perchance

For example, if you've made a world building religion generator, and you title it "The Arch Bible" or something like that (i.e. something that's more of a "brand" than a "description"), then people won't be able to use a web search engine to find it unless they already know its name. In other words, people don't search for "The Arch Bible" when they want to find a religion generator - they of course search something like "fantasy religion generator" or whatever - so make sure you put keywords like that in your $meta.title/$meta.description if you want to make it easy for others to find it.

Search engines heavily weight the page title in their search, so it definitely pays to have a $meta.title which appropriately summarizes what your generator does in a few words. It's fine to have something like "Fantasy Religion Generator - The Arch Bible" as your title - i.e. a description, plus a "brand". Just don't leave out the key descriptive terms.

I'm writing this post because I don't think people realize how the "popular" generators on Perchance actually tend to get popular - it's one of two things:

1. (rare & temporary) The generator happened to go viral on social media somehow.
2. (common & long-term) The generator's title and/or description was descriptive, and so random people around the world each day hit their page via a Google search, which can add up to thousands of visitors in just a few months if it's a popular "topic" that people search for.

Popular generators almost always get popular via #2, and #2 often eventually leads to #1 - i.e. people find it via a search engine, and then share it with their friends on social media, and then at some point (for whatever reason) it goes viral. I think people tend to incorrectly assume that #1 is the main factor in a generator's popularity (it can be, but it's rare).

TL;DR: Use appropriate descriptive terms in your title and description if you'd like your generator to become well known. Think about the sorts of keywords that people would type into a search engine to find your generator.

Unfortunately for now it's just phrase banning (with regex pattern-matching supported) and user ID banning - i.e. no ability to "login" and delete stuff, like you can do with the comments plugin. Hopefully this will suffice until I get around to making it easier (I want to make moderation easier on comments plugin at some point too - e.g. 1-click bans alongside existing 1-click delete).

• https://perchance.org/text-to-image-gallery-moderation-example
• https://perchance.org/text-to-image-plugin

There may be bugs! Please let me know if you find one in the comments below. I haven't thoroughly tested it, so I'm relying on y'all :)

Edit: Also, a reminder that when I'm short on time (like lately) I'm most likely to fix things that people complain about often. Thanks to Allo and others for posting and complaining about this. Feel free to complain repeatedly and tag me often. It helps me prioritize.

Note that the 'auto' checkbox doesn't actually clear variables - it just fully re-executes all the square/curly blocks in the HTML. So if you're doing stuff where your code needs variables to be "cleared"/fresh before the first generation, then you'll have noticed that you actually need to click the 'reload' button (or refresh the whole browser tab) to get your generator back to a completely "fresh" state. But, as the annoying message would inform you, clicking the reload button required saving your generator first. That's not required any more. I should have fixed this about 6 years ago. Took about 15 mins 😐

New plugin: https://perchance.org/upload-plugin

This plugin is like https://perchance.org/upload except in 'programmatic' form. So you can allow users to e.g. upload their generated text with a button click, and get the resulting URL to share with their friend.

It does not require the user to be logged in, but as a result, the daily allowances (based on IP address) and max file sizes are significantly smaller than with perchance.org/upload - see plugin page for details.

As an example of what you can do with it: I just used it to add a feature to https://perchance.org/ai-chat where you can easily share the AI character that you've made via a link.

Just a little demo/example for now - feel free to fork and play around with the instructions and stuff, of course! https://perchance.org/ai-generated-hierarchical-world

Currently notifications aren't supported on mobile, and also you won't get notifications if you don't have a perchance comments section open somewhere on your computer. It doesn't matter which comments section you have open (i.e. it can be on any generator/page, regardless of which particular comments boxes that you've subscribed to), but it needs to be visible somewhere.

Also, some browsers will "hibernate" a tab that is backgrounded/inactive which will pause the notification script, so it's best to pull the browser tab out into its own browser window so that the tab is deemed "active"/visible by your browser - that way it won't "hibernate" the tab.

So, with the above caveats, you now have a crude way to get notified if someone comments on your generators! Or when people are active at your favorite hang out spot, etc. The caveats are annoying, but it's the first step! Please give feedback if there are any issues - I may not be able to fix them, or at least may not be able to fix them right away, but it'll be helpful to hear about the most annoying issues so I can plan future improvements here.

Example generators made with this plugin:

• https://perchance.org/ai-character-design-example-simple#edit
• https://perchance.org/random-character-chat-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-character-design-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-chat-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-render-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-text-to-speech-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-tester#edit

See the plugin page for more. There will probably be issues/bugs! Thank you in advance to the pioneers who test this and report bugs/issues in these first few days/weeks 🫡

(It was actually possible to discover this plugin a few days ago, but no one made it through all the clues lol ^^ some people did at least figure out the first step)

Wondering if someone can get in contact with Raggedflight to ask if they'd like to donate the link-plugin to the admin account so I can put it into the official plugin list? Credit to Raggedflight would be added at the top of the page just like in https://perchance.org/image-plugin of course. No worries if they'd rather not!

Simple example usage: https://perchance.org/url-params-plugin-example?blah=abc123

It's really simple:

url = {import:url-params-plugin}

output
  [url.blah] // this will output 'abc124' if URL has '?blah=abc123' on the end

This plugin allows you to, for example, have several "different" generators within the same generator page, where each sub-generator has its own URL. Or to just adapt the output of your generators based on the URL. E.g. you might have an English and a French version of your generator with URLs like this:

• https://perchance.org/my-cool-gen?lang=en
• https://perchance.org/my-cool-gen?lang=fr

In that case, within your code you can use [url.lang] to determine which language the user is viewing, and adjust your list selection/odds/etc. based on that.

You can also use it to e.g. link directly to a particular seed for the seeder plugin, and stuff like that.

(Note for experienced Perchance users: The old document.referrer hack is no longer required since Perchance now copies all parameters over to the iframe when initializing it)

For images and other files that you need for your generators/plugins/etc. - rather than using base64 strings, or external file hosting services like catbox.moe

https://perchance.org/upload

Previously all generators shared the null.perchance.org subdomain, but now thanks to Cloudflare moving wildcard DNS from the enterprise plan to the free plan (announcement post) I've given each generator its own subdomain. I really should have done this a year ago when they announced it - just got around to it today.

I've added some code to transfer localStorage data across to the new subdomains, but unfortunately this code has to run the first time you visit any generator, and causes a refresh to happen a second or two after page load. This'll be a bit annoying, but I can remove this code after a few months - it's just to make sure that any important data is transferred across. If someone hasn't visited a particular generator in a few months, then the localStorage data (e.g. from the remember-plugin) probably isn't very important (and if it is, it's still recoverable - they'd just have to make a post here on the lemmy community to get help on how to do it).

If, for some reason, you need to easily & programmatically access the new subdomain, you can use the global generatorPublicId variable (akin to generatorName which already existed). The full URL of the embedded iframe is https://${generatorPublicId}.perchance.org/${generatorName}. The null versions of generator embed URLs are auto-redirected to the new generatorPublicId versions, so you can still embed your generator in other websites using the normal embed code:

<iframe src="https://null.perchance.org/my-generator-name" style="width:100%; height:600px; border:none;"></iframe>

That iframe will redirect to:

https://50e67e76966106ad99d72edb729943b7.perchance.org/my-generator-name

Please let me know if you run into any troubles with this, or have any feedback/suggestions .𖥔 ݁ ˖