
Show HN: tascii.io – a multiplayer ASCII character grid - is0tope
http://tascii.io
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is0tope
Before anyone asks, I only need registration to keep track of characters. Feel
free to make up any username and password you want!

I've been working on this side project over the christmas break The original
goal was to learn about real time web systems and to learn a bit more about
web development.

The goal was to try and emulate what reddit did with r/place but using letters
instead of pixels. It's a little basic, but I am overall happy with the result
and I want to see what happens when this gets exposed to the wider internet.

I think that the "collaborative whiteboard" medium like this is interesting
due to the fact that it is possible to implement other functionality through
it. One example is the QuickMaths bot that I implemented, that will ask
questions and listen for output on the grid. There is another more quiet bot
that prevents certain words from being written also.

Would appreciate any feedback or bug reports!

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ddtaylor
Seems like it's devolved into pointless political flame wars.

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is0tope
Unsurprising in some ways, but that's freedom :/

Could make Donald trump a censored word, but not sure what that would be
saying.

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ddtaylor
I think it's a more general problem. My guess is that it's not 99% of users
going to the site posting that one specific issue, yet the small vocal
minority of users has decided to plaster it all over the site.

One solution could be to maintain a karma for every user and update it when
their text is overwritten or erased. That way a user that constantly writes
the same garbage everywhere that gets erased would have a low karma and
couldn't keep doing it, whereas a user that writes things that visitors want
to see would have higher karmas.

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is0tope
Thanks for the insight. Yes it is presumably one user. Interesting algorithm
also with overwriting. There is a risk though that someone might get passively
punished simply because someone overwrote them.

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bradknowles
So, what exactly do you mean by "multiplayer" in this context?

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is0tope
In a loose sense. You can see the other players cursors as they type and they
can see yours. Idea is to see if people will interact when that happens.

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garfbradaz
I really like this. Good fun!

