to check the "Mon" box" problem. On that problem: would it be too hard to refer to the user's local time?
  • Streamline account creation with OpenID or something else that doesn't require yet-another-username-and-password. (The advantage of OpenID over something like Facebook Connect being that the former is vendor-neutral.)
    • I second this. OpenID is finally gaining critical mass, and many many services provide OpenID credentials (AIM, LiveJournal, etc.). Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that getting that to play nice with the phpBB user database would be a gigantic mess. Fluffy 07:37, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Advance setup: Comics per day for individual days, so I can have more on weekends but still get them on weekdays, for instance.

Tasks

This is a list of approved tasks. We plan to do these. Non-Comic Irregulars please don't add stuff here!

  • News on front page when new comics are added to the service. - Done
  • An RSS feed to announce addition of new webcomics to the service. - Done
  • Logout button. - Done
  • At launch: create reverse link from IWC forum registration page mentioning the registration is also for Archive Binge. - Done
  • At launch: revert /index.php links to / on site header graphic and logout result page. - Done
  • Implement scraping of most recent comic numbers and URLs from comic sites. - Done
  • Implement "you have finished the archive" message. - Done
  • Display total number of strips in archive on comic list page. - Loki - Done
    • Also, a "people bing(e?)ing this comic" counter. Shishberg - Done
  • Display latest comic for each strip - Done
  • Change comic list page from static to dynamically generated, probably cached cron job. - Done
  • Logo - Done
  • Support for alt text for strip images (for those comics that use it) - Done
  • Include alt-text on images if the comic contains alt text (eg - Dr McNinja has alt-text jokes on every page starting from (I think) Issue 2, number 1). Currently the alt text is the number of the strip.
    • We already support this and it is already working for several comics. I need to get the alt text for Dr McNinja into our database, then it will work too. -Dmmaus
      • I now have the Dr McNinja alt text. Just need to put it into the database. -Dmmaus 22:08, 8 September 2009 (UTC) - Done
  • Get lots of webcomic authors to join! = In progress
  • Favicon
  • Add field for "Originally published on <date>"
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