Fixes and Changes to the Fractured Fairfax Forums

I've made the following fixes and changes to the Fractured Fairfax forums:

1. Fixed the problem where the buttons in the editor didn't work if you were using Firefox 16+. This was particularly annoying, but it was a pretty easy fix once I found the patch on the MyBB Web site.
2. Removed the link to the forum calendar from the forum header. I'd disabled the calendar anyway, so all clicking on the calendar link did was take you to a page telling you that the calendar had been disabled, which was kind of annoying and useless.
3. Added a new "Announcements" forum. I added a new read-only forum for news and announcements for the Fractured Fairfax forums.

The Fractured Fairfax forums also had their first spambot registrations: two of them, in fact! I deleted the accounts, but this has got me thinking as to what other changes I'm going to have to make to protect the forums from spambots.

I also think I'd like to make some changes to the formatting and layout of the forums to make them look a little more like the Fractured Fairfax wiki.

Now Testing the Fractured Fairfax Forum

Now testing the Fractured Fairfax forums at http://fracturedfairfax.com/forum.

The Evolution of the Fractured Fairfax Logo

Here's the original Fractured Fairfax logo:

Actually, it's not the original, original Fractured Fairfax logo. That one had a slightly different pattern of lines, but I was unhappy with it because it looked like tiger stripes rather than cracks. When I redrew it, the old one went to the great bitbucket in the sky.

I used this logo for about the first year of Fractured Fairfax, but I was increasingly unhappy with it. Finally, I broke down and created this version last month:

It's better, because the outline of Fairfax County is actually broken up (fractured, even!). I've used this logo for about a week or so, but the problem is that when it was shrunken down, the words seemed too small. So I left it alone with the idea that I'd know better what changes were needed after a "cooling off" period.

Finally, I came back to it and made a few color changes and made the text bigger, so here's the new new Fractured Fairfax logo:

I'm still not 100% happy with it, so I imagine before too long we'll see the new new new Fractured Fairfax logo.

Serendipitous Discoveries

Sometimes you make a serendipitous discovery when you're writing.

I spent today writing some more backfill articles for the Fractured Fairfax wiki, trying to turn some of the red links that are sprinkled throughout the 1,753 articles there into blue links. For those of you not in the know, a red link on a Mediawiki wiki (which is what Fractured Fairfax is) is a link to an article that does not yet exist.

I started out by writing an article about Matthew B. Harper, who stabbed his sister Anne to death on Thanksgiving Day, 1995. While researching and writing, I discovered that the lead detective on the case was named June Boyle, who was honored as one of the Virginia Homicide Investigators Association's Top Homicide Investigators in 1999 for the nearly three-year long investigation she conducted to prove Harper's guilt. A blurb in the article about Boyle's receipt of the honor mentioned that she had shot an unarmed recreational pharmaceutical salesman to death in November of 1987.

Serendipitous discovery! June Boyle was in fact Irene M. Boyle, whose November 16, 1987 shooting of unarmed criminal suspect Jose Carlos Rodriguez was commemorated in a series of articles snarkily titled "Fairfax County Police officer Irene M. Boyle “Opps! Gee gosh it was loaded?” awards" on the nastily anti-cop Fairfax County Police Watch blog.

Armed with my new knowledge, I went ahead and wrote up an article about Detective Boyle after I finished up the Harper article.

One more red link down, 3,349 to go.

If You Build It, They Will Come - And Spam the Shit Out of Your Wiki

One of my least favorite things in the whole world is dealing with wikispam. To paraphrase from the movie "Field of Dreams", if you build it, they will come, and spam the shit out of your wiki.

Now, I'm trying to keep things simple as far as the Fractured Fairfax wiki goes. One of my favorite design principles is summed up by the acronym KISS, which besides being your older brother's favorite rock band (or now maybe your father's), stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid". That is, don't add on a lot of shit that will overcomplicate your solution to a problem.

With this in mind, I originally started with just a bare Mediawiki installation, to which I added the ParserFunctions and Cite extensions. The former makes it easier to design templates and certain special pages for the wiki, while the latter makes it so I can add footnotes and references to the articles on Fractured Fairfax (it may be poorly written crap, but it's poorly written crap with proper attribution).

Next I added on the Google Analytics Integration stuff, which lets me look at a whole bunch of statistics which I can slice and dice in all sorts of interesting ways to figure out what parts of Fractured Fairfax people are actually reading. The idea here is that if people are reading certain types of articles, I should craft and curate similar articles to cater to my audience.

The last one was the hardest, or easiest. In its previous incarnation, the How to be Bad blog specifically made fun of the idea that someone might think advertising on that blog was a good idea. However, even though I don't expect to get rich (or even make a very good living) from Fractured Fairfax, I'm not going to just fork over money to my Web host for the joy of running a wiki. I figure a tiny little bit of advertising to help offset the minimal costs I incur isn't going to destroy Fractured Fairfax, so I added an small spot for Google to display whatever ads they think are appropriate for my audience.

So, back to wikispam. One advantage of having a new home for the Fractured Fairfax wiki was that the spammers hadn't found it yet, so I didn't have to worry about dealing with them. That golden age lasted all of about 2 days before the spammers found the site and started crapping it up with their E-shite.

Since playing Internet whack-a-mole with wikispammers is not my favorite way to pass an evening (delete crap wiki page, block user, rinse and repeat), I decided to add some measures to try and minimize their impact. One of these was adding the SpamBlacklist extension to the Wiki. So far, I've seen a little bit of improvement, but I think some fine-tuning is needed, which I'll do before I add any more.

I'm trying to keep it simple, after all.

Well, I've been feverishly working away at Fractured Fairfax at its new home at http://howtobebad.com/wiki and according to my stats I've now got 1708 articles in 3258 pages. This is up from 1629 articles in 3116 pages at the old site.

The new articles today so far are:

• Harbi Adam
• Maria J. Alvarenga‎ 
• Intesar A. Amra 

These are all rewrites of articles I'd originally posted on the Fairfax Underground wiki. I looked at the count of categories and articles in the Unnatural Deaths Category and it's at 107 subcategories and 341 articles on Fractured Fairfax versus 139 subcategories and 457 articles on Fairfax Underground, so it looks like I've still got quite a lot of work to recreate.