Monday April 23, 2007 What's an Ultra Farktographer?
Active, Total, Elite, Ultra, these are all labels that the FSM applies to Farktographers to give some sort of idea of how involved a particular Farktog is. The actual number of votes a Farktog gets really doesn't come into play, but the FSM only counts entries that have at least one vote. That's sort of
important. But that's the only place that votes come into this stuff.
I needed to put some thresholds in place when I calculate averages.
Otherwise, the best average votes report turns simply into the one hit
wonders report. I arbitrarily chose 10 entries as the original
threshold. This worked for a while, but I noticed some people who had
10 entries, but they were way in the past and they hadn't participated
for months. So I needed to add another threshold and finally decided
that I'd figure out when a Farktographer's initial contest was and then
set the 2nd threshold to the number of entries equal to 1/3 the total
number of contests since that Farktographer's initial contest.
e.g. if I entered 12 contests ago, the 2nd threshold is "4 entries"
Both thresholds need to be met to be listed. The "10" threshold
means that the Farktog has a demonstrated interest in Farktography and
the 2nd threshold ensures that the Farktog keeps at it.
Then I started to think about Fark and Farktography. There are
Farkers, Total Farkers and some super secret thing that no one is
supposed to talk about. I wanted that for the FSM so I created:
Farktographer - anyone who entered any contest (and got a vote)
Active Farktographer - anyone who meets the 10 and (1/3*contests) since Boobies criteria
Total Farktographer - anyone who meets the 10 and (1/2 * contests)
Elite Farktographer - anyone who meets the 10 and (1 * contests)
Ultra Farktographer - 10 and (2* contests) criteria
For example, assume your boobies contest was "What's on My Horizon" and your weeners was "Bridges II". That's contest #41 and #127, respectively, for a spread of 86 contests - 86 contests you could have entered. To be an Active Farktographer, you need 86 / 3 entries, or 28 and 2/3s (I can't remember if I round or truncate the fractions). Here's a table (assuming truncation):
| Level | Required Entries |
| Active | 28 |
| Total | 43 |
| Elite | 86 |
| Ultra | 172 |
You have to be "active" to get into the average reports and all Total Farktographers are Active Farktographers. Every Ultra is also an Elite, &c. I shade the rows in the average listings based on your "level" and give you the label in your portfolio.
Hey, what happened with the Standings?
mikemikeb pointed out that I was not really calculating them in a manner that would make sense to most people. Basically, I considered the third-highest vote total as third place, regardless of preceding ties. Now, if four people tied for 2nd place, then the next place finish available would be 6th (assuming only one person had first place). Something like this:contestid farktographer standing 2274259 schnee 1 2274259 bobroberts 2 2274259 Darkbladedancer 2 2274259 redphive 2 2274259 Pwaully 5 2274259 CaptainJim 6 2274259 CaptainJim 7 2274259 BenzaiOhio 8 2274259 CaptainJim 9
I notice a lot of "Boobies"...what's up with that?
You're new to Fark, aren't you? "Boobies" as a term is what Fark calls a Farker's first post, or a first post in a comment thread. The reason is to reduce the number of jokers who will make the comment "First Post!" in a thread. Farktography has adopted "Boobies" as a Farktographer's first contest. "Weeners" is a Farktographer's last contest. Posted by schnee ( Apr 23 2007, 11:03:04 AM CDT ) PermalinkOn-behalf-of? What's that
Farktographers are friendly, and they like to help each other out. Sometimes, someone is not able to make the contest and someone else posts the entries for them. Fark.com records those under the poster, but the FSM will override those with the actual photographer's Fark login. The FSM has to be told about that, however. Posted by schnee ( Apr 23 2007, 11:02:24 AM CDT ) PermalinkWhat's next?
You can always request a feature - that's how "On-behalf-of" processing got implemented. I'm also trying to figure out some sort of a ranking for Farktographers. Something that rewards participation and votes. Posted by schnee ( Apr 23 2007, 11:01:50 AM CDT ) PermalinkWhat did you write this in?
Java, HTML, Velocity Macros, SQL - the usual suspects Posted by schnee ( Apr 23 2007, 11:01:14 AM CDT ) PermalinkHow does the FSM work?
There's the poetic answer. There's also an answer that is a bit more technical.- Every 24 hours (and once an hour on Thursdays), the FSM Loader runs. It looks for new Farktography contests listed on the main page, retrieves the contest page and the result page and extracts the entries that have received votes. This phase makes heavy use of HTML Parsers, XPath expressions, and various networking and file handling routines.
- The raw entries and the contest are loaded into the FSM Database, which used to be served by Derby, but is now MySQL 4.1.?.
- To pickup late votes (votes that come in after 24 hours), the past 4 contests are re-retrieved from Fark.com and reprocessed. Any vote that comes in after 4 weeks won't be counted until I feel like rebuilding the entire DB, if at all. Fark.com archives the threads and turns off voting sometime before the 4 week window closes
- After all votes have been accounted for, summary tables are built to assist with the reporting
- The static reports are then generated by BIRT, an open-source reporting tool.
- The reports and the FSM main page are then assembled (using Velocity) and deployed onto Schneeworld.com