Intro (also, a little more technical issues)

I suppose I should talk a little bit about what Kongregate is. At its base, it's just a place where people can upload Flash games and other people can play them, which is not too different from many other sites such as Newgrounds. There are a couple of features which differentiate it, however. First is that it's very oriented toward building a community (hence the name, I guess), so, for instance, every time you're playing a game, there's also a chat panel to the right where you can carry on enlightened discussions on Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undestanding with everyone else in the room. I'll leave it to the clever people in the audience to figure out how well this works in practice, so this is a feature that doesn't really do anything for me.

The feature which does do something for me, however, is badges. After all, adding achievements to a terrible game instantly makes it something that you want to play, because you get rewarded with this achievement at the end!

Anyway, as you might expect, Kongregate is no stranger to Sturgeon's Law, but that doesn't mean that there are some good games there. And hopefully I can find some of them!

Oh yeah, the obligatory referral link: Sign up using this link!

OK, the promised technical issues. (Try to contain your excitement!) It looks like Blogger can't import comments from external sources, so the old comments will not appear (I still have them saved on bantha, however). I suppose I could go in and add them by hand to old posts, but that is not terribly exciting, to say the least, so I think I'll pass.

One item of curiosity: the old blog, even when lying completely dormant for years on end, never seemed to get any comment spam, which pleasantly surprised me. I guessed that my comment system was so old and janky that the spam scripts didn't know how to handle it. Well, it turns out that I was half right. So, my old comment script saves the comments in a file with a name of ###.comment, where ### is the ID number of the post being commented in. When I was cleaning out the comment directory, I found that there was, in fact, an extremely large file called .comment. Apparently the spam scripts would just submit their comment without any post number attached at all, and the comment script (apparently not being so great) would accept this. The spam comments would never show up on the blog, of course, because they weren't actually attached to a post, and a casual ls of the comments directory wouldn't turn them up, either. Anyway, this makes it quite easy to nuke all of the spam.