Orphalese Tarot Zone Community Forum

Hey Richard,

I'm late in getting on board with the P2P but I'm finally here. Great work with the new version. I know this is something that you've been working toward for a long time. Congratulations in bringing it to completion. And great work Dominatrix on the images.

I haven't shared any of my own files yet, just downloaded one to checkout how the whole thing works. Am doing this from my dial-up connection at home....not sure if the exchange will be blocked by the firewall at work....or, if they will be able to detect the traffic if I run it there.

Just a few questions/points.....(and sorry not to have raised these through the beta stage but better late than never, hey?)

1. When downloading a deck, it shows a file transfer in progression message (or some similar words) but how do you know how long the transfer will take, or the size of the file you are downloading? A progression bar might help to show where the download is at. Is there a way we can view the properties of the file?

2. You have a next 50 decks link but not a previous 50 decks link which makes it a bit tricky to move up and down the list.

3. Can we tidy up the list a bit? I noticed there were some duplications (which I understand is multiple people uploading their version of the same deck). Some of these decks are listed under different variations of the same name. For example, it could say Marseilles Tarot, and then a bit further there is a Tarot of Marseilles. Do you think we should invoke some kind of deck name formatting so that duplicate versions of the same deck are at least kept together on the list? Were there filters to maybe just show all of the Oracle decks, for example (sorry I've not played enough to know if that is already available).

4. Will the administrators have access to complete some of the missing information such as the deck creator's name? And if so, what's the process to do this?

Um, that's all I can think of, off the top of my head. Will let you know if anything else comes to mind.

regards
purple_scorp

Hi Scorp,

Glad to have you around again! I might not answer these questions in order because some of the answers are related to each other, here goes...

The reason there is no progress bar shown is technical. I experimented with different ways of transmitting the files and the ones that would have allowed the program to show a progress bar (basically any kind of file stream) all proved quite a bit slower. I think this might be because modern internet servers are smart enough to prioritise certain kinds of transmission at the expense of others, which is one reason why peer-to-peer file sharing is generally slow. The method I settled for doesn't allow for the progress bar but it perhaps manages to avoid that kind of discrimination.

What I am planning to do soon is build in a way of giving the user some clue as to which decks will download more quickly. I will do this by having the program send a little feedback report after each transaction, whether it was successful or not, how long it took etc. What I envisage is that each file will have a colour code - four shades of red from very dark (=very slow) to very light (=slightly slow) and then four shades of green for better than average times. Files which have not been requested or for which there is no information would be white. So when you see three or four identical decks being shared by different people you might also notice that one of the decks was on a better connection than the others and more easily obtainable.

The navigation is also something I am planning to improve, with a series of links to numbered pages similar to what you get with Google.

The peer-to-peer model really does away with the administrator role to speak of. Because the shared decks are all hosted on users' own machines, rather than on a central server, it is only the individual user who can edit their own shared decks. It certainly might be useful to start some debate going in here about useful deck-naming conventions and the desirability of including information about the author etc.

Re your own situation, you might or might not be able to share decks from your work machine, subject to any corporate firewall settings. They could certainly detect the traffic if they were looking for it, you can judge for yourself how likely that is. I would not recommend sharing any decks from home if you are on a dial-up connection though. I would guess the upload speed you get is pretty slow, and that will mean a strong likelihood of connections timing out. Also if you are paying by the minute I would imagine you disconnect quite often when not using the internet, and that would be quite frustrating for anyone trying to receive one of your decks. I can understand that you would have an urge to upload decks, as you shared a lot of decks on the old exchange, but with this peer-to-peer model it might be better to just stick to downloading.

Cheers,
Richard