ConwayLife.com

oh dear. it's throwing errors already

Screenshot 2026-06-05 at 8.32.45 PM.png


Not so much "already" as "for now". These errors are a result of a weird caching issue, and they should go away after each page is viewed once (if you see it on two separate page loads of a page, let me know).

Whenever I search something and it automatically redirects to a page, this notice pops up at the top:
Notice: Unexpected clearActionName after getActionName already called in /home/njohnsto/conwaylife/w/includes/context/RequestContext.php on line 318

I have no idea what it means, but there ...

I think Nathaniel will handle that in the near future.


Unfortunately it looks like there's less I can do than you might expect. I have made a change to try to force the left navigation menu to stay stuck to the left, but it's only partially supported.

There are two collapsible navigation menus ...

hotcrystal0 wrote: June 5th, 2026, 3:09 pm Just wondering, was the arrow change intentional or just a result of updating everything?

Not intentional -- I can probably switch it back if people prefer.

If you see this post, you are now viewing the new server. Sorry for the headaches, the server move was much more involved than I had hoped it would be. Please feel free to report issues in this thread; I'm currently squashing problems and expect I will be for the rest of the day.

What happened ...

The move has been postponed until tomorrow. The weirdness will have to wait another 12 - 24 hours.

Just a heads-up that conwaylife.com will be moving to a new machine at my web host tonight (somewhere around 10 - 12 hours from now), so there will likely be some weirdness and downtime around that time. It shouldn't last more than an hour or two.

Question for discussion: In the event a separate OCA page is launched, will an OCAWiki tab be added to the top or will OCA Current news be some sort of toggle embedded on the current LifeWiki page?


I'm of course open to suggestions on this, but my first thought is to put the "OCA" link in the ...

Eeep, was a Cloudflare issue -- CF was blocking my own server from fetching stuff from the wiki. Fixed now.

It appears that this change has broken the !wiki function of caterer (the discord bot, not the p3 oscillator :D ) Could whatever web thing caterer uses be given an exception?


Yep, whoever's running it just has to let me know where it's running from (e.g., which IP it's hosted on or something so ...

Can you be more specific? (e.g., post screenshots or error messages of what goes wrong when you try to access the site on IE?)

Edit: I might have an idea of what's going wrong when using IE to try to access the site now, and unfortunately that's unavoidable now -- it has security holes from 10 ...

I've started the process of putting conwaylife.com behind Cloudflare DDoS protection. There might be some weirdness for a day or two, but hopefully it's less painful than the bugs caused by the truly absurd amount of bot DDoSing that is happening.

confocaloid wrote: January 2nd, 2025, 9:58 am Maybe create a subforum titled "Help / Support", and very directly clearly tell in the visible description that it's specifically created as the place to help new forum members?

I like this. Done!

hotcrystal0 wrote: November 27th, 2024, 1:27 pm Can we make this an announcement?

Done.

LuveelVoom wrote: November 27th, 2024, 1:29 pm Do direct links to forum posts in sandbox still work?

confocaloid guessed correctly: direct links to posts in the Sandbox won't work; you'll be greeted by a "You don't have permission to view this thread" message.

If you are not interested in this Sandbox forum, it is now possible to hide it from your view, while retaining access to all other forums on the site.

To hide the Sandbox forum , go to this page in your User Control Panel while logged in and add yourself to the "Sandless" group.

If you later ...

Very strange. The MediaWiki parser cache (the cache that handles Template transclusion) defaults to 24 hours, and I haven't changed that. And apparently it looks out for some special commands in that page's wikicode and speeds up cache expiry to just one hour if it sees one of those commands ...

I'll throw my two cents in for a few aspects of this thread, for what it's worth.


I think re-adding "C2_4" fails to be an improvement. The topic of the article is unique father problem , which is not just a single specific pattern. The topic of this article doesn't have any specific symmetry ...

Maybe the [ LV] could have a note on its hover text which very clearly discourages it from use. Or, maybe, the [ pattern] tag should be a different color (let's say green) from the rest of the tags.


I have gone ahead and made this change. Most of the other suggestions (e.g., moving the button ...

pifricted wrote: August 13th, 2024, 5:20 am When I load some pages, this comes.

Still happening, or fixed now? This might have been a by-product of me fixing the bot attack while the site is live.

(If it still happens, please let me know if a specific page that this happens on.)

Sorry about this folks -- it's a server issue, not a browser issue. We're getting hammered by bots for some reason. Working on a fix.

Edit: These bots are true assholes. I couldn't find a way to get rid of them other than blocking a rather wide range of IP addresses. Anyway, with them blocked, we ...

Yep, I think that should work. (Is that how links to patterns/*.rle files are also handled?)


This is now set up (e.g., https://conwaylife.com/rules/DoubleB3S23.rule points to the rule that's on the wiki). This is done via a server-side URL rewrite, so it is instantaneous (i.e., it's not a ...

You could also use Golly's "get:url" feature to download a .rule file and switch to that rule. This requires the url to end in ".rule" so it might be necessary to ask Nathaniel to write a little script to periodically store all the current rule info in .rule files somewhere on conwaylife.com ...

Add a new "LV" tag that does the exact same as the "viewer" tag. Have the "LV" button displayed, but the "viewer" button hidden. Then the "viewer" tag would still exist for backwards compatibility reasons, but the "LV" tag would be the visible one, which is less enticing to newcomers.
Add a new ...

I've added a few more accepted answers to the forums registration question, including "line of three".

Is it still possible, though?


Basically anything is possible. PHP is Turing-complete, after all. It's just a matter of (a) how much effort it would take on my part to make it work (I don't know whether things like "account creation date" are already pulled into the posting page's scope, for ...