"Usernames must contain only alphanumeric characters. You can use a dot as a separator."

It is offending to have to transliterate names. Please allow unicode everywhere, it has been around since tens of years now and doesn't cause any problems anymore.

Why am I following over 50 random People and Projects after signup? Is this just an evil way to ensure that the authors stay on top of the list forever?

Error of error: while posting a reply to a comment on https://hackaday.io/project/14628-ambap-a-modest-bitslice-architecture-proposal/log/48656-relay-endurance-speed-and-reliability

The message was published anyway...

It might explain why some logs or comments were duplicated lately ?

The system objects to your abuse of relays :-)

Then it would complain "relay error" "bad proxy" "wrong port" :-P

Thanks for the feedback!

Thank us by telling us the story of how you spotted the problem and what the blunder was ;-) you know we love stories !

Oh, you could start a "coding horror" project on here ;-)

I have been seeing these more and more, too.  Just got this one.  (Redaction box drawn by me.)

Feature request for the next contest. Some way for others to (secretly) comment on projects with things the judges might need to know, for EG links to prior art that is being claimed as novel, relevant research on the feasibility of projects etc - basically like the thing they do at weddings asking for any last objections to the union. I haven't had issues with the current winners, but I can forsee someone doing well with a stolen idea. 

Although, looking at the current judge lineup I suspect they know more than enough to spot any funny business :p

Hi John! Thanks for the feedback! Comments on any project are always welcome. Comments directly to the Prize can go to prize@hackaday.com. And yes, we're pretty lucky with this group of judges.

As a followup, something very useful to contest entrants would be feedback, especially negative feedback.

It would help a lot if there were some way to anonymously show the scores the judges gave to the projects, and maybe make their internal discussions available to the project lead.

For example, judges might say things like "the documentation was hard to understand", or "this doesn't look like it has a lot of hacker potential", or even "this isn't a hack".

This would let the project leads know where they should focus for improvement next year.

Failing that, perhaps a way that other members could anonymously comment on each others' projects.

I used to run an event-driven business; we required member feedback after each event, and let people say whatever they wanted about anything.

What we found was that if we paid attention to the feedback and made changes, we held better events and eventually became the most popular system of its type in the area. Frequently the changes were minor and easily made.

If you want better projects on the site, consider allowing feedback so that people have a method for learning and improving.

I agree with your point.
We would really appreciate if we can get feedback on our project especially from judges.

Ever since the recent spam was dealt with, my two new projects don't show up in the projects lists anymore.  If you sort projects by newest, they should show up on page-2(as of this post)  The projects were created on 10-29-2016, but they don't show up in the lists at all.  Not even in the completed project lists(TheBlackBoxSequencer) or the ongoing projects lists (MimsMirror)

They are public, and are still in my projects, and can be found if searched for by name.

Project 1 - MimsMirror - Created 10/29/2016 - https://hackaday.io/project/16788-mimsmirror

Project 2 - TheBlackBoxSequencer- Created 10/29/2016 - https://hackaday.io/project/16789-theblackboxsequencer

Is this a bug from the few new policies /improvements in the queue that were changed due to the spam?

I guess someone fixed the problem, my projects are now back in the lists, currently on page 3 of the new projects.   Thanks.

It would be nice to be able to spin off projects from existing ones, somehow. Github / Git allows you to "fork" projects. Perhaps that's not very apt for a mostly-hardware community. Thingiverse allows you to "remix" things, but that doesn't seem quite right either. Perhaps a "drew inspiration from" sidebar.

That would be good if I wanted to, for example, start a project documenting some tentacles, with my own twist, but still using some ideas from the #Two Stage Tentacle Mechanism logs

Agreed, "fork" or "remix" would be a great feature

Yes- it's cool that so many of us are remixing others' projects. Until we add a way to do it formally, add a fork tag to your project.

you might want to automatically delete projects with  "代办学历认证" in the title after 5minutes or so. 

I'm sure the admins have enough data (IP address, email address etc.) to create efficient filters.

Another trick : allow display of spam-flagged posts/users to the user's IP subnet so they don't see they are flagged. That will keep them busy for a while, instead of creating yet another account.

For a few last weeks, the .io news from blog page looks usually like this

I already stopped reporting the spammers.

If you stop, they win...

They are selling fake university "official" documents.  HaD staff should report/forward them to the universities affected.

Add "QQ", "Q/微信", "QQ/微信", "微q" or similar combinations to the alleged filter as that's what they use for email.  :)

We have just implemented a few policies that should address this & have some more improvements in the queue. Hopefully this should be a thing of the past soon. Thanks for your patience! 

So far, it seems to work.

Let's see in the long term :-)

SPAM filter still not working 100%:

https://hackaday.io/xiaotubai8455

https://hackaday.io/ibntechsupport

Near the end of the HAD prize cutoff, the blog ran a "you still have time to enter" article. This meant that anyone who wanted to enter the contest had to make an assistive technology project

If you do this again next year, consider putting the "anything goes" round at the end. That would seem to be the best position to catch people that are slow in entering, late, or don't find out about the contest until late in the season.

I will say again that I think this year's prize has hit very high marks. Money prizes instead of swag, lots of smaller interim awards, and multiple categories with three "catch-all" categories makes this years contest a lot more inclusive and exciting.

Yet another blunder :-D
So far I have 45 projects. OK.
But a mouseover on my profile link (in comment sections) says I have 47 !

I made a screenshot but don't know how to include it in comments.

I usually add a quick project log for uploading the image.  While still in the editor, I copy the URL of the image into the comment.  

After posting the comment, I quit the project log edit without saving.

I imagined such a kludge but...
nooooo....

See it works.  :)

I'll just say "I have ethics" :-P
OK, let's add this request : add pictures to comments ? like, use the same editor as for the logs ? I wonder why it's still not possible or done !

I started a separate project called "potpourri" for that very purpose. I can upload images to build logs there and then post links to other parts of this site, and to comments on the HAD blog.

Github is also very easy to use and easy to upload images to.

I don't know if/how HaD removes "orphan" pictures from their CDN...

It would be far better to allow pictures directly in comments :-D but this does not address the blunder that motivated the original post.

I now have 46 projects and there is still an off-by-two, two phantom projects are added on the mouse-over label...
One explanation might be that I transmitted one project to @al1 (the #PICTIL) but what about the 2nd phantom project ? o_O
I hope that the HaD developers don't try to design electronic voting devices :-D

Blunder still blunding.

I have 49 projects and the mousover shows 51...

OK, mouseover shows 51, and I really have 51 projects.
Yet.
Because I have more in mind, I can't stop thinking.
There will be more projects...

I noticed there is some new "clutter" in my personnal message inbox. There are topics based on some of my projects, with no actual messages and no other persons than myself, just with "This space feels empty. Why don't you invite some people to collaborate with you?" text. What's the deal with this one?

that's the project chat stuff, you have that for every project of yours since the beginning of the project chats :)

I would swear it wasn't there few days ago. I haven't started the chat anyway and there are no other people I could chat with. What is the point of empty chat that nobody started?

no idea, but it was probably easier to just open them by default / foreach(projects) show_chat() or something. You could use it for private notes? I don't know. I don't see them anyways.

woohooo!

Hello. The latest project that I uploaded doesn't show the number of views. Only the number of likes and followers.

Hi Julio, view count starts counting from 50 views.

I see... Thanks for your reply!

kudos to the designer of the 'PROJECTS YOU MAY LIKE' it looks very clean and I like that it shows a lot more than two projects!

I must admit it is useful feature, too. Thumbs up for developers.

the automatic link detection thing doesn't automatically link detect this link ⡱⢎.io   :(

Is there any way of showing line numbers in a code snippets? it would make life much easier when trying to describe the operation of a snippet. it looks like the underlying plugin (codemirror plugin for redactor ?) might have the capability but there's no interface to switch it on (that I can find, anyway).

Last night I had a bug where I updated the project details and a bunch of text and images disappeared entirely as if they were deleted, some sections also got duplicated. Luckily I had a backup of all my writing but if I didn't I would have lost a ton of work. You should definitely look into this.

Can you please send me the link?

Trouble replacing a file with a file of the same filename

I tried replacing a file in a project profile with an updated version of the file with the same filename, but the old file seemed to persist.  So, I deleted the old file and added the new file with the same filename, but the old file seemed to persist.  Ultimately, I deleted the old file and added the new file using a different filename, and that worked.  Throughout the above, I reloaded the pages in my web browser to try to rule out the possibility of the old file being cached by my web browser.

Thanks for the feedback.

Two projects that I *know* are vying for the contest don't have videos showing in their project page. I hope they got the E-mail and figured out that there is a new field in the project for it.

How to get the video link on the sidebar wasn't explicit in the E-mail, and it's not spelled out in the "Details" or "Rules" pages either.

I hope HAD will be understanding if people have videos posted in their "links" section, but not the official "Prize Video" section.

(Both projects mentioned are from non-US people who are probably ESL.)

@Peter Walsh  can you send me the links to those projects please?

I PM'd both parties and left messages, and they both responded so we're all good.

I just wanted to point out that it wasn't obvious to me from the E-mail, and I had to dig around to discover how to do it. Next year, consider putting this on the Details page.

The projects were:

https://hackaday.io/project/10188-automatic-digital-microscope

https://hackaday.io/project/11225-a-new-high-accuracy-tilt-sensor

Difficult to read Components description (grey text colour)

I find it difficult to read and edit the descriptions of components in a project because of the dark grey text on the black background. It would be great if this can be changed to lighter grey!

Thank you for your suggestion, ticket has been written...

I am having the same issue! 

I am having the same issue! 

the skull is a logo. It says something and means something.  this seems to be a not very well thought out attempt at a "logo" but lost its' way. 

Someone may have already mentioned this ( tried looking, though ). But, I think there should be an option to remove conversations from "Private Messages"! If that option already exists somewhere, it would be nice to have that option next to the "New Message" button, or something!