NationStates++ | Browser Extension for NationStates

[Republic of Vietnam]

I have a little question I would like to ask.
A few days ago, I was looking through regions. Some of them have this KiwIRC. Now, as a founder of my region, I would like this feature. So my question is, how do you get this?

TG Afforess, he adds it for you.

Oh. Thank you very much Leningrad Union!

[Shadow Afforess]

I officially changed my font size down and it did absolutely nothing here (though it changed sites like google. I still think it's NS++ because I never changed the font size on my computer before. Also what can I do about that giant flag on the sidebar.

NationStates++ does nothing to fonts. You can verify this fact for yourself by uninstalling the extension. Your fonts will remain unchanged.

Regarding the sidebar flag, you can simply disable it in the NS++ settings page area. Uncheck "Floating Sidebar" in the Sidebar Settings category.

Sorry about the slow response.

[Applebania]

This may be a noob question, but how does the recruitment work?

[Shadow Afforess]

This may be a noob question, but how does the recruitment work?

Not a noob question at all. Basically recruitment can be set up by the regional delegate or founder. You need a client key for your region to recruitment (which you can obtain via a Getting Help Request). Once you have that, you write and send a telegram you want to use for recruitment to "tag:api" as the recipient. When you do that, it will give you back a telegram id and secret key. All 3 of those things are needed and then you can set up a campaign.

[The Leningrad Union]

This may be a noob question, but how does the recruitment work?

Not a noob question at all. Basically recruitment can be set up by the regional delegate or founder. You need a client key for your region to recruitment (which you can obtain via a Getting Help Request). Once you have that, you write and send a telegram you want to use for recruitment to "tag:api" as the recipient. When you do that, it will give you back a telegram id and secret key. All 3 of those things are needed and then you can set up a campaign.

I applaud you for explaining this so simply, it's hard for a lot of people.

[[violet]]

Is there anything you can do to identify NS++ traffic to us? At the moment it is indistinguishable in our server logs from regular human browsing, since it sends the user's IP address, the user's UserAgent, etc.

When we have strange load events, I often wonder if NS++ is responsible, but it's very hard for me to see what it's doing.

[Shadow Afforess]

Is there anything you can do to identify NS++ traffic to us? At the moment it is indistinguishable in our server logs from regular human browsing, since it sends the user's IP address, the user's UserAgent, etc.

When we have strange load events, I often wonder if NS++ is responsible, but it's very hard for me to see what it's doing.

You mean the client/extension, right? Ajax requests can not override normal browser headers, but can add custom ones, like X-NSPP. I can add it to the next release for you.

PS. I asked if you wanted this sort of feature back when we were dealing with recruitment issues & user-agents.

PPS. While I am discussing things I've asked about and not gotten a response for, ages ago I asked Ballotonia if the mod staff would be interested in some sort of web-based NS++ control panel, so they could:

1.) Check if a player was a NS++ user
2.) Remotely disable NS++ for a user
3.) Remotely deactivate NS++ recruitment for a region
4.) Remotely deactivate NS++ servers

I also never got a response there either. I can't pull up a TGID on it because I believe that was back under my old nation. Ya know, not being able to read telegrams from my old nation kills me. I couldn't care less about the rest of the stats. And I know the telegrams are still there, just in an unreachable set of database rows...

[[violet]]

PS. I asked if you wanted this sort of feature back when we were dealing with recruitment issues & user-agents.

Right, and then we discussed it offline, and agreed you could add an identifier to the URL of NS++ requests, something like "?nsapp=1". So has that happened? I'm not seeing it in the logs.

Right now when I see odd load and traffic spikes I have no way of telling whether that's because of NS++. I would really like to be able to see where that traffic is going, because otherwise I'm trying to debug system-side when the problem isn't there.

[[violet]]

PPS. While I am discussing things I've asked about and not gotten a response for, ages ago I asked Ballotonia if the mod staff would be interested in some sort of web-based NS++ control panel, so they could:

1.) Check if a player was a NS++ user
2.) Remotely disable NS++ for a user
3.) Remotely deactivate NS++ recruitment for a region
4.) Remotely deactivate NS++ servers

That sounds handy. Maybe it could have an API, too, so we can gather data to combine with our own.

I also never got a response there either.

Sending TGs direct to one admin probably isn't ideal. If you post here in Technical, at least we can all see it. It still might get ignored, but it's visible!

[Shadow Afforess]

PS. I asked if you wanted this sort of feature back when we were dealing with recruitment issues & user-agents.

Right, and then we discussed it offline, and agreed you could add an identifier to the URL of NS++ requests, something like "?nsapp=1". So has that happened? I'm not seeing it in the logs.

Right now when I see odd load and traffic spikes I have no way of telling whether that's because of NS++. I would really like to be able to see where that traffic is going, because otherwise I'm trying to debug system-side when the problem isn't there.

Yes. API requests to the official API have been using that for quite a while (a few months). But for standard html pages I haven't (as I understood it, only the API usage was being discussed. No special user agent was needed for normal game side pages.)

If you are saying ALL Ajax requests to ANY NS domain need that additional query parameter I can and will do that. But what I understood us agreeing on was that requests to the API were the only ones that needed it.

The TG to Ballo was before other means of communication were possible and violet has no TG inbox.

[[violet]]

Yes. API requests to the official API have been using that for quite a while (a few months). But for standard html pages I haven't (as I understood it, only the API usage was being discussed. No special user agent was needed for normal game side pages.)

Oh I see. You are right; the "?nspp" was a workaround so you could hit the NS API without sending a UserAgent. We didn't ask you to do that for other requests. As to whether you should, I guess it depends on what NS++ is doing. If it's only generating a few page requests here and there, no big deal. If it's occasionally causing hundreds of hits on a particular part of the game, I'd like to be able to see that so when I go hunting for why something is running slow, I can tell whether NS++ might be involved.

What does it mean when there are API requests with UserAgent "--NationStates++ ( Afforess - Afforess@gmail.com )--" but no "?nspp" parameter? Looking at the last day, for example, there are 82,000 of these vs 11,000 using "?nspp" with a regular browser UserAgent.

[District XIV]

When do you think the proposed "Regional Assembly" feature will roll around?

[Shadow Afforess]

Yes. API requests to the official API have been using that for quite a while (a few months). But for standard html pages I haven't (as I understood it, only the API usage was being discussed. No special user agent was needed for normal game side pages.)

Oh I see. You are right; the "?nspp" was a workaround so you could hit the NS API without sending a UserAgent. We didn't ask you to do that for other requests. As to whether you should, I guess it depends on what NS++ is doing. If it's only generating a few page requests here and there, no big deal. If it's occasionally causing hundreds of hits on a particular part of the game, I'd like to be able to see that so when I go hunting for why something is running slow, I can tell whether NS++ might be involved.

What does it mean when there are API requests with UserAgent "--NationStates++ ( Afforess - Afforess@gmail.com )--" but no "?nspp" parameter? Looking at the last day, for example, there are 82,000 of these vs 11,000 using "?nspp" with a regular browser UserAgent.

Most of the time (most = 99.99%) only a few Ajax requests occur a minute. Obviously if something goes wrong or a user opens 1000 tabs I can't stop that.

Only 82,000 NS++ server requests in the last day?! I'm being generous then, the theoretical maximum is 144,000 API requests per day. I'm not surprised there were only 11,000 ?nspp requests - that number seems reasonable. The only API request the extension users make is to send a telegram. That occurs only once every 3 minutes, hence the low volume.

PS. NS++ servers serve ~1.2M requests a day to users. Admittedly Json responses are less demanding to create.

[Shadow Afforess]

When do you think the proposed "Regional Assembly" feature will roll around?

Sorry about the slow reply. This will likely be a part of regional forums. If you participated in the recent survey, you saw that feature listed already.

[Jeckland]

Would it be possible to allow newspaper editors to view which nations submitted an article for editing? I ask this because somebody is trying to stir up shit in my region, and I'd like to know who, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's had this problem. I don't know how easy that would be from a technical aspect, as I'm not a computer kinda person.

[Shadow Afforess]

Would it be possible to allow newspaper editors to view which nations submitted an article for editing? I ask this because somebody is trying to stir up shit in my region, and I'd like to know who, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's had this problem. I don't know how easy that would be from a technical aspect, as I'm not a computer kinda person.

Yes...I do have that information, I just haven't added it to the form. I can definitely do that.

[Shadow Afforess]

I guess it depends on what NS++ is doing. If it's only generating a few page requests here and there, no big deal. If it's occasionally causing hundreds of hits on a particular part of the game, I'd like to be able to see that so when I go hunting for why something is running slow, I can tell whether NS++ might be involved.

I'm not sure how "self-aware" the site is, in terms of performance, but one possible way to help reduce load during traffic spikes would be to perhaps add a hidden html tag onto the page. NS++ could check for this and if it is present, skip normal "real time" ajax updates (like refreshing the sidebar, rmb, forums, etc).

[[violet]]

NS++ could check for this and if it is present, skip normal "real time" ajax updates (like refreshing the sidebar, rmb, forums, etc).

Well, you already can check how long it takes to retrieve a page. But really I'm not looking for solutions because I'm not sure NS++ is the problem. At the moment I just want a way to tell, when there is a problem, how much NS++ has to do with it. Very possible the answer is "nothing." But I need to be able to figure that out.

It would be wonderful if NS++ could tag itself in the UserAgent. That would allow all my existing diagnostics to work. But if you can't do this, the extra query string would be helpful.

More and more I'm seeing "lumpy" behavior, where there are sudden big spikes in particular areas, which seems to be caused by lots of people abruptly hitting the same place at once. It's not the API, it's other places across the site. Very weird.

[Shadow Afforess]

NS++ could check for this and if it is present, skip normal "real time" ajax updates (like refreshing the sidebar, rmb, forums, etc).

Well, you already can check how long it takes to retrieve a page.

Not really. I can not tell between:

1.) The user's internet is slow (saturated upload)
2.) The website is slow (saturated download)

More and more I'm seeing "lumpy" behavior, where there are sudden big spikes in particular areas, which seems to be caused by lots of people abruptly hitting the same place at once. It's not the API, it's other places across the site. Very weird.

Gotcha. I will include the extra query parameter on the next release.

[Shadow Afforess]

More and more I'm seeing "lumpy" behavior, where there are sudden big spikes in particular areas, which seems to be caused by lots of people abruptly hitting the same place at once. It's not the API, it's other places across the site. Very weird.

https://github.com/Afforess/NationState ... 244aae?w=1

Not released yet, but it's done. I am hoping to get a bit farther with websockets.

[Prince Richard of Valconesia]

Is there a problem with the buttons? Because they look weird. This is what I am talking about.

Is it an NS++ problem, a NationStates problem, a computer problem, an internet problem, or a browser problem?

[Shadow Afforess]

Is there a problem with the buttons? Because they look weird. This is what I am talking about.

Is it an NS++ problem, a NationStates problem, a computer problem, an internet problem, or a browser problem?

I don't see any issues. Can you tell me what browser you are on, and what NS theme you use? (Default, dark, etc)

[Prince Richard of Valconesia]

Is there a problem with the buttons? Because they look weird. This is what I am talking about.

Is it an NS++ problem, a NationStates problem, a computer problem, an internet problem, or a browser problem?

I don't see any issues. Can you tell me what browser you are on, and what NS theme you use? (Default, dark, etc)

It's like the New Telegram button, reply, archive, and the delete buttons. I use Google Chrome and i'm on the default theme. Here in the emoticons there is that castle badge. The quote button towards the bottom is also a badge.

[[violet]]

More and more I'm seeing "lumpy" behavior, where there are sudden big spikes in particular areas, which seems to be caused by lots of people abruptly hitting the same place at once. It's not the API, it's other places across the site. Very weird.

https://github.com/Afforess/NationState ... 244aae?w=1

Excellent, thank you.

[Shadow Afforess]

I don't see any issues. Can you tell me what browser you are on, and what NS theme you use? (Default, dark, etc)

It's like the New Telegram button, reply, archive, and the delete buttons. I use Google Chrome and i'm on the default theme. Here in the emoticons there is that castle badge. The quote button towards the bottom is also a badge.

Something weird is going on with your browser, and I don't think its related to the extension. I recommend you go into chrome's settings and clear your browser cache. See if that fixes it.