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Psychopath
Affable misanthrope, common narcissist, incorruptibly amoral, aspiring arsonist, friendly neighborhood psychopath.

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Joined on 12/18/06

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What the fuck happened to the dumping grounds?

Posted by Psychopath - September 14th, 2014


Today I've made an angering discovery. For those who don't know, the ads I have installed for most of my new Flash movies and the rotary list that displays my other submissions [CFC quick list] are embedded in from the dumping grounds, the way you used to be able to do this was to take the link "http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/" and replace the word "item" with the word "draw". When the display stopped working in my browser I just assumed that it was Chrome's fault. Chrome has a horrible history with Flash. Then I tried it in three other browsers [IE, Firefox and Safari] and eventually learned that "draw" no longer displays the SWF file when you enter it into the HTML address bar, it just downloads. Then I previewed another SWF just using the normal "item" URL in Firefox, looked up the page info and found the actual display code for it; it was nothing like it was before. Not only that but as it turns out, the display code fucking mutates constantly making it impossible to make it properly display that content.

The only other form of uploading SWF files to Newgrounds that doesn't have a mutating address for previewing it are those that are submitted to the portal, meaning that I'd have to submit my ads, individually, to the portal before displaying them properly from a Newgrounds server. This also goes for the images in my rotary list of links.

In case you're wondering why this is important, I use embedding to prevent my CPMStar ads from locking up the preloading screen and preventing you from using the menu. The whole point of preloader ads is that they achieve the double benefit of making money while occupying the spare time it takes to load the content. A lot of the times, the ads lock up the menu for longer than it takes for the movie to load. Most people will ditch the content by this point. Either that or they just resort to using adblock. By embedding my ad in such a manner, I was performing a service to my viewers when other people didn't know how. It wasn't an alteration to the code either, it was a work around.

I also used the 2.0 version of the ads. Now for those who don't know, the 2.0 version of the ads don't lock up the screen with a video ad like the current 3.0 ones do. In case you're wondering why I embed those in when they don't lock up the screen, it's because those ads occupy a lot real estate and I can't change their size without using and embedded window.

This also kept the file size of my submissions from blowing up by five megs when I embedded the rotary list in, since that consists of about forty or so images as previews to the movies they link to.

This embedding format also allowed me to make universal edits to the CFC quick list without having to alter each individual portal submission I had that used it. Now if I want to make an update of any kind, I have to physically edit each and every SWF file and file swap them which takes something like three days to register where as file swapping one file in the dumping grounds was instantaneous.

This means that the service I've been providing to other authors with my rotary list have been losing potential hits on their content.

I have one question: why has the dumping grounds been made so useless when it had such a dynamic function?


Comments

That explains a lot actually... so I guess the Quick list is out now?

I'll probably have to compromise with a new watered down version of the same thing. I'm honestly considering creating vector renderings with pseudo-pixels of the images I was using before. Since vectors are native to Flash, they'll be a much lighter load than the 75 x 50 images I'm using now. For now, I'm just gonna fix the ads and ponder my options on the CFC quick list.