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Hello TL Mafia players!
Around the start of this year I made the Java program for creating somewhat balanced "normal" setups of roles ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/mafia/436988-automatic-balance-tester ). It probably hasn't seen a huge amount of use (since the hosts are mostly pretty experienced players anyway and better judges of balance than a simple algorithm), but it was quite fun to create it. And maybe it has helped some hosts - at least it was interesting to discuss about balance in the feedback thread for the program.
A few months ago I had a university course for creating a simple database and a website to make use of it. I decided to name my project "MafiaTools" and to make it something potentially useful for Mafia players. Originally I had various ideas for what to do, but I ended up with a simple feature: a note application for keeping track of each player in a game of Mafia - specifically their posting and things related to role claims / usage.
I finished the course already some time ago, but it wasn't yet quite ready for actual use. In the recent days I've been making changes to make the website more practically usable and now it should be ready for actual use.
Of course I haven't really used *that* much time on the project and there's certainly always room for improvement. If you have suggestions, please share them in this thread. My studies will be starting pretty soon though, so I may not have time to make major changes in the near future.
In any case I decided that this should be a good time to share the website for testing out with actual users (people on this forum playing real games of Mafia). I've done a bit of testing myself already and it feels like reasonably useful especially at the start of a game. Later on it tends to become less useful as the reads become stronger and fewer people remain alive.
Here's the website: http://t-teesalmi.users.cs.helsinki.fi/MafiaTools/
Registering is as simple as entering a username and password. The password is hashed with PBKDF2 so it's impossible for anyone to find out what password you use for the website. On the other hand, if you forget your own password, it's also impossible to recover your account. That's why I'd recommend using a reasonably simple password.
Once you've registered, you can create games and then add players to those games. The game view includes the players' names as well as various pieces of information about them (points, play notes and role notes).
Points: Kind of a town/mafia ranking based on your own opinion. The players in the game view are ordered according to these points and they can help you to get a "bigger picture" of how suspicious each player in the game is.
Play notes: This is where you write notes about each player's posting style, relations to other players, voting patterns and stuff like that. You can also insert HTML to this text field (things like bold <b>text</b> or links). There's a also a specific button to conveniently enter HTML links into this text field.
Role notes: This is where you write notes about each player's bluetells, claimed roles, role usage and stuff like that. You can also insert HTML to this text field (things like bold <b>text</b> or links). There's a also a specific button to conveniently enter HTML links into this text field.
Not sure how useful this will be, but it should be worth at least trying out as a learning experience.
Huge thanks to raynpelikoneet for helping with the testing and for making numerous suggestions for the website! Also thanks to gonzaw for helping with the early phase of this project.
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On August 27 2014 04:22 kushm4sta wrote:
why did you use java
Haha :D Why not?
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cause if you are on a mac you have to use safari
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Hm. It works just fine on iPhone so I don't think you even need to have Java installed?
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I also tested it with Firefox on my Macbook Air and it worked fine. Are you sure it doesn't work outside of Safari for you?
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Well, testing this would naturally work best while playing an actual game. Next games coming up seem to be the Cell + Mission games. So if any of the players in those games want to use it, that could be good.
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I'll give it a try and can post thoughts on it once the game's over if you want. I haven't looked into it yet but one basic question:
Is it possible for other people to search for other people who have registered? Just from a smurfs point of view, do I have to be afraid of people looking at the email I signed up with? Can I just sign up with my real accountname from TL?
Oh don't even need an email but the question still remains for the name I register with
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On August 27 2014 07:54 Professor Apathy wrote:
I'll give it a try and can post thoughts on it once the game's over if you want. I haven't looked into it yet but one basic question:
Is it possible for other people to search for other people who have registered? Just from a smurfs point of view, do I have to be afraid of people looking at the email I signed up with? Can I just sign up with my real accountname from TL?
Oh don't even need an email but the question still remains for the name I register with
There's no way to view the usernames except by looking directly at the database information, of which only me and raynpelikoneet should have the knowledge of doing currently. I could completely disable the option of doing that too if you're worried about information leaks? Probably I should just in case. Passwords are 100% impossible to look for though since they're hashed.
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No need to disable that if that's the case. As long as it's not out in public à la "people online right now: XYZ" or "newest registered: XYZ". There shouldn't be an issue as it should be impossible to link people who are currently playing on TL in whatever game and people on your site anyways. Unless of course I happen to be one the first guys to sign up and it were to be out in the open 
Just asked to make sure of it.
first suggestion: When registering, ask for the password twice and only accept it when it's identical. I found myself typing it 5 times to make sure I don't mistype with it being lost if I typo'ed
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On August 27 2014 09:21 Professor Apathy wrote:
No need to disable that if that's the case. As long as it's not out in public à la "people online right now: XYZ" or "newest registered: XYZ" there shouldn't be an issue. Just asked to make sure of it.
Haha OK  I think I'll disable it just in case in the near future though. For example I accidentally saw your "real" username when I just went to check the database. It would be bad if an actual game was screwed because one of the players found their way into the database contents or something like that.
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On August 27 2014 09:21 Professor Apathy wrote:No need to disable that if that's the case. As long as it's not out in public à la "people online right now: XYZ" or "newest registered: XYZ". There shouldn't be an issue as it should be impossible to link people who are currently playing on TL in whatever game and people on your site anyways. Unless of course I happen to be one the first guys to sign up and it were to be out in the open Just asked to make sure of it. first suggestion: When registering, ask for the password twice and only accept it when it's identical. I found myself typing it 5 times to make sure I don't mistype with it being lost if I typo'ed
Haha yeah that's actually a good addition. Btw you should maybe make a new post instead of editing the old post since it's not as easy to notice you updating that post.
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On August 27 2014 08:38 Xatalos wrote:
There's no way to view the usernames except by looking directly at the database information, of which only me and raynpelikoneet should have the knowledge of doing currently.
I am pretty sure i do not have the knowledge to do this or if i do i do not know about it. ^^
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On August 27 2014 23:06 raynpelikoneet wrote:Show nested quote +On August 27 2014 08:38 Xatalos wrote:
There's no way to view the usernames except by looking directly at the database information, of which only me and raynpelikoneet should have the knowledge of doing currently. I am pretty sure i do not have the knowledge to do this or if i do i do not know about it. ^^
I thought you did but OK Nvm then.
In any case, I just disabled access to view the database contents. Now it shouldn't be possible to fetch any information from the database (at least with any reasonable ease). I can temporarily enable access if really needed, but I think it's better if I (or anyone else) can't accidentally see something they shouldn't. And I don't really even *need* to look at the database at this point since I've finished working on the database stuff.
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second suggestion: Add more input fields for the "add player" option so that you can add a bunch at once and don't have to do the same thing 15 or 30 times. From a pure aesthetics point of view having 30 input fields on one page is probably overkill but if you could add 5 seperate people at once that'd be already a bunch more comfy.
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On August 28 2014 00:29 Professor Apathy wrote:
second suggestion: Add more input fields for the "add player" option so that you can add a bunch at once and don't have to do the same thing 15 or 30 times. From a pure aesthetics point of view having 30 input fields on one page is probably overkill but if you could add 5 seperate people at once that'd be already a bunch more comfy.
Yeah, it's a bit inconvenient to enter all the player names at once if there are a lot of them. I actually tried some sort of a multiple name input system earlier (when the structure of the database was still quite different) but ran into technical difficulties. Now it would be easier to implement though so I might look into it. Another idea I've been thinking about is a button that enters all the player names on your clipboard into the database (so you could basically just copy-paste the playerlist from the OP of a game).
I'll probably implement your first suggestion tonight and the second one I'm not exactly sure how I'll go about doing it yet, but I'll try to do something about the issue.
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On August 28 2014 03:56 kushm4sta wrote:
you shoudl add a captcha
:D:D:D
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On August 28 2014 03:56 kushm4sta wrote:
you shoudl add a captcha
Did you get it working btw?
And yeah I guess... Although I wonder who would be bored enough to start botting my website.
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EPT
