Automatic Forum Group Fixes

[Liloz01 1,242 / 18,285]

TL:DR

Many Forum group issues are automatically fixed every 10 minutes now. Roughly 2,700 Forum accounts were effected by the first wave of automatic fixes.

 

Some group issues still require human input (talk to me, your DL or SM!).

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The issues

For many years and people, Forum groups have been fucked up in different ways:

#1 Duplicate secondary groups (roughly 1,100 accounts had this issue)

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#2 Duplicate primary -> secondary group (roughly 900 accounts had this issue)

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#3 Both of the above at the same time (roughly 150 accounts had this issue)

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#4 Banned without the "Banned" group (roughly 500 accounts had this issue)

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#5 Donator in-game, but not on the Forum (roughly 150 accounts had this issue)

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There were roughly 2700 unique people with these issues. #5 is the most catastrophic, effecting Forum and Discord donor perks. #1, #2, #3 and #4 are purely aesthetic but still annoying, especially for banned people - it's how regular users can tell if another user is banned or not!

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What causes these issues?

#1 is caused by computer error - GFLDonations/GFLCore assigning multiple of the same group - possibly tasks conflicting? Uncertain of the exact cause.

#2 is caused by human error - Someone adding a group as both secondary and primary.

#3 is caused by both #1 and #2 at the same time.

#4 is caused by human error - When someone is banned on the Forum their groups must be manually removed; so people ban and forget to add the banned group/remove all other groups.

#5 is caused by both human and computer error - Most commonly, it is computer error. When you donate, Forum perks are applied to the Forum account that you are signed into. This means that if you donate for someone elses Steam account, they do not get the Forum (and therefore Discord) perks, if you are not signed in... no account gets the perks, etc.

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The "fix":

IPS tasks! Tasks are scripts that run at specific intervals. I've made three tasks that fix all 5 of these issues. Here's a screenshot of the ACP for the tasks:

"Fix" is in quote marks because the causes of the issues are not addressed (nor can some of them ever be addressed, humans will always make errors). In other words, the issues will still occur - they will just be automatically fixed within 10 minutes now (...hopefully, my spaghetti code might fail and fuck everything up; who knows). In the past, these issues would only be fixed if reported or stumbled upon; as to why 2,700 people had one or more of these issues before the first wave of automatic fixes ran.

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Random shit

This was actually an unbelievable pain in the ass because of so many weird edge cases. For example, VIP "hall of fame" people who have VIP as a primary group instead of secondary; ugh. Temporarily banned users, ugh. Invision documentation of tasks not existing, ugh! People donating for BOTH Supporter and VIP at the same time thus requiring both groups... UGH! My local IPS install not letting me download files, because...? Who knows! Not me! AAAAAAAA!

 

Anyway, here's some videos and a screenshot of logs (from testing/the actual task run), because I know some people like looking at logs:

 

While testing I put a logging thing in the wrong place and it made like 60,000 logs:

Oops, lol.

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Ok, that's all. Let me know if you notice any Forum group issues from now on (you shouldn't!) and let me know of any general Forum issues as well.

 

Kiss hug kiss hug.

[Joshy 4,297 / 42,800]

Nice update!  Time for me to start adding wrong roles to people on accident 🙂 who wants VIP as main jk jk jk

 

Not on the forums but was trying to script something at work and wanted to add a little display message... it got stuck in a loop and ruined my day 😞 can definitely relate to that last part with the very useful 60k logs lol

[Liloz01 1,242 / 18,285]

To give an update, roughly one month later: I haven't received any reports of forum donor, banned or duplicate group issues. In addition to this, I've noticed no bugs and there have been about 60 automatic fixes so far. Feels pretty good!

 

Here's a little snippet of the last few logs created by the application:

...I just uploaded a new version of the application - it has more consistent and helpful logging messages than this, I promise. 😉

 

I'm gonna call this a success! If I ever add anything to this application I'll post it on this topic, but this is more of a temporary solution to a greater issue, so it will likely not be touched again. Onto tackling the greater issue! Check in with me in 2025 for an update on that.