Dominion Strategy Forum

Miscellaneous => Forum Games => Topic started by: jotheonah on October 18, 2021, 03:55:44 pm

Title: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on October 18, 2021, 03:55:44 pm
I assume some of you also got this message:

Quote
Dear QuickTopic users (free version):

I'm sorry to break the news to you that QuickTopic will be shutting down this year.

Here's the planned schedule, in reverse:
The final shutdown date will be December 11, 2021.
We'll disallow posting new messages starting on November 27.
Sometime before then, we'll post a message at the top of each QuickTopic page about the upcoming shutdown.

To save your message board contents, you have a few options:
1. In the lower left corner of your message board, tap the Print link. That will take you to a page with some options.
2. For saving the text and other info as a spreadsheet-compatible format, there's an option under the Tools menu to Download CSV (Excel) format.

It's been a wonderful experience building and running QuickTopic all this time. With 21 years since its inception, QuickTopic has been the world's longest continuously running web-based social media platform.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to reply. Best wishes to you!

Regards,
Steve Yost
QuickTopic

What are we gonna do? How are we gonna do mafia without Quicktopic?
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on October 18, 2021, 04:02:10 pm
How sad! I'm sure there are other similar services, though. I look into it.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on October 18, 2021, 04:34:10 pm
Here's one: xoyondo.com/mb/LD8qeeqBjvRyf1g/15PsuU1tJQ
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: scolapasta on October 18, 2021, 04:58:21 pm
Once upon a time I thought it'd be interesting to have a slack workspace for the forum mafia. Wouldn't fit exactly, but would also have some interesting pros as well as the cons. (in this thought, the slack was for the game threads as well as the QTs)
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Dylan32 on October 18, 2021, 10:29:00 pm
I mean, a discord with restricted or hidden channels and direct messages could be made to work I think.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: faust on October 19, 2021, 10:33:26 am
The lack of formatting in EFHW's suggestion is a bit sad. It's nice to have orders and questions pop out.

Discord requires you to make an account, which is not ideal I suppose. I'm not sure what features exist there.

Another option I could think of is to use Etherpads. They have a chat, and you can use the main text for orders/questions/role PMs.

See here for an example: https://padlite.spline.de/p/bsM27bmoX92yOoyQYNeF
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: infangthief on October 19, 2021, 05:28:10 pm
Is it worth creating a record somewhere of scum QTs etc from past games?

Quote
To save your message board contents, you have a few options:
1. In the lower left corner of your message board, tap the Print link. That will take you to a page with some options.
2. For saving the text and other info as a spreadsheet-compatible format, there's an option under the Tools menu to Download CSV (Excel) format.
I guess you need some kind of QT account to have these options (I don't see them).
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 19, 2021, 08:16:24 pm
Has anyone else noticed some weird spam in some of the QT threads? See BM32 speccy (https://quicktopic.com/53/H/7yUWSTdcPcn). I wonder if it's related to its impending demise.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Galzria on October 19, 2021, 09:13:00 pm
Has anyone else noticed some weird spam in some of the QT threads? See BM32 speccy (https://quicktopic.com/53/H/7yUWSTdcPcn). I wonder if it's related to its impending demise.

The majority of my old, unused QT’s do at this point.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on October 19, 2021, 10:02:06 pm
Is it worth creating a record somewhere of scum QTs etc from past games?

Quote
To save your message board contents, you have a few options:
1. In the lower left corner of your message board, tap the Print link. That will take you to a page with some options.
2. For saving the text and other info as a spreadsheet-compatible format, there's an option under the Tools menu to Download CSV (Excel) format.
I guess you need some kind of QT account to have these options (I don't see them).

It would be nice to have these archived but I'm not sure I have the patience to do it.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: scolapasta on October 19, 2021, 10:22:14 pm
Is it worth creating a record somewhere of scum QTs etc from past games?

Quote
To save your message board contents, you have a few options:
1. In the lower left corner of your message board, tap the Print link. That will take you to a page with some options.
2. For saving the text and other info as a spreadsheet-compatible format, there's an option under the Tools menu to Download CSV (Excel) format.
I guess you need some kind of QT account to have these options (I don't see them).

It would be nice to have these archived but I'm not sure I have the patience to do it.

We might at least want to archive some of the BSG ones, since that's legacy.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on October 20, 2021, 07:39:32 pm
I've been trying to find a note app that supplies date and time stamps, which seem to be the only thing faust's suggestion is missing. Notepad for Windows can put one in with one click, but so far I haven't found anything online that does that.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Swowl on October 21, 2021, 12:38:26 am
I think I like faust's the best so far.
But chatzy.com seems like it could work as well in a pinch if that doesn't pan out.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 21, 2021, 01:33:41 am
You can post any QT links here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0) and I'll archive them.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: ehunt on October 21, 2021, 01:59:20 am
how sad, end of an era
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on October 21, 2021, 09:50:05 am
You can post any QT links here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0) and I'll archive them.

The hero we don't deserve.

PM your venmo and I'll tip you for the effort.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Dylan32 on October 21, 2021, 03:05:03 pm
I know not everyone might like the idea of using discord, but if some people who aren't as familiar with how it could work for this would be interested in seeing it demonstrated, I could set up a trial server and set up the channels and stuff and show how the private and hidden channels would do exactly what we would want. Also it would have the benefit of having all comms related to the game being at the same place. It would also be very easy to make a discord bot that automated vote counts and stuff like that too!
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 21, 2021, 07:15:11 pm
Well I underestimated how long that would take (or moreso how many QTs and associated posts have been linked so far). I now have 381 QTs with 28,771 posts saved (without any errors or issues as far as I can tell), and the last 378 QTs took about 24 minutes.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 21, 2021, 07:18:08 pm
You can post any QT links here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0) and I'll archive them.

The hero we don't deserve.

PM your venmo and I'll tip you for the effort.

Glad to be appreciated. :) I might take a rain check on that.

It was pretty quick and easy to put together as it used tools I've recently learned. It was nice to have a reason to use them.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 21, 2021, 07:31:01 pm
Can anyone see anything that all the spam posts have in common that could be used to reliably filter them out? I'm guessing not...
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Robz888 on October 22, 2021, 01:45:08 pm
Oh no! Shoot, there are some things I definitely want to save. My neigbhorhood with Galz in Modern Comm. The scum QT from the more recent Marvel game where scola dominated, those immediately come to mind.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Robz888 on October 22, 2021, 02:20:20 pm
Robz/Galzria M31: https://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/XwuYYrFNBa52g

Villains M129: https://www.quicktopic.com/53/H/8ZZG4DZBWpX

Mafia 2 mafia thread: https://www.quicktopic.com/48/H/W3ydbNNQ7hD4J
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: faust on October 22, 2021, 03:50:45 pm
I've now managed to post my QTs... it ended up being quite a bit! No worries if you cannot make it through, Jimmmmm!

I've done my best to remove the personal QTs that weren't released to the public.

And don't worry, I will make sure to archive anything BSG-related. It will be transferred to whatever platform we are going to use next.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on October 22, 2021, 05:22:10 pm
I like chatzy.com. Click the gear to see commands. I got it to do bold with square brackets. We would need to put in time stamps each message.

http://us21.chatzy.com/67754632152581#0
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 22, 2021, 06:25:22 pm
Robz/Galzria M31: https://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/XwuYYrFNBa52g

Villains M129: https://www.quicktopic.com/53/H/8ZZG4DZBWpX

Mafia 2 mafia thread: https://www.quicktopic.com/48/H/W3ydbNNQ7hD4J

Robz, you should post these in the Other thread (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0;topicseen). You can dump a heap like others have if you want.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 22, 2021, 06:28:41 pm
I've now managed to post my QTs... it ended up being quite a bit! No worries if you cannot make it through, Jimmmmm!

I've done my best to remove the personal QTs that weren't released to the public.

And don't worry, I will make sure to archive anything BSG-related. It will be transferred to whatever platform we are going to use next.

Whoa, that's gonna take a while. No problem at all though.

I'm not involved in BSG (and I don't imagine replacing in if that becomes an option), so you can PM me all the BSG links if you want and I'll take care of them.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Robz888 on October 23, 2021, 10:10:34 am
Robz/Galzria M31: https://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/XwuYYrFNBa52g

Villains M129: https://www.quicktopic.com/53/H/8ZZG4DZBWpX

Mafia 2 mafia thread: https://www.quicktopic.com/48/H/W3ydbNNQ7hD4J

Robz, you should post these in the Other thread (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0;topicseen). You can dump a heap like others have if you want.

Oops! I'm bad at following basic instructions.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on October 24, 2021, 06:04:43 am
If I create an interface for it, would some of you be interested in helping organise the QTs? That is,
If we can get it done before the site goes down, it could be useful for checking if there are some missing that should be included. There are already over 1000 QTs so it'll take a bit of an effort, and I'm probably not going to do much of the organising myself, at least for a while.
Maybe eventually I'll add the game threads as well and create a full f.ds Mafia archive.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 02, 2021, 03:28:18 pm
I made a virtual room in Chatzy to test it out, and I think it has the features we need.

http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625
 (http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625)
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: faust on November 02, 2021, 03:44:05 pm
I made a virtual room in Chatzy to test it out, and I think it has the features we need.

http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625
 (http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625)
From what I can see, there are two restrictions to the free version that might be problematic:
- free rooms have a maximum capacity of 10 people. That's fine for most things, but will be a problem for speccys.
- it's not possible to access the entire chat history. This is a bigger issue.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 03, 2021, 02:48:13 pm
I saw what you did. It's confusing, because they say the entire Bible would be 5 KB and your couple screens was 13. I was able to see everything by clicking a bar at the top. Is that available to you, or just me because I made the room?

The 10 person limit is a problem for all QTs if we want to be able to share them at the end of a game. I think it's ambiguous if it means ten posters, ten people at a time, or ten people ever, even if not posting. I'm looking for a way to ask.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Swowl on November 03, 2021, 04:56:08 pm
hate to be basic on this - but just a simple Google Chat could be a good alt for the time being if we need a filler.

- Free to make a gmail account. No personal info needed to make the QTs, just the email
- Can make private threads and 1v1 threads and mod threads
- posts are time stamped and signed
- Can share everything via html posts.

It's not an ideal setting but it would work.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Dylan32 on November 03, 2021, 05:13:38 pm
I mean, if we are listing out features, a discord server for managing the private conversations would allow:

- Restrict visibility of private channels (not just who can read it, but who can even see that it exists), so private messages are good.
- Channels can be sorted into groups for easy navigation (All threads related to each game can be grouped together and completely hidden if you aren't involved; I imagine this would be nice for the QoL of mods)
- Unlimited (or at least practically unlimited) post history
- Timestamped posts
- Can restrict edit permissions
- Can't change or spoof who posted what
- No limitations on # of people in a channel (ala speccy problem of chatzy)
- All you need is a free email account to sign up for a free discord account (technically less restrictive than having to have a gmail account)
- You can access discord through a browser, desktop application, or mobile app.
- You can manage notifications on a per channel basis

The one big con I can see that I just thought of is that the server creator has permanent visibility on every channel, so either someone would need to use an alt account or have a friend outside of our mafia community host the server. I guess I need to double check to make sure someone who is able to create new channels and manage them (in order to mod, unless we just have someone that is willing to do the channel setup for game mods) would be able to still have other channels hidden from them so they can play as well.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: WestCoastDidds on November 03, 2021, 05:25:34 pm
EFHW, do you want to test if you can lock the chatzy and then reopen it?
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: WestCoastDidds on November 03, 2021, 05:27:38 pm
I made a virtual room in Chatzy to test it out, and I think it has the features we need.

http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625
 (http://us25.chatzy.com/88177764337625)

We need like 5 more people to go to get us over 10 to see what happens…
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 03, 2021, 07:58:33 pm
Need 3 more now.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 03, 2021, 08:20:50 pm
I looked at Google chat. I can open it in my EFHW account and stay logged in to my regular account on other tabs. You can't invite people by sharing the link. Everyone you invite has to have an email address. So I can't share the space I made unless I know some emails. I couldn't find a way to open and close the space to posts.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 03, 2021, 09:35:52 pm
Need one more on Chatzy.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 03, 2021, 10:54:43 pm
I closed the chat on Chatzy. Someone try to read it and report back if you still can even if you can't post.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on November 03, 2021, 10:57:55 pm
A message comes up: "The chat has been closed temporarily.

You must wait for somebody with permission to reopen the chat before you can join."

You can still read it.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: faust on November 04, 2021, 05:32:52 am
I had to dig a little bit, but it seems that Chatzy deletes rooms after 14 days of inactivity (see Chatzy FAQ). That means we'd have to create our own archive.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: faust on November 04, 2021, 05:35:26 am
I mean, if we are listing out features, a discord server for managing the private conversations would allow:
What formatting options does Discord allow?
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: WestCoastDidds on November 04, 2021, 08:42:17 am
I can still see the locked chat but not post
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on November 04, 2021, 10:03:12 am
I had to dig a little bit, but it seems that Chatzy deletes rooms after 14 days of inactivity (see Chatzy FAQ). That means we'd have to create our own archive.

Or just build a bot that posts on all our rooms every 13 days.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on November 04, 2021, 10:03:53 am
We can have it say things like "I love your site click here to buy sunglasses and prostitutes", just for old time's sake.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: scolapasta on November 04, 2021, 10:43:45 am
On # of users, btw, I found this from the inactive session popup:

Quote
In a free room, the timeout depends on the number of visitors in the room:

60 minutes if there are 6 or fewer visitors in the room
50, 40, 30 or 20 minutes, respectively, if there are 7, 8, 9 or 10 visitors
15 minutes if people are waiting in line to enter the room (more than 10 visitors).

So this confirms that the 10 is for active users at a time.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Dylan32 on November 04, 2021, 05:44:55 pm
I mean, if we are listing out features, a discord server for managing the private conversations would allow:
What formatting options does Discord allow?

Off the top of my head, you can bold, italics, and underline at least. Not sure if you can use color though.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: EFHW on November 09, 2021, 07:38:04 pm
joth, maybe put up a poll so we can make a decision?
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: jotheonah on December 01, 2021, 08:33:51 pm
joth, maybe put up a poll so we can make a decision?

done.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: J Reggie on December 05, 2021, 10:24:09 am
I mean, if we are listing out features, a discord server for managing the private conversations would allow:

- Restrict visibility of private channels (not just who can read it, but who can even see that it exists), so private messages are good.
- Channels can be sorted into groups for easy navigation (All threads related to each game can be grouped together and completely hidden if you aren't involved; I imagine this would be nice for the QoL of mods)
- Unlimited (or at least practically unlimited) post history
- Timestamped posts
- Can restrict edit permissions
- Can't change or spoof who posted what
- No limitations on # of people in a channel (ala speccy problem of chatzy)
- All you need is a free email account to sign up for a free discord account (technically less restrictive than having to have a gmail account)
- You can access discord through a browser, desktop application, or mobile app.
- You can manage notifications on a per channel basis

The one big con I can see that I just thought of is that the server creator has permanent visibility on every channel, so either someone would need to use an alt account or have a friend outside of our mafia community host the server. I guess I need to double check to make sure someone who is able to create new channels and manage them (in order to mod, unless we just have someone that is willing to do the channel setup for game mods) would be able to still have other channels hidden from them so they can play as well.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to play any more mafia games, but I like reading them and like this community. I also have a fair amount of experience with being a discord admin, so I'd be willing to create a server for this and do any maintenance as needed. Let me know if that helps anybody's decision.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: mathdude on December 06, 2021, 12:04:18 am
I'm running a game right now where all Roles (and individual communication) is sent out via forum PMs local here.  Scum group chat is (and speccy will be) done through chatzy - having never used it before, I didn't want to start 13 chatzy rooms and try to figure it out, so I'm doing such with just 1 or 2 rooms at the moment.  So far, no issues.  I can lock the room at night easy enough, and people have successfully written bold text.  I have a setting selected to timestamp every message (although looking now, that appears useful day-of, and now it's just showing which day the message was sent for older messages).

However, I've never hosted a game on the forums here before (with QT), so I have nothing to compare to.  I can say this is working.  I don't know how well or how it compares to previous hosting experiences for people.  We'll see how the next few hosts plan to approach it.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on December 07, 2021, 06:08:29 pm
Reminder that QT closes on the 11th, which is in about 3 days. You can still post your links here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=20934.0) if you want them to be saved.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on December 11, 2021, 04:01:34 pm
Well, it's gone. I ended up scraping every thread in the Mafia and Non-Mafia Game Thread sections for QT links, resulting in about the same number again as from the Post your links thread. Final count is 2,639 QTs and 191,177 posts.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: ashersky on January 24, 2022, 10:55:17 pm
I was gone for awhile, didn't notice this coming.  Sad to lose all the old games, although it sounds like Jimmmmm may have saved some from posted links.

My brainstorming and mod QTs though...
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Jimmmmm on January 25, 2022, 01:42:26 am
Yeah so every link that was posted on a Game thread should be saved.
Title: Re: RIP Quicktopic
Post by: Kuildeous on March 16, 2022, 02:02:43 pm
I've been out of it for a while. I remember using QT for some of these games. It was very handy. Sad to see it gone.