Hey all! I've been hard at work with things IRL, so no Motley, Totley, W0tley, or Thotley vid this week. :/

Here's a text update!
- I've been hard at work on a secret project I mentioned in my blog a few days ago. Still a long way off, though.
- There was a function that, for some reason, wasn't working correctly in the Dots/Kong/PR1 servers. I did some maintenance, and I'm happy to report that this should prevent them from going down more often than not.
- Beta testing on a new addition to PR1 is underway! Stay tuned for that!

I've been reading through all of the PRF suggestions and they all look awesome. Hopefully, Jiggmin will take community input!

See you all next week. ~~~

Copy the reply above, and add one line. Try to make it rhyme in abab (the 1st and 3 rhyme, while the 2nd and 4th rhyme separately) or abcb (just the 2nd and 4th lines rhyme) or aaaa( all lined rhyme together) pattern. 
Make the stanzas 4 lines each
Example: 
Person 1: This is a Poem a
Person 2: I will say "orange" b
Person 3: rhyme it with "home" a
Person 4: uhh... Splorange b

Try to keep your line short but not too short, and about the same amount of syllables as the rest of the lines in the stanza you're adding to.

A.K.A. The flash games you see on y8, kongregate and even on steam.
Exclude PR2 because we all know it's the best.

WARNING: Technical stuff below. Click away now if that sort of thing scares you.

For undisclosed reasons, a future project I'm working on requires a connection to a socket server from another server using PHP. The function I was using (fsockopen, like a normal person) wasn't working. I spent about a half hour on the phone with my hosting provider's support team this afternoon, only for the guy (who had no idea what he was doing) to tell me that the company is totally dumb and they block outgoing socket connections to the port to which I was trying to connect.

For the rest of the day, I attempted to find ways around this. I tried different functions (stream_socket_client and cURL), and neither worked. Of course, I didn't realize that the restriction was network-level and not function-level. So, essentially, I wasted an hour or so trying desperately to solve a problem in a method which definitely was not possible.

I took a brief interlude in my work to try to explain to Mom what this highly technical problem was. I love explaining this stuff to her because I'll try to compare it to a real-life scenario, she'll have no idea what I'm talking about, and we'll both dissolve into hysterical laughter.

After some more troubleshooting and wanting to throw my computer out the window, I came to the realization that I could connect to an allowed port via my PHP script and forward the connections once they got to the destination server from the allowed port to the prohibited port. I spent about two hours trying to figure out why the connections would work from my local computer and not my PHP script. When it still wasn't working, I called my hosting provider and spent about 45 minutes speaking to another guy that had no idea what he was doing. He told me the allowed port I was connecting to on my other server was not open. I was like "the connection isn't even getting to my server, so it must be a *company name* issue." He said something like "uh well if you figure it out give us a callback."

I spent a bunch more time messing with my firewall's rules to try to allow connections to this port from a specific IP address only, and then forward the connection over to the correct port. I restarted the server multiple times (you may have noticed downtime in Dots, Kong Racing, or PR1) and still didn't have any luck trying to diagnose the issue.

Then I had an idea. I enabled network logging and tried to search for my site's IP address again. When that turned up no results, I searched the port. Surprisingly, there were many entries for a bunch of different IP addresses. I decided to unblock that port for all IP addresses temporarily so I could log the connections and see where the requests were coming from. I was flooded with a bunch of Chinese IP addresses in my log; definitely not me. It had been a while since I tried to connect to the server using fsockopen from my server, so I ran the command via SSH for the hell of it.

And it worked.

Instant replay of me figuring out it worked:



I instantly reblocked the port and checked my log. What was surprising to me was the IP address of my server wasn't there. I was bewildered, to say the least. To diagnose the issue, I decided to unblock the port again, log the connections to that port, and spam the command that ran the PHP script to see if I could find the IP address of my server. I still didn't, so I looked through the IPs that did connect. There was one IP listed awfully frequently, but I didn't recognize it all. I figured I might as well do an IP search on it to see where it was coming from, and... you guessed it, it was a different IP from my hosting provider.

Nobody ever told me this was a possibility. Gee, thanks, guys! Y'all are really knowledgeable about your own servers. -.-

The only good thing that comes out of having absolutely no idea how to do something and doing the same thing multiple times, is you get really good at what you're doing. I now know about different aspects of my OS's firewall that I had no idea existed.

Anyway, it works now. What a relief! Now I can get back to the actual project instead of worrying about this nonsense.

Hi there! I didn't know there was a new site like this. I'm glad I know now, I missed JV!

I'm curious, I have no idea how to find the Artifact hat and I was wondering how to find it. I really want to be the first person to find it one day and get the bubble parts. Like do you use Fred's level Treasure Map to find it? I think there used to be hints back in the day before there was a password on it? I have no idea.

hmmm

Hello! I would like to preserve PR3 + PR2 for as long as I could.

Is there any way to download PR3 to be able to play offline? I assume there's no way, but just wondering, maybe you guys know more information than I.

This is a song that I finished about a week ago. 

https://soundcloud.com/zerinus/retromancer-1

Hope you guys enjoy, and thanks for listening!

The Platform Racing series is now once again fully functional!

Here's what's generally new in Platform Racing:
- Intro now plays the "Thanks" intro song snippet present in PR2
- Skip intro by clicking
- Various cosmetic changes (login screen, online list)
- Various sound enhancements/changes (bounce sound changed to the one from PR2, higher quality audio)
- Current stats for individual stat types are now available (see customization page)
- Required ranks made a lot lower (I don't think any casual players are getting to rank 300)
- Fixed mine in wall glitch
- Modified jetpack physics so they're not completely either OP or terrible

There are a few other things that have changed here and there, but that's the gist of it! The next update will probably have to do with attempting to make the level songs perfect loops. We'll see where that endeavor takes me.

And who knows... maybe there will be more levels made in the future!

Links

-- Games --
Platform Racing: https://jiggmin2.com/games/platform-racing
Platform Racing 2: https://jiggmin2.com/games/platform-racing-2
Platform Racing 3: https://jiggmin2.com/games/platform-racing-3

-- GitHub --
PR4 code repository: https://github.com/jacob-grahn/plant-right-4
All open pull requests: https://github.com/jacob-grahn/platform-...rver/pulls
Warnings to Mutes (merged): https://github.com/jacob-grahn/platform-...r/pull/519
Make links clickable in the ban popup (merged): https://github.com/jacob-grahn/platform-...r/pull/520
Log staff account logins (merged): https://github.com/jacob-grahn/platform-...r/pull/521

-- Contests --
No contest news this week! See https://pr2hub.com/contests for more information.

If you'd like to host a contest of your own, please post in Ask a Mod. https://jiggmin2.com/aam
If you're a contest owner and want your announcement to appear on Motley Monday, please send it to me by the Sunday before your desired Motley Monday video.

-- This Week's Suggestions --
No suggestions this week.

-- Posting Future Suggestions --
For JV2 Suggestions, post in the Bugs and Suggestions forum. https://jiggmin2.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=37
For PR2 Suggestions, post in the PR2 Suggestions forum. https://jiggmin2.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=45

That's it for this week. Thanks for watching!