Kison

Kison

This user plays Mafia. (Talk) Message: (Forum • Wiki)

Info

I am a scummer who joined on January 22, 2007. My two favorite games are iPick & Space Monkeys. I have so far moderated only a few games, mostly in the Newbie category. As of 2017, I play rarely if at all, and usually only if haggled relentlessly.

I am one of the site's current Technical Administrators alongside Thesp and formerly Mr. Flay, chamber & jeep and have been so since April 27, 2011. I joined the Omertà team on June 21, 2010. I was also a member of the Scummies Sterring Committee from its founding on June 25, 2009 until April 23, 2012.

My primary responsibilities include building new features, fixing old bugs, performing upgrades, and recovering from crashes. Perks include a pretentious red name and access to hidden forums. The two site crashes for which I am best known for recovering from are The Great Rollback and the The Great Encryption. The fatigue of these two crashes along with increasing political strife caused me to go on an abrupt and unannounced hiatus between December 2012 and April 2013.

In the real world I am a 30 year old former landscaper turned programmer. I grew up in Maryland and have lived in San Diego(Pacific Beach), Boston(Cambridge, Beacon Hill & Somerville) & Manhattan(Wall Street). I am currently back in Maryland.

Interested in contributing to the site? Send me a private message! Questions? Feel free to spam my GTKAS!

Contributions

Ongoing Projects

• phpBB 3.2 Upgrade - The board currently operates on phpBB 3.0.x. We are well overdue for an upgrade!
• Site Chat
  • New Features Notification - Despite announcing new features, users often times aren't aware of them. We'd like to build in a mechanism for making new features apparent to users within the chat application itself.
  • New Message Notification - If you're offline when someone sends you a direct message, you may not receive it. This is a pretty critical bug.
  • Notification Pattern - This feature would allow users to receive a notification if a text pattern appears in any window. For example, being notified if someone mentions your name.
• Post Masking - An option that you can set on a per-game basis that will allow any posts made by your primary account to be placed under an alternative account.
• Automated Queues - We're dabbling with the idea of automated queues run outside of the forums. The initial release would allow users to browse & join games. Moderators would be able to accept/reject players and begin the games. This project would greatly reduce the workload of List Moderators.
• Fixing Old, Broken Posts - A bunch of posts made prior to the 2010 phpBB3 upgrade are broken. This is the result of the new board not recognizing the new bbcode format. Mith & I did a fair amount of work on this already in 2010, but there are still a bunch out there that need to be fixed.

Past Projects

• Activity Overview - Displays a summary of poster activity within a given thread.
• [countdown] tag - A BBCode tag that will display the difference between the current time and the time you specify within the tag.
• Multi-Isolation - Provides the ability to view more than one poster in isolation within a thread.
• Wiki-Forum Integration - Allows users to log in to the wiki with their forum account without having to register separately.
• Private Message Searching - Installed a plugin to allow private messages to be searched.
• [dice] tag - Originally implemented by jeep on the phpBB2 board, these were completely redone after the phpBB3 board upgrade.
• Pre-Crash & Archive Reintegration - At one time, MafiaScum consisted of three different boards: The live board, the archive, and the pre-crash board. The pre-crash board consisted of posts from the early days of Mafiascum up until a massive crash occurred. The archive consisted of most posts prior to the Summer 2010 phpBB3 upgrade, initially to address server stability issues. With better hosting, the need for this separation became unnecessary, and we unified all into the current forum for ease of use.
• Friends & Foes - Primary Contributor: kunkstar7, this feature was modified to work only outside of Mafia games. The lack of this separation is the main reason the feature was disabled.
• Autolocking Topics : The ability for moderators to enter a date and time at which their topic will automatically lock. Particularly useful for moderators with deadlines.
• HTTPS - Upgrading the site to utilize HTTPS, a more secure means of communicating with the MafiaScum servers via encryption. The wiki & main site have already been upgraded, but a few lingering issues with the forum(notably image tags to insecure sites) are still being worked out. ConnorJC & borkjerfkin are helping out with this.