Even Emotionless Engineers Enjoy Egoboo

Submitted by Virge on Tue, Feb 10, 2004 - 02:24
in

I read my page stats
to find some encouragement;
Pathetic, I know.

I found the answer to two riddles in my page statistics. Over the Christmas break I designed a simple detective game specifically for playing on a community forum. Each player makes a move by interacting with a PHP program on my site, then posts the html code generated by the game into a message on the forum. After playing a couple of rounds on EK in early January, the game died a natural death of disinterest.

While browsing my web page statistics today I noticed that the game page was still being accessed. People were still playing. I looked at the game state data to find out who was playing, only to find a list of nicknames I didn't recognise. A moment's googling answered another riddle. The names showed up on a private community that I'd observed (with some curiosity) linking to my site.

So, a special GreetingOfVirge goes to Eamane, Oogg, Domine, Saealorn, Dannalyn, Arigon, Cienya, Feni, Aarlaorn, fairsong, Celtin, Aliciarose, mindaarie, Lore, Dynamyte, Metelaze and Thorena (and any other names I might have accidently missed). I got a kick out of seeing your creative choice of weapons, suspects and locations.

Comments

Submitted by Rats (not verified) on Tue, Feb 10, 2004 - 04:24.

Unless I am missing something, that's only the answer to ONE riddle--that of who was using your game? What was the other one?

Submitted by Virge on Tue, Feb 10, 2004 - 05:06.

Sorry, I didn't make that clear. The other riddle was: "Why was there a regularly used link from a message in a private forum to one of my pages?"
It evoked enough curiosity that I was almost tempted to try to join the community just to see the message link. Was it a vitriol-filled Virgilanti hate-thread? Was it a published link to one of my top secret folders? Was it someone stealing bandwidth by direct linking one of my precious images? Was it a ring of rhymophiles getting their perverted jollies from my verse? My site statistics showed the referring site, but not the address of the file to which it linked.
It's just as well I'm not paranoid. I'd be a jibbering wreck. (Not exactly. Paranoia would be sufficient motivation to drive me to create an anonymous account and apply to join that private forum.)

Submitted by Rats (not verified) on Tue, Feb 10, 2004 - 05:59.

You think you are bad
But in more than one instance
I've joined such a group.

Yeah, that's right. I'm a hoser whose curiosity usually gets the better of me. I invade people's private communities and spy on what they're saying about me. Once, on an Italian art forum, I thanked the posters for the nice things they were saying about me, and they accused me of impersonating myself. It was most surreal.

Submitted by fairsong (not verified) on Wed, Jul 27, 2005 - 08:11.

from out of the tree's shadow the druid materialized. looked around this strange world wondering if this is a dream. Like a wisp of smoke vanishing in the morning sun, he fades back into the tress to ponder the vision.