Bay 12 Games Forum

Thank you; I hadn't considered placing two stockpiles like that. If I'll end up using two stockpiles then that is probably optimal.

Having the dwarves pick up a bin and bring it to the item being collected is awesome -when there are multiple items to collect, and when nobody else wants any of the items already in the bin.

If a dwarf picks up a nearly full (and therefore heavy) bin to pick up a single item, this is likely slower than picking up the item and bringing it to the bin.

The more annoying scenario is when what's being collected is an intermediary product in a longer production chain -I learned this in my clothing industry. I'd collected pig tails in a stockpile close to a farmer's workshop next to the looms. Binned, of course, since I was mass-producing clothing for both domestic use and export. As soon as pig tails got to the stockpile I'd set up a plant processing job on repeat at the farmer's workshop. Then more pig tails mature over at the farms, leading to some Urist mcHelpful running over to the pig tail stockpile and picking up the bin with the existing pig tails (which is nice and efficient -much fewer stockpiles full of half empty bins), bringing it over to the farms to snatch up the fresh ones... Only, this means that my thresher, hard at work, finishes his current job and looks around for additional idle pig tails to process and, finding none, cancels the job.

So. Ideal scenario: There's somewhere in-game where you could have stockpiles switch between the new and the old collection method, and I'm just stupid and blind for having missed it?

Hey! HEY YOU! WATCH OUT FOR THE MAgma oh Armok, sod this; Now I need to find a new adventurer.

From what little spam theory I've picked up, the main attractiveness of spam is the ease with which it is successful. From the point of the spammer, the main part of success is exposure; I've often seen a spam thread on these forums with no replies but with over a hundred views before it's gone. That's already a success for the spammer. If even 0.1% of the views generate a click-through, then about every tenth spam message, assuming 100 views per spam, is generating income of some kind. Further, deleting accounts and ip-banning is easy to sidestep, as mentioned earlier in this thread.

To fight back, you need to make the spammers work harder for their viewcount, and slow down the rate at which they can create new forum ID:s.

The easiest way I can think of to sabotage the viewcount statistic is to let the viewers react. There is already a "report to moderator" button. How about adding a checkbox for spam to the page you are taken to upon clicking said button? If enough people , let's say five, report a post and check the spam box, then the forum would automatically hide the post (or thread if first post, or if all the posts were marked as spam), and possibly even prevent any further posts by that ID until the matter is investigated. A variation of this would be some kind of reddit-like upvote/downvote system with personally adjustable tresholds. Neither is foolproof, of course; they are open to abuse by spammers too, by spam-reporting innocent treads and thereby taking up the moderators' time restoring them, but I hope a simple check of IP:s would reveal the crudest attacks of this kind, and a (silent) rule requiring a forum ID to have had no posts flagged as spam within the last week before said ID's own spam reports are counted -for example- would further reduce the dangers.

Making generating new spam ID:s harder inevitably means messing with the registering process. I don't know the current process, so I am at a disadvantage, and I am also too lazy to clear my cookies and find out. On a purely theoretical note the longer it takes to register, the bigger a hassle it is, for genuine forumites too, of course, but whereas true bay12:ers register (usually) only once, whatever person or whichever persons doing the spam ID:s must register again each time their previous accounts get banned -so the inconvenience for them is multiplied.

In summary, I firmly believe that delaying the registering process and allowing forumites to actively partake in the fight against spam would hopefully greatly inconvenience the spammers without increasing the burden on administrators.

There is another possibility, depending on the age and version of your fortress. Was this fortress perhaps made in the version with buggy heat calculation, causing dwarves to melt in the rain?

You said you had forgotten beasts. That version was before forgotten beasts. I should have thought about it some more.

You want one of the suggestion subforums for this idea to get proper attention and feedback.

You are a dwarven cook. Down the hallways, you hear screaming. "We've found adamaaaAAAAAARGH!!!!"

You know it's time to run like the wind (from a furnace air intake, you know, not that elven breeze up on the surface)! Leap spiked pits, magma trenches, tantrumming soldiers, fireballs from imps, etc. on your race to the fortress gate -to be the first to Pull The Lever (and be the only one NOT sealed in with certain dismemberment).