DavidWest's Discussions

You're spot on, it's usually SMS hijacking via social engineering. Mostly you see this with high value targets; they'll call up support and verify enough with the support tech that they get the number switched to a different phone.

If a service only offers SMS, it's really not something to be super worried about. But if a service offers 2FA through multiple means, the general recommendation is to use an authenticator app if offered.

Nuyube,

I'm sorry you had to go through all that; security breaches snowball really fast.

Quick note for those that aren't going to read the entire thing. The BEST thing you can do on Alpha Coders is to have a strong and unique password.

As far as Alpha Coders and two factor authentication goes, it's something that we could add in the future, but don't see a huge need right now. I know that might sound odd in a response to a well written experience like yours. Also a side note, 2FA through Authy or Google authenticator is MASSIVELY better than 2FA through SMS. Anyways:

Alpha Coders isn't generally a huge target, for a variety of reasons. We take measures to prevent brute forcing of passwords. So even if an attacker thought you used the same password on multiple sites, brute forcing via Alpha Coders is not going to be a viable way to go about it. There will be logins that are far more lenient behind the scenes.

We also don't feel we are a high or medium priority target. We don't store much information beyond just an email. No financials, not really much of 'value' to an attacker.

By far the most value would come from attacking Alpha Coders as a whole, rather than an individual here. Either for mass harvesting, or ransomware, so we put a lot of focus and effort there. Keep in mind we're a small team, so we do end up having to put focus in specific areas.

For a site like ours, I'm of the opinion that we do an above average job utilizing best practices (most of this happens behind the scenes). But 2FA is definitely something on our radar if it becomes prudent.

Hey everyone!

To enter, all you need to do is add author information to the content you submit, or to content already on the sites!

Responsible discovery and sharing is an important goal of Alpha Coders. We like to reward user activities that make both our site and the rest of the internet a better place - and we greatly appreciate everyone who joins in!

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Let me know if you have any questions!

Alexis,

Sometimes the machine learning models will get it wrong. You can always request a review. We then use that data to improve the model.

RolloBollo,

Having to wait for a moderator approval is normal until you become a trusted user. If you receive any private messages about changes to your submissions, try and take note, and you'll be a trusted user in no time!

Hello everyone!

For the month of September, we are going to have a special contest for tagging! You earn points by tagging either your content, or other content on Alpha Coders.

Please make sure that you follow the tag rules. Tags should be relevant to the image. The point of the contest is not to spam low effort tags. https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6766 Low effort/spammy submissions will immedidately disqualify you from the contest, and potentially get your account banned.

You can find our scoring page at : https://alphacoders.com/contest/tag-score

Hello everyone!

Today we've started moving our traffic through Cloudflare's network. Cloudflare's network is designed to filter out more bot traffic than we previously filtered out.

What does this mean for me?

Hopefully, it doesn't impact you at all! It is possible that if you view hundreds and hundreds of pages, you may be presented with a captcha. It is also possible that if you use a VPN, Tor, or other anonymizing sources, you may be impacted.

Why make this change?

As unfortunate as it is - there's the real possibility that bots are having a really big impact on our traffic quality, and putting us in a bad spot with our advertisers. No advertisers, no $$$. It's a pretty simple equation for a free site. This hasn't been completely verified, but it's what I believe is going on.

Hey - I have a bot that relies on your site! What about me?

If you use our API: That will still work the same as normal!

If you scrape pages outside of the API: Please use our API! https://wall.alphacoders.com/api.php is 100% still active. Even if your bot can't access user pages, it will still be able to access our api! 150,000 free queries/month is a lot! I personally don't have a problem with anyone scraping the site in nearly any fashion - but the negative impact I'm currently seeing is completely unprecendented, and I absolutely have to try this route.

Please let me know if this negatively impacts you. Thank you for your understanding.

Another month, another batch of updates! You can keep more up-to-date with our Discord channel!

## [0.1.28] - 2020-08-20

### Added
- Admin can warp a player back to the Azure planet in limited circumstances now
- Monster attacks can now have an additional effect. The first example of this is going to be the Trae having a thorn effect show up on the player
- Ice Sleem. Consumable by human bodies.
- Portal image added
- Voonita can now drop AI Dust

### Fixed
- Bug that was allowing players to pick up things no matter how far away they were
- Bug that would cause some objects to not immediately update on the client when a player harvested them

### Changed
- Minimum HP requirement for Blue Algae to spawn from an Algae Vat has been increased from 100% to 101%
- Cyberskell HP from 200 to 100 (will probably go back up if I decide to increase attack - which I think I will)
- admin spawning monster type command changed from using an ID to a name
- Updated the object ID of The Great Nomad to match production server
- Gave the Reinforced Human Body additional defense to all damage types
- Building a portal now needs to be done in a Manufacturer. Increased complexity from 10 to 20
- Reduced Voonita HP from 50 to 25
- Increased Transporter drops to 50 Credits/200 AI Dust/10 Exoskeleton Fragments.
- Changed how the server finds additional ship coords to send to the player as the player moves. Tiles are now grabbing and storing the indexes of their up/down/left/right
neighbors - and once they know that, traversing space around the player is extremely quick for the server.
- Removed Nano Bonder drop from Macro Viruses

## [0.1.27] - 2020-08-13

### Added
- Warning message when players attempt to dock at The Great Nomad
- Admin function to tick The Great Nomad
- Danger message if a player is thinking about attacking a monster that is likely to near instantly kill them, or insta kill them.
- Admin ability to gift items to players if they lost items somehow

### Fixed
- Objects that can not be assembled will now not show up, even if those objects have assembly linkers associated with them.
- Issues with placing objects with multiple tiles
- Bug with researching while the player is offline
- Maggot Burgers and Mech Take Out can be picked up and attacked
- An error or two when players died
- Players can no longer be attacked on Spaceport Merchant tiles

### Changed
- Implemented the start of a new system I've been thinking about for quite a while now. Tiles/coords will grab the array index of their neighbors to the top/bottom/left/right,
so we can traverse those indexes rather than searching the entire array. Currently this is only active for grabbing new ship tiles/coords in ships. If I don't notice
any large issues with it, I'll keep expanding this system. It takes the lookup times on a pod from 300ms to 1ms and should scale much better
- Reduced 'Crush' attack damage from 150 to 75 for Trae
- Regenerated the BioGrove, Inferno, and Frozon Planets

## [0.1.26] - 2020-08-11

### Added
- Temporary script to fix the extra 1400 or so ships

### Fixed
- Couldn't land on Azure planets
- Potential fix for the infinite assembly bug (not tested yet)

## [0.1.25] - 2020-08-11

### Added
- Admin function to regenerate the floor of a planet level
- Generic message when moving to a tile isn't going to work
- Fire Wall
- Fire Lava and Fire Simple floors
- Two advertisement drones (monsters) on the Corporation Planet
- Maggot Burgers
- Mech Take Out
- Cherry Blossom and Cherry Blossom Sipmle floor
- Cherree (monster)
- Boomtis

### Fixed
- Warmind should now show up
- Clients will no longer think they can move onto a tile with part of a monster on it
- When monsters that take up multiple tiles die, they will now be removed from all tiles.
- Asteroid Ship display

### Changed
- Most monsters on the Machine Planet Type spawned on 3 different levels. I want to increase variety, and have reduced that to an average of 2 levels.
- Reduced Warmind HP
- Complexity and tier of some items. I'm going to try and standardize the complexities of the different tiers a little. Otherwise things get a little too confusing.
- Ice and Ice Simple floor tiles
- Ice Wall spite
- Fire floor spite
- The Great Nomad sprite
- Maggot sprite

## [0.1.24] - 2020-08-06

### Added
- Monsters can now have a 'move away' attack movement type. This will generally be the default movement pattern for ranged monsters.
- Admins can now send a new 'admin' type of message globally to notify everyone if the server is going to shut down or something else important.

### Fixed
- Autopilot
- Message warning players that if you build a ship in someone else's shipyard, it will not belong to you when it is complete.
- Manufacturing Thiol Drives and Blasters
- Monster beams were not following the monsters. It will now follow the monsters as they move.
- Bug that would cause many of the same effect sprites to be created needlessly.
- Bug that would cause all beam sprites directed towards a player disappear when only one needed to be removed.
- Continuously redrawing hp bars unnecessarily
- A bug that was immediately deleting new battle linkers when a player moved down a hole or up stairs

### Changed
- When switching ships, only pods will be abandoned. Other ships will remain yours, and you can command the ships you aren't using to dock/warp to the Azure planet. Eventually I want them to autopilot to the nearest planet, but that's a lot more difficult to implement.
- Made credits a more common drop on monsters - especially on corporation planets

## [0.1.23] - 2020-07-27

### Added
- Things you can eat can now impact your manufacturing abilities
- Support for events generating new planet coords above level 0
- An event that spawns a building with special enemies to be defeated (event is not yet active, just waiting on the sprite animations to finish). More of this coming!
- Ability for events to spawn monsters on a coord that didn't have a floor prior to the event
- Admin ability to despawn events
- Players can now assemble the Octopus Body
- The start of content for Water planets (basic enemy types + objects on level 0 to -2)
- Monsters can now poison players. Poison stacks.

### Fixed
- Not leveling up until the server restarted

### Changed
- Switching Font Awesome (it's what we're using for icons) from a kit they host, to self hosted.
- AIs now take 10 Power Cells instead of 10 Batteries to manufacture
- Lots of sprite updates
- Lots of code refactoring

For me... it's just plain Sonic. Gotta go fast!

farhana nusrat,

You just need to enter information into the category and subcategory field when submitting content and then hit 'Add/Submit Info and Refresh'

What are captions? Captions can be a description of an image. Either going for accuracy, or even being funny (but relevant).

Caption rules: https://communities.alphacoders.com/topics/view/6765

Scoring page: https://alphacoders.com/contest/score/81

If you aren't sure about what decent captions look like, always feel free to visit the recent captions on Wallpaper Abyss ( https://wall.alphacoders.com/captions.php ), or ask one of the mod team.

I wish everyone the best!

I'm pretty excited about the new Pokemon Snap announced for the Nintendo Switch. I hope it's decent😃

I've heard nothing but good things about this game. It seems to really know what is trying to be, and delivers on it. Things like a kurosawa mode to give a feel of an old samurai movie are just too cool.

Hey everyone!

Below are the most recent updates to Space Abyss. I had a bit of a slower pace over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes life gets busy🙂

## [0.1.22] - 2020-07-16

### Added
- Wrecks and other salvagable material can spawn in the galaxy.
- Augmentation Station
- Stabbing Gloves, Urchins, Urchin Spines, Bionic Crabs
- Manufacturing Body sprite - ability to manufacture - and benefits
- Reinforced Human Body sprite - ability to manufacture - and benefits

### Fixed
- Various bugs with monsters on ships
- Octopus body sprite
- Asteroid ships weren't spawning in the galaxy

### Changed
- Most monsters had HP that was 10x Exp. I've decreased the base monster HP to 5x Exp. This means existing monsters will have LONG HP bars.
- Changed part of Reinforced Human Body assembly requirements from 5 AI Fragments to 1 AI Fragment
- The various cores associated with augmentation are now built in an Augmentation Station instead of the Forge
- Augments are built in the Augmentation Station
- Machine planet has been regenerated

## [0.1.21] - 2020-06-29

### Added
- Ability to update ship types when there are changes. This is currently mostly focused on adding ship coords, and changing the object/floor/monster spawn on a coord.
Would need added funtionality to remove previous coords, or remove an object type without changing it. Test before doing more than adding ship coords.

### Fixed
- Being brought back to a planet if you previously logged out or were disconnected on a planet, and then logged out/disconnected on a ship

## [0.1.20] - 2020-06-26

### Added
- Manufacturing Core, Laser Core, Hacking Core
- Decay rate to AI Space Constructs
- Floor types have an additional property - movement type. This can be land,fluid, or air. Different player bodies will get different movement
bonuses/penalties based on the type of floor tile they are walking on. This lets the Octopus body be fast in the water, and slow on land.
- Exodium Asteroid

### Fixed
- A bug with repairing damaged tiles on ships
- Connecting levels on planet genaration (was using the old single underground offset instead of the new separate x,y underground offset)

### Changed
- Removed the Advanced Forge while I continue to get closer to working on the type of functionality it's supposed to provide
- Increased AI complexity from 20 to 22
- Increased complexity of Power Cell from 1 to 10
- Increased Defense Drone complexity from 5 to 10
- Manufacturing Bodies, Manufacturing Augments now require Manufacturing Cores instead of AI Fragments
- Removed energy storage from AI batteries, and increased their complexity from 1 to 10
- Increased complexity of AI core from 1 to 20
- Increased decay rate of AI Edifice and AI Daemon
- Now show the energy of an AI directly on it
- Once the update is pushed, I'll be re-generating the Water planet type. Still no monsters on it, but they are coming!

## [0.1.19] - 2020-06-23

### Added
- While complexity is a mechanic I'm super fond of, I think adding some clarity for players on what to expect when manufacturing things will prevent some
needless wasting of resources and frustration. I've added a tag next to the name of things you can assemble to show how difficult it is for the player.
- A function to try and help fix when ships aren't removed properly from their coords
- AIs can now spawn monsters in the Galaxy to protect the planet and ships they are protecting.

### Fixed
- Error killing players that are attacked by objects
- Image for Microcontroller, Crystal, Blockade Runner, Lancer, Thiol Extractor

### Changed
- Instead of a single per attack bonus, attack bonuses are applied for each piece of equipment
- Ion drive now takes 10 ticks instead of 20 ( In general, building ship engines should take a long time, but this is the intro one )
- When switching bodies, the player is set to the current HP of the new body.
- Pod HP changed from 100 to 10 so abandoned pods decay faster and are quicker to kill.

## [0.1.18] - 2020-06-21

### Fixed
- Hopefully I finally squashed the bug that was causing the 'Back To Galaxy' button to disappear
- Potentially fixed an issue that sometimes put players on ship 2 (yes, a ship with ID 2)
- Bug with inventory items not always updating to the database

### Changed
- Algae Vats produce 6 Algae instead of 2 Algae

The monthly raffle for July is for Azul - a very popular and fun board game!

To enter into this contest, you can buy raffle tickets with the Alpha Coder Points you earn from using the site. Best wishes to all!