COLORS CHAT #21

[skybuns]

It's time to sit back, relax, and pour yourself an ice cold glass of... milk. All these games are so great and fun but everyone needs a chance to just unwind and talk. So welcome to Colors Chat!

Here, you will get a topic and you can talk about it all you want. Just listen to your heart and write what you feel like. For your six sentences, you'll get 5 cards. And you should always go around and talk to people, see if you can make new friends or old friends with new light on them or you know, just talk with everyone! It is a chat after all.

Today's topic:
TCG woes. Tell us about the little problems you face while doing anything TCG! Has ETCG ever screwed up while you were updating? Maybe you missed an end tag in your coding and all of a sudden your post is an intelligible mess. What little things pull your chain?

To encourage discussions between players, there's a bonus - for every conversation that is at least 5 comments long all participants will receive two random cards. This is not limited, so talk to as many people as you wish!

Please keep all comments civil and polite. You might disagree with someone, but please do not start a flame war. Especially for this topic, please try not to talk poorly of specific players if you've had a bad experience with them. THANK YOU and enjoy your weeks!

This round closes on Monday, August 25th, but the next Colors Chat will go up on the 24th if I remember. CLOSED

Comments

[honeybrushedheart]

ahahahaa... I've messed up my card post a good number of times, from something not looking right when adding extra portions, or using the wrong tag when trying to add new cards, all the way to the full blown disaster that was accidentally leaving out one quotation mark and breaking all the html in the post because I was adding cards and participating in a silly Twitter "argument" amongst the League community.

I've messaged Onyx on Skype at least three times so far going "HELP I MESSED UP MY CARD POST SOMEHOW I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FIX IT." and she ends up just responding "SIGH hold on a minute."

I also always feel a little bad whenever I comment to someone's post on the trade community with a link to my post and list of like. 4 or 5 cards I'd like to trade for but that's just me being kinda weird and shy really.

[tentacular]

It's all too easy to mess up those posts. The first day I joined I wound up in a complete panic fest because I was affected by massive gaps in the post (turned out to be an unclosed tag), but I just wound up getting so frustrated that I had to go hug Onyx and then go to bed just to unwind myself. HTML is pure evil sometimes.

Also being shy isn't weird! It's totally normal. And kind of cute.

[skybuns]

It's okay Chii, we love your derps. Thank you!

[radria]

Oh, I've got a great story for this one.

Just two weeks ago, I was working on updating my site and started a backup to make sure things were working nicely. I had decided to move one of the image host backups to a new subdomain and after backing up, deleted the subdomain information to rebuild it.

... too bad it was my actual tcg domain instead of the image host subdomain. In between completely losing it and thinking I would have to restart everything. Luckily for me, in my infinite wisdom, I remembered about the backup and reinstalled my TCG Post from said backup.

Sadly, I had to completely reinstall the Image Host subdomain but it could have been so much worse.

If I have learned anything, it's BACKUP!

As for easyTCG itself, it seems to hate when I have to tweak a trade (either adding/removing a card) and then I have to go back in when the trade is done and remove or re-add the card manually.

For other things, what mods do people use for easyTCG? I'm kinda interested to see what I might be able to add to my own trading post!

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[empanadas]

It's not in Colors TCG but in another game (Pairings, to be exact), but I was adding pairing decks in the collecting page using Ten's PHP thing for eTCG when one pair suddenly appeared as doubles. I think I have to delete those decks and readd them with a different name, which is time-consuming and I'm too lazy to do that atm.

It is kinda annoying that eTCG won't automatically take more cards from the trading pile if you already made a trade; you'd have to cancel the whole trade, and then add those cards in. Also the trade php files for the eTCG seem to hate me because I tried tweaking the header/footer for the trade form, but once someone finishes filling out the form, CSS errors pop up for the "Your form was submitted successfully!" page. Here's the proof! See what I mean? The navigation and the rest of the footer with the credits disappeared. :\ If anyone knows how to fix it, please let me know!

[netbug009]

Did you have two of each deck in collecting? The script will double up if that happens.

[harukami]

For a while, when I used tables in my mastery post, they kept messing up. It started happening when I was about 50 mastered decks deep so it was hard to pin down. I eventually figured out what was going on but it was a huge nuisance. It wasn't like a big deal -- it kept adding an additional extra space after every row, so the first row was fine, then the next one was one space out, then the one after was two spaces out. But it looked untidy and drove me crazy. I don't even remember what fixed it in the end but it was definitely just one thing out of place. It hasn't happened again but I've mastered enough now I think I should split them into multiple pages... both for organization and to avoid an error somewhere in the sea of decks. But getting around to it is so hard!

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[gammacrank]

I've screwed up so many times, haha. The worst was a few months ago, when I accidentally deleted my TCG php folder while cleaning out files via FTP and thought I'd have to do all of the coding again - thankfully Dreamhost was able to provide a backup, and now I do regular backups just in case. In general, though, ETCG has been pretty good to me unless I mess up spelling or punctuation when updating cards/trading; there are a few minor annoyances that would be great to see fixed, but there are work-arounds for those, so it's not a big deal.

…Oh wait, also, around the time I decided to move things to a website, I realized that dreamwidth had eaten the first few months of activity/trade logs (this was only a few months after I joined, so it wasn't the end of the world, but still). Had to rebuild that by wading through e-mails, the main comm and the trade comm. Not fun.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[estamir]

I don't really have ETCG woes aside from "setting up took forever because I waited to start using it until I had like 6000 cards." But god, now that it's up I don't know how I functioned updating manually. BLESS YOU ETCG.

Really, my biggest TCG woe is probably the fact that I only really have time for one TCG in my life - which is of course Colors. And since most of what I like is animu or eastern vidya, that works out fairly well for me, for the most part. But there are just a few other things I would really kill to collect, but 1) not enough of them to join another TCG with a different focus, and 2) I don't really have time for another TCG anyway. It's tragic.

Also I don't collect many orange or green decks and the randomizer always wants to give me orange and green crayons.

[netbug009]

The lack of a stable general western animation TCG breaks me heart. D':

[netbug009]

Ohhhhhhhhhhh man, eTCG. My love hate relationship with eTCG. On one hand, I could probably never keep up with TCGs without it. On the other hand, its emails wind up in my spam folder and I worry the same will happen to other folks. ;_;

Of course, that's not even going into the problems I make for myself. Like my ridiculous pile of mass decks.

http://netbug.carbonbeauty.net/tcgs/colors.php?Mass

Every single one of these cards is in the collecting section because I wanted things to be SUPER DUPER PRETTY. Just.... try to imagine what my collecting section looks like.

I still can't set up eTCG on my own from the ground up. I've been very blessed to run into hosts who handled it for me. <3

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[beezebeora]

Biggest ETCG woes for me is sometimes I don't change my keyboard settings back to ENG, so my commas are all 、 (and I just copy and past.) and the whole thing messes up. and I totally hate when I type something wrong on a huge post, and I misspell something, so one of the categories are not updated and goes unnoticed. But these are always my fault 80% of the time, so what do you expect.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[reneetwist]

SO, when I was a wee newbie player, I used my Dreamwidth journal to house my cards, and kept my logs on another entry. Three days after I joined Colors, I was setting cards in the post and tweaking the layout. And you know that the delete post button is next to the post/save button... welp. I pressed the wrong button (and missed the "Are you sure?" cue). So I lost EVERYTHING. I had to find and retweak the green table coding (which I'm not good at doing myself), I had to switch between the log post and the new post to get my cards back, I had to remember who I had outstanding trades with and who had made requests (which is why the very first comment on my post is basically I'M SO SORRY, here are your trades ;o;). The only good thing is that I did this at Red level, with less than 100 cards to my name.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[forevertobestill]

Hahaha I'd never even heard of ETCG until recently. This is the first TCG I'd been a part of since maybe 2007 and I'm not even sure if it existed back then. I just passed 800 cards though so it seems like it would be a good idea to perhaps work on getting hosting with ETCG. I haven't really had any issues when it comes to coding and whatnot, save for the occasional time I forget to put a space or symbol in my coding and my DW post goes nuts.

Oh, I guess one of my TCG woes would be some of my old favourites disappearing. ;__; I remember I was hooked on Fictional back in the day, but the updates started to dwindle and one day the website completely disappeared. I was also really fond of Divinity and a Pita Ten one, but neither are active anymore. That makes me a sad panda. I also wish my old trading card post was still up, damn you Freewebs.

[netbug009]

There was a whole TCG for Pita Ten? I had no idea it was so popular. :O

[kuranosuke]

My biggest problem with etcg has been the moment when you have a double card of a deck in your TP and then you put the deck on collecting... and it takes that one card from the TP. I normally wouldn't have most likely noticed a thing, but then I saw a card of the deck I just put on collecting in one of my priorities...

Otherwise ETCG has worked like a charm. I can't imagine how I'd manage without it with the number of cards I have right now. Sometimes I fear of accidentally deleting everything, but then I'd have to be really careless to do that and I'm usually not.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[moes]

Updating my logs is a huge pain in the butt, I don't even know how I manage to maintain it... sob.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[grandmaestro]

When I used to manually update a DW post, I would constantly forget an end tag when adding new cards. I had messed up posts like, 90% of the time I tried updating. Especially since I used to wait so long between updates, haha...

With ETCG though, my biggest problems are either a) misspelling card names and causing errors or b) accidentally trying to update the wrong TCG. I also had a hell of a time setting up different mass decks but once that was done, everything has been a breeze. (Bless the inventor of ETCG tho, cause seriously. Even with problems life has been SO EASY since I switched to it.)

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[admiral]

well my current woe is not being able to access my site right now, but that's more a hosting woe than a tcg woe. :C

etcg is such a time saver but I do mess up trades a lot by typoing card names and stuff, lmao. also when you use the easy uploader and have a huge amount of cards to upload but you MISS A COMMA or something and it screws up everything. woe indeed.

I'd also kill for a western comics tcg, there's been a few comics-based tcgs but they haven't lasted long, unfortunately. (on the plus side, there's a ton of new animanga tcgs popping up now and I have to stop myself from joining literally all of them I am terrible at doing things in moderation.)

oh and this is just me being super lazy, but I get sad when people have their cards up on a site but don't have a card search script on their trade pile page. seriously check this out it's so handy!!

[arilyn9]

Thank you for the link! I've been meaning to that and the information makes setting up a lot easier ^^

[arilyn9]

I restarted after almost a half a year hiatus because an awesome friend of mine set up an etcg for me! It's awesome! My only problem is, that for some bizarre reason I wanted to separate SP and regular cards in the tradesite even though I trade whichever way. I can't keep up what i an SP and what isn't though! So they are all messed up. And another thing, I keep having the same deck cards in like three different sites like depending the day it might end up in high, middle or low priority or just for keeps! And I keep putting things, especially the ones I'd just like to eep for now in the tradepile... And I have a couple of cards in my highpriority that I don't even know where from. The stupidest thing? I could have remedied that in the span of the time it took to write this :')

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[emberwishes]

I don't think I have anything that really bothers me about TCGs or my eTCG. It did take me a really long time to realise you could list cards to add them. Like I would click the + button and put each individual card into their own box. Then one day I realised you could just copy paste a whole list of cards if you were adding them to the same category, and I felt pretty silly haha! ^_^

To be honest I haven't had many more problems than that. It's much easier than all that manual coding and is definitely one of the best things I've switched to! (even when it randomly disappears or moves cards) ^_^

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[hanakoanime]

My biggest problem with my cards is loading the trade pile. Whenever I want to edit that, it freezes. Maybe I should split it in half...

Another problem is the logging. I'm a lazy person in nature, but I do PoG or anything with a lot of cards as prizes, and I cry because I have to update my logs with all those cards.

And my biggest problem is I want to collect a lot of decks. I get into too many series/I like how the deck looks, and then I collect... and collect, and my list seems to be expanding, not shrinking even if I master decks.

I really want a Vocaloids tcg, or an Utaite one. Did I mention that before?

[vivillion]

I would love a Vocaloid tcg. Imagine having decks for various PVs! And maybe characters? Utaite decks added in would actually be really cool too, though I don't know enough about their fandom so-to-say to know how a deck would be done...

off topic: have you seen the new vocaloid Rana? i'm not sold on her voice yet but her design is totally adorable

[murkrows]

Let me talk to you about setdomsess.

Okay. So as some of you may know, I keep track of my Colours logs through editing Dreamwidth posts. To do this, I have to log in to my account and edit the comment -- quite normal. What isn't normal is the fact that my old school (I just finished my last year there) has an extremely weird filter that blocks anything related to "livejournal.com". I had thought this wouldn't be a problem, because... well... Dreamwidth.

Unfortunately, I was wrong! Dreamwidth was built off of old LiveJournal source code, so whenever you try to log in, it sends you through a LJ process called 'setdomsess'. I can only assume that it's the thing that tells the site you're logged in, or something. Either way, my school's filter blocked that, which basically means that whenever I am logged in, if I try to load any user page (murkrows.dreamwidth.org, etc) I will get a feedback loop for a few cycles as the filter repeatedly blocks setdomsess, and eventually get a "Page couldn't be loaded" error.

So, yeah, this meant that I couldn't choose my icons when responding to RP tags, but I also couldn't log in to edit comments. I found a way around editing the entries, so I was able to update my actual post. But comments... nope. Nothing. So I had to leave already-processed Colours emails in my inbox until I could log them, and because I was and still am a lazy bum, they ended up being logged much less frequently than they absolutely should have been.

And that's my TCG woe.

[skybuns]

Thank you!

COLORS CHAT #21

[fall]

I had the usual problems with setting up etcg, I think. It took me forever to actually get my auto upload feature to actually work. I had to actually contact the script owner and go to google, just to find out that it was an issue with my host not allowing them by default. Fortunately, I was able to get it working though. It took me a bit to get the card search script working. Aside from that, I've had trouble with giving the wrong answers to games. It's not a big deal, but it's always a little frustrating to mess up.

Re: COLORS CHAT #21

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[vivillion]

yes... excellent.....

My computer, rest its soul, died a few weeks ago. I got my new shiny laptop with Windows 8 and a touch screen a little after. However, because new laptop + grumpy, resistant to change Chives = trouble, I haven't been able to convince myself into properly editing my tradepost html in ages. I have, like, 20 unlogged crayons because they aren't something I have automated through eTCG, and I don't even have FileZilla installed yet.
Even worse, my mass deck page is getting to be a pain to load, so chances are I'm going to need to break that up... not to mention, I'd like to make a new layout... but I have so many other commitments, including school, tabletop games, and even a RP I'll need to do coding for... in summary, everything is busy busy busy and I just want to sit back with a familiar computer and play online trading card games and watch idol anime. ;__;

And there's my vent session for the day!

[skybuns]

Thank you!

[beccastareyes]

Right now? Vacations are my problem. Because there's always something going on, right now I'm going back and answering a week's worth of games. I don't even want to think about logging all my cards.

I also have to be careful about spelling. Or checking once I enter cards, so I can figure out right away what my typos mean.

[skybuns]

I understand that so much, especially with how busy I've been the past few weeks... OTL;;

Thank you!