Show HN: tascii.io – a multiplayer ASCII character grid | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: tascii.io – a multiplayer ASCII character grid

tascii.io

9 pointsis0tope8 comments

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I really like this. Good fun!

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