A Postmortem (Destiny)

by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Saturday, April 02, 2016, 03:29 (3251 days ago) @ dogcow

So, yesterday afternoon I thought, “Wait, what if really we turned the DBO forums into a Taylor Swift fansite?” This was mostly instigated by CruelLEGACEY’s post from last week and the ensuing… fallout.

Anyway, I decided I could do something fun in a few hours, so I made a copy of the current forum theme (called “swifty”) for our April Fool’s shenanigans. After the header and the background were modified, the real trick was changing everybody’s avatars. I rounded up 30 pictures of Ms. Swift and cropped them down to size for the forum, then stuck them in the new theme. I wanted to randomly assign pictures to everyone, but making tens of thousands of copies seemed like the wrong approach. So instead, I altered the part of the forum code that “finds” a person’s avatar and over-wrote it with my own contraption. :-}

I assigned each Taylor avatar an index number from 0–29, and then changed the code to take the user’s unique “user id” number and modulus that with 30 (the number of Taylor pics). This means that if your ID is, say 117, then you’d always end up with Taylor photo #27.
(117 % 30 = 27)

Perfect!

With that done, our evil mastermind Xenos suggested that we change the “true” Taylor fans’ icons into Kanye West, which I thought was a delicious twist to the theme. I dug through last week’s post and found the folks who had Swiftified their avatars and made special modifications for them. The admins became the Beatles (except for me… I had to find some use for that gif up there), and Marty got a special one with Taylor performing on stage with Paul McCartney.

Oh, and I made Cody be Miley Cyrus for the day.

Anyway, all of the relevant imagery is below, and the “swifty” theme is still available for selection in your settings if you want to keep it around for a little while longer. Note, though, that the theme will disappear the next time we do a big update to the forum. Also, avatars have been returned to normal even if you choose the new theme.

<3

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