LetsRaceBwoi
Well-Known Member
Alright; a bit of backstory:
Back in March, I created a search engine for ZeroNet dubbed "Bwoi". It went through two revisions, one which used poorly-written code and eventually turned out to be a big mess, and another "improved" version which was clean and easy to use.
...Or so I thought.
Back in April, when I published the "final" code for Rev.2, I didn't notice one critical bug which was still left in the code that I hadn't fixed; pages did not correctly display and the number was always completely wrong. I could have fixed it quite quickly, but it would have required a large code change and I couldn't be bothered to do it - I left it until later - and forgot all about it. When I published the change, I noticed a sudden - but slow - decrease in peers connecting to Bwoi. What was wrong? Why were they all leaving!? Was one of my results wrong? I went to check, and that's when I noticed the bug.
I decided to leave the rest of the work to Kaffiene, and shortly after discovering the bug I shut down the Bwoi project. The site is still up to this very day (albeit with 0 peers), but there's really no point in using it. The index is likely very outdated which means that half of the websites either don't work or aren't even there anymore.
I didn't notice at the time, but Bwoi was actually bringing in a lot of people (~1500 peers avg.) to the whole of ZeroNet. I never really noticed because I didn't really care - I just thought it was a coincidence and that I was just getting a lot of traffic because multiple servers were permanently hosting it (~15) so that if anything went wrong, they could be relied upon for an immediate backup. Well, I just looked at the peer count, and there have only been around 150-200 peers every time I looked.
Whoops.
TL;DR: I didn't notice that I was giving ZeroNet huge bonuses by creating a search engine, and now that I don't update it anymore nobody uses ZeroNet.
EDIT: Just checked back on Bwoi, got 8 connected peers. Still follows the aforementioned pattern of "less bwoi users, less zeronet users"
Back in March, I created a search engine for ZeroNet dubbed "Bwoi". It went through two revisions, one which used poorly-written code and eventually turned out to be a big mess, and another "improved" version which was clean and easy to use.
...Or so I thought.
Back in April, when I published the "final" code for Rev.2, I didn't notice one critical bug which was still left in the code that I hadn't fixed; pages did not correctly display and the number was always completely wrong. I could have fixed it quite quickly, but it would have required a large code change and I couldn't be bothered to do it - I left it until later - and forgot all about it. When I published the change, I noticed a sudden - but slow - decrease in peers connecting to Bwoi. What was wrong? Why were they all leaving!? Was one of my results wrong? I went to check, and that's when I noticed the bug.
I decided to leave the rest of the work to Kaffiene, and shortly after discovering the bug I shut down the Bwoi project. The site is still up to this very day (albeit with 0 peers), but there's really no point in using it. The index is likely very outdated which means that half of the websites either don't work or aren't even there anymore.
I didn't notice at the time, but Bwoi was actually bringing in a lot of people (~1500 peers avg.) to the whole of ZeroNet. I never really noticed because I didn't really care - I just thought it was a coincidence and that I was just getting a lot of traffic because multiple servers were permanently hosting it (~15) so that if anything went wrong, they could be relied upon for an immediate backup. Well, I just looked at the peer count, and there have only been around 150-200 peers every time I looked.
Whoops.
TL;DR: I didn't notice that I was giving ZeroNet huge bonuses by creating a search engine, and now that I don't update it anymore nobody uses ZeroNet.
EDIT: Just checked back on Bwoi, got 8 connected peers. Still follows the aforementioned pattern of "less bwoi users, less zeronet users"