Many of you thought we didn't have an April Fools until days later when your symptoms became severe, only to discover you'd come down with a terrible case of Dragonpox (definitely not inspired by current events).

Now that the Dragonpox infection has peaked, I figured I'd talk a little bit about how it worked.

Zombie was patient zero, the genesis of the disease. I'm not sure how he contracted it, but something illegal I suspect. You can check the infection graphs for the real reason. He contracted it shortly before celebrating DLP's 15th anniversary, and spread it to me before my own post celebrated our anniversary.

Dragonpox spread via three vectors:

• Directly replying to a post whose author had Dragonpox (most contagious)
• Liking a post whose author had Dragonpox
• Participating in a thread whose starter had Dragonpox (least contagious)

We had some other vectors planned (DMs, viewing threads for too long, etc.) but found these three worked really well. Incubating, active, and recovering "patients" are all contagious, recovered patients are also contagious (but at an incredibly reduced transmission rate).

Staff caught it first. Unfortunately, it happened right before the big "Fifteen Years of DLP", so many of you caught it from that thread. From there, it was mostly on all of you as you posted about the site. @Steelbadger in particular has quite the body count.

As of this post, 322 unique users have contracted Dragonpox, 232 recovered, 34 in recovery, 56 with active symptoms.

Dragonpox consists of 7 stages, each one increasing the probably that you see effects ona particular thread load, and enabling certain effects at different stages. Stage 1-5 were linear (20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%) while recovery 1-2 is exponential improvement (80%, 30%). Testing is able to detect Dragonpox at stage 3.

There were two thread-wide effects:

1. Thread shuffling. This shuffled the order of posts and happened 10% of the time the thread had effects enabled (e.g.: 10%*20% symptom rate = 2% chance overall).
2. Post attribution shuffling, shuffled who posted what. This was 20% of the time.

And some per-post effects with their own per-post chance of procing an effect.

1. Post gaslighting. I ported the code from vB where we silently edited the posts to replace words at per-word probabilities of their own. The one noticed the most was movie->porno. Overall, this was enabled at your symptom rate (e.g. stage-1, 20% of posts in the 20% of threads Dragonpox triggered on would be gaslit, ensuring an exponential increase over the stages (4%, 16%, 36%, 64%, 100% of posts).
2. Reversing of posts. Linearly increased with your symptom rate, starting at 1% of posts.
3. Base64-ing of posts. Linearly increased with your symptom rate, starting at 2% of posts.
4. Zalgo-ing of posts. Started at stage-3, linearly increased starting at 3%.

You can see infection graphs (DOT, force-directed) as well as a linear, semi-realtime list of who infected who and through what vector.

The top infectors:

1. Lord Ravenclaw (41)
2. @Steelbadger (31)
3. @Halt (25)
4. @Zombie (23)
5. @Blorcyn (10)
6. @Seratin (8)
7. @Ched (7)
8. @ScottPress (7)
9. @Xiph0 (7)
10. @soczab (5)
11. @Lindsey (5)
12. @Othalan (5)

And the longest infection chain:

Zombie -> Xiph0 -> Utsane -> Rahkesh Asmodaeus -> Erotic Adventures of S -> Nuit -> Othalan -> Majube -> Silirt -> TheWiseTomato -> {PomMan, 0_Hellhound_0}

Despite this post, the pandemic has not ended. We'll see how long it takes to run its course.

 

Sorry guys. I did kill a bunch of chickens back in Jan. Must have got something from them. Knew those coops were bad all along.