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Chatterbox: Chirp at Cricket
Weird pages!
Weird pages!
I was poking around with the console and found the /taxonomy/ pages on the cricketmagkids.com domain. Not entirely sure what their purpose is, but they seem like maybe they're databases for other pages on the site?
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/taxonomy/ just outputs an error message, and so does http://www.cricketmagkids.com/taxonomy/term/
But add a number after the final forward slash in that last URL and you get some interesting stuff:
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/taxonomy/term/1
The header seems to indicate this is a database of posts in the "Meet Everybuggy" section of the Cricket website. /term/2 is Cricket League and /term/3 is Old Cricket's Library. /term/0 doesn't exist and I haven't been able to find a page corresponding to "What's New" so far.
After /term/3, you get pages that correspond to the various sub-forums of the Chatterbox (/term/4 is blababoutbooks, /term/5 is chirpatcricket, etc...) /term/9 is the last sub-forum page (DtE) and after that you get /term/10, which is a... form for a... birthday e-card??
/term/11 through /term/15 are very interesting, looks like Friendship, Graduation, Just Because, Holiday, and Thank You are unused categories or sub-forums with no posts. After this it gets less interesting; terms 16 through 26 are just official announcements plus contests and their winners. I guess it's kinda neat to see all the past contests that have been held and who's won, though.
/term/27 is Crowd Sorcery and /term/28 is Kyngdom. 29 through 32 look like they're Kyngdom sub-forums corresponding to Kyngdom's various groups? Or clans? I've not participated in Kyngdom, so maybe someone who has could give me a little more backstory on what those are. /term/33 is another Kyngdom forum, but I'm not sure what differentiates this one from /term/28.
34 is weird, it's called "admin" and it looks like a place for posts directed towards the Admins, but there's only one post there from 2016 that never got resolved. 35 is equally weird, it's called "reference" and has three Kyngdom threads plus an oldish thread from Over the Rainbow asking where Sydney C. went. 36, "groups", has some more Kyngdom posts and a Mythical Creatures SI.
/term/37 is called "missions" and contains two posts that seem unrelated besides the fact that they were posted within half an hour of each other. 38 is called "random" and it certainly is random; again, the posts here seem to have little to no correlation except that they were all posted between April 21st and April 8th, 2016.
39 is called "N/A", not applicable, and contains one post asking about the "categories thing", which was apparently referencing these very pages. Looks like at one point they were showing up on the main site by mistake. /term/40 is "rp" and contains no posts at all. 41 through 43 is more Kyngdom stuff, and it seems to end there. No more /taxonomy/ pages after #43, which is sad because they were so close to my favorite number.
To access all these pages, type www.cricketmagkids.com/taxonomy/term/number and replace "number" with the number of whatever page you want to view.
Why did I write so much about this? I dunno. Just thought they were interesting, but maybe not. Bye!
In web design, "taxonomy" refers to how the individual pages on a website are organized. In the case of the CB, there are MANY pages, and not even we know how they're all organized. You seem to have found some clues about how the site works, but I'm not sure even us Admins can decipher these clues. An intriguing mystery indeed!
-Admin
submitted by hotairballoon
(April 9, 2018 - 9:22 am)
(April 9, 2018 - 9:22 am)
How fascinating! Evidently there's much more to this website than meets the eye. Further investigation will commence...
(April 9, 2018 - 4:24 pm)
Top
(April 9, 2018 - 5:46 pm)
Wow! That's really intresting! I'll have to do more research.
(April 9, 2018 - 5:53 pm)
Whoa, this is so cool, HAB! How in the world did you even notice this?!
Okay, so first off, I'm really tempted to send someone an e-card right now XD. (But I won't, don't worry. Honestly, going to that page kind of feels like walking into a haunted house.)
And now, a very long list of my observations:
Terms 11-15 look like categories for the different e-card themes, which were never filled. If you go to /term/10 and click on 'Test E-card', it'll take you to the e-card page. I think maybe that picture was in a Cricket contest once; although, I could be wrong. But take a look at the image address:
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/files/cricket/imagecache/ecard_full_view/files/cricket/
contest/popup/Spd050608_CrossanR.jpg
So, a little insight to the Kyngdom categories: /term/28 is where all the Kyngdom posts which nobody can comment on have gone. (The Archive.) Categories 29-32 are all the official, admin-designated posts for the different 'phases' or 'chapters' of Kyngdom. (Power of Wing, Power of Claw, Power of Fin, & Power of Hoof.) /term/33 contains all threads that are currently on the homepage of Kyngdom. The Kyngdom RP board is featured at /term/42. The Kyngdom Groups page is at /term/36.
/term/34-/term/40, I believe, are the result of a very brief phase in Cricket's lifetime--does anyone remember those short few weeks when there was a category field for new threads? It was at the top of the thread submission form, somewhere near the name field, and had a dropdown menu with subjects on it. (Take a look at these posts for a little insight: http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/downtoearth/node/211452 , http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/puddingsplace/node/212426 , http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/puddingsplace/node/212303 , )
I can't clearly recall the names of each subject (I only made/almost made 1 thread in the time that the field was up), but the names of 34-40's categories do seem like a match.
The subject field disappeared, (according to the most recent threads on categories 34-40), either on or after April 21. To this day I still can't figure out why it was there, but maybe this discovery will help crack the code. In fact, I'm already forming a theory...
More intriguing facts:
~On all the /term/ pages, threads are sorted from newest to oldest.
~Almost all of the CBer-made posts that are featured on pages /term/34 - /term/40 were made in April 2016. The only two exceptions are both Kyngdom posts by Capense and Info Chan--they were made in March 2016--before the subject field went up. Perhaps they were manually sorted by an Admin, Editor, or the webmaster.
~The mysterious subject field appeared around the same time that the Kyngdom RP Board (/term/42) did. The oldest posts on the board (or, at least, the posts on the last page of /term/42) only date back to April 22, 2016. Kyngdom was reorganized (and the RP board added) on April 8, 2016.
~Notice the date? April 9, 2018. Two years ago exactly, the subject field was up. (Eerie timing...)
~When you go to a /term/(number), and look at any given thread, you have up to four links to click on: 'Read more', '# Comments', 'back to the ___', and 'add new comment'. When you click on read more, the link up top is the same as if you'd gone through and found it normally. When you click on the link displaying the number of comments, it takes you to the thread, but the link has a '#comments' added to the end of it. It transports you directly to the first comment of a thread Here's the thread you're on now, but this link will teleport you down to Alizarine's comment: http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/chirpatcricket/node/362874#comments
One of my biggest questions is about the subject field. Why was it added? To better organize the Chatterbox? To help organize Kyngdom? Or was it even supposed to be there--was it a glitch?
As I mulled this over, I realized some things:
-The names of categories 34-40 are "Admin," "Reference," "Groups," "Missions," "RP," "Random," and "N/A". Most of these categories have Kyngdom-related threads on them. And on Kyngdom, the Admins made posts, there were groups that characters could join, and missions were handed out.
-According to evidence, Kyngdom was reorganized around the same time the subject board was added.
-And I can't really think of a situation, if the subject board was created for the main part of the Chatterbox, when a CBer would ever need to categorize a thread under "Missions".
So, maybe the subject board was created primarily for the organization of Kyngdom. After all, Kyngdom was originally remodeled due to a mounting disarray of threads. This would explain the unusual mixture of Kyngdom & normal threads on these categories--when the subject board went live, instead of just applying to Kyngdom, it applied to all of the Chatterbox, and all threads created under a subject between April 8-21 were sorted to /term/34 - /term/40.
I wonder what other mysteries can be solved from this. One thing's for sure, it's very interesting.
Well, I've got to go eat dinner now. That's probably enough poking around on Cricket's behind-the-scenes for me for now anyway :P
(April 9, 2018 - 6:11 pm)
It sounds like Kyngdom caused a lot of changes behind the scenes. I have to be honest, I don't remember the categories feature at all (even though I commented on a thread during that period). Probably because I don't make many threads, so I wouldn't have noticed. Also, that was eerie timing, wow.
(April 10, 2018 - 8:06 pm)
I found some food!
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/funstuff/trythis/recipes
Also, @Admin, what's up with the E-card thing?
I don't know. It may have been planned at some point.
Admin
(April 9, 2018 - 7:57 pm)
Ooh that's neat. At first I thought maybe it's an archive of all the recipes featured in the Cricket magazines, but there had to have been more than six by now, right?
(April 10, 2018 - 7:23 am)
Yeah, that's what I thought...
(April 10, 2018 - 2:54 pm)
Hey, I might actually make that strawberry spread!
(April 10, 2018 - 9:36 am)
I've been poking around. Haven't gotten very far, but I'm working on it. I noticed that whenever you open a thread, the link is
www.cricketmagkids.com/node/[number]
So, I've been trying different numbers after /node/. I've gone through 1-5 right now, and still nothing, but I'll keep you updated. It might take me a while, considering the node for this thread is like 38,000 something.
(April 11, 2018 - 7:41 am)
That's odd. Typing in the exact number of any given post does work, for example http://www.cricketmagkids.com/node/362874 does link to this thread, but no nodes seem to exist directly before or after it (362873 and 362875 both lead to errors). Maybe the threads aren't organized in direct ascending order, but follow some other weird pattern?
Looks like you can also link to comments using this: http://www.cricketmagkids.com/node/363034 takes me directly to your comment (which humorously enough is titled "I've been poking") without any other comments attached. Neat.
(April 11, 2018 - 1:06 pm)
That's weird but kind of cool... I tried sending myself an e card but I didn't receive it. Tear.
(April 11, 2018 - 8:37 am)
Some more unrelated stuff:
Not really that hard to find since there's a link from the footer of Cricket League, but in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, there's some s00per sp00ky audio stories at http://www.cricketmagkids.com/multimedia. I remember getting nightmares from Nighttown when I was younger and thinking The Man Who Sang to Ghosts and Bigger Than Death were really good, but I haven't listened to them in a long time.
Getting back into things that are hard to find, I located some pages with very short bios of the individual bugs:
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/cricket
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/zoot
http://www.cricketmagkids.com/muffin
...and so on. Haven't been able to find one for Ugly Bird though, I'm not sure such a page exists. Looks like most of the lines from these pages are just rehashed from the Meet Everybuggy segment, and I wonder why the developers took the time to make individual pages for each buggy if they're never used or linked to?
I also noticed the Sample Magazine link in the footer is no longer functional, it just takes you to an error message saying it couldn't be found on that domain. That domain, by the way, is intriguing. As far as I know it's a website that doesn't exist anymore or at least no longer hosts content, but I could be wrong there. The "caruspub" bit of the URL is probably short for Carus Publishing, and searching "caruspub" in Google turns up nothing but results that are vaguely related to Cricket and Carus' other magazines.
One more thing, has anybody ever taken a look at the URL of the window that pops up when you add an emoticon to your post? Any idea why Palantir would be mentioned or why they need to state "tinymce" three times just to get the point across? :P
...
After a couple more minutes of searching, I found something that's actually related to the original post: http://www.cricketmagkids.com/ecards
So terms 11 through 15 look like they're not unused subforums, but instead categories of E-cards that could be sent. Might be more to this E-card thing than I thought. Birthday is the only category of E-card that has any entries, with a single attached image of a... duck-monster? Standing in a swamp? ...Happy birthday indeed.
Anyone wanna try sending this Birthday E-card to themselves or someone else, to see if it works?
I'm pretty sure that the e-card function was never completed, so I'm pretty sure it won't work.
Admin
(April 11, 2018 - 1:00 pm)
Interesting discoveries about the /node/. I tried sending myself an ecard, but I never got it. Admins are right. ;D
That's intriguing about the emoticons. I don't really use them (just text faces) so I didn't know the link, but I tapped on them quick and you're right--that's a redundancy that I can't explain. But why?
Maybe tiny-mcr is a folder or two as well as the name of the plug-in, and they have to say in the domain--open this folder, open this folder, find the plug-in?
(April 12, 2018 - 8:31 am)
Huh. That is interesting. I'm not sure I follow on most of it, but it seems you've discovered what may be the equivalent of a crawlspace. I think I'll visit term 27...
(April 27, 2018 - 11:46 am)