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joker314 / PrivateOnline

An extension which doesn't track you but tells you who is online anyway (UNFINISHED, PUBLISHED IN THE HOPE THIS WILL BE USEFUL)
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What does it use to see who is online? #2

Open haylinmoore opened 6 years ago

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

From what I gather it posts in a forum topic, but I don't think scratch would allow it

towerofnix commented 6 years ago

Yup, that's what it does. Such is a significant part of the reason that this project is abandoned. (You get a dilemma of sorts - either you rely on an external server, which could track what you're doing, or you use Scratch's APIs, but in that case you're really abusing them, which is bad, too.)

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

Why not have the external server run on heroku that is linked with a git repo, so the backend is forced to be open

towerofnix commented 6 years ago

That's a pretty good idea, actually.

What if you did this, for the original isOnline project you and the rest of the iO team are working on, making the backend open as you described? :)

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

Here is the issue. Heroku, can be slow, and takes 30 seconds to boot up. Also is it possible to have a constant database ever after rebuilds?

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

But if you find a way, that also lets us keep our user key privates I will happlily make the switch

towerofnix commented 6 years ago

Here is the issue. Heroku, can be slow, and takes 30 seconds to boot up.

Test on a local server; publish the extension so that it's connected to the Heroku server. Since the Heroku server will only reboot once every publish, that 30 seconds doesn't matter so much. And in development, you'll use a faster server.

Also is it possible to have a constant database ever after rebuilds?

I don't know - you proposed this :)

But you can probably find information about that online.

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

Do you feel it would be ok if the database was stored on our servers? but is run on heroku

towerofnix commented 6 years ago

That's better than having the code also be run on your servers, but it isn't perfect, because, with the database on your servers, you can keep a track just like before. After all, Heroku has to make HTTP requests to your database server, and you could be running a script which watches for HTTP requests on that server. That script would keep a record of the database fields being set; so, a running count of who visits profiles the most. So really, it doesn't solve the problem there was with isOnline.

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

I don't see why knowing what profiles are popular is bad, like "Oh, no, lots of people go to griffpatch, damn that's unexpected"

haylinmoore commented 6 years ago

Anyways say we did, what good would come from that? Like we would not sell, if anything it would only show "Wow, people go to the pages of popular scratchers"