Releasing a Tease over multiple days?

[SlenderSissyNewbie]

Hej everybody.

I'm working on my locktoberfest idea and have a question:

Is it possible to unlock parts of a tease on a specific day? I want the tease to be able to be played along end of this september and this october. I would like to put it in 5 parts with each having unlockable days, like September 24th, September 25th and so on.

Is there a way to do that with EOS or do I just have to trust my potential players?

Thanks for all helpful input.

[Roblsforbobls]

Hej everybody.

I'm working on my locktoberfest idea and have a question:

Is it possible to unlock parts of a tease on a specific day? I want the tease to be able to be played along end of this september and this october. I would like to put it in 5 parts with each having unlockable days, like September 24th, September 25th and so on.

Is there a way to do that with EOS or do I just have to trust my potential players?

Thanks for all helpful input.

I am by no means a programmer or know what I'm doing, so take this with a grain of salt, but...
I tried to solve this problem by using the Date.now() function in Eos, which returns (checks notes) "the number of milliseconds since midnight Jan 1, 1970" in UTC. Theoretically you could figure out how many seconds would translate to specific dates, then subtract what you get from the function. If the result is less than or equal to zero, you could unlock a section for the player.

This reveals a problem though that you may or may not care enough to try to tackle: people playing your tease will be from around the world and thus have different time zones. I imagine you'd want the tease to allow someone in the US and in the UK and in Australia all to be able to unlock a part at 12 am in their respective time zones... but to do that you'd have to account for differences in the player's time zone with UTC, the first step of which would be to ask the player for their time zone (or maybe you can ask what time it is for them?). Unless you don't care about that, at which point you can leave it all in UTC.

At that point, honestly, I would consider alternatives if I was making the tease. Maybe you go with a password system so players have to start at the beginning, but of course that does nothing to prevent players from moving ahead. Maybe you include a link in the beginning of the tease to a forum post, and you post that day's password on the forum - then of course everyone needs to wait for whatever time you think it should unlock, but after the fact anyone can use any password to continue. Or you could trust your players to not move ahead (but you know plenty of people will anyway lol).

You may find some helpful information here or here.

Anyways, hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in with a more elegant solution. Cheers

[Zer0_0reZ]

By looking what other Teases (39839, 54778, 55287) did I found this:
first create a Date object

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var date = new Date()

then you can do

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date.getDate()

to get the Day of the month in local time.
You can also get all other parts of the date by looking at what is suggestet when you type

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date.

in the eos-Editor

[SlenderSissyNewbie]

Thank you both, I'll see, what I can do.

I think it will be the password solution, since I'm rather new, but maybe I can do something with the date variable.

I'm not realy a programmer though.

If there are other suggestions or tutorials, keep em coming.

[PlayfulGuy]

Here's a function you can use to help with that:

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function theDate() {
  // Returns the date as an integer in the form mmdd (or mdd)
  var now = new Date();
  return (now.getMonth()+1)*100 + now.getDate();
}

September 9 will be 909.
October 10 will be 1010.

I have tested this in EOS and it does work. The issues of timezone should be handled automatically if users are logged in and set their timezone properly. Maybe

Pages in EOS can be enabled or disabled with the pages collection.
You can start with whatever pages you want to control disabled, then enable them in the init code based on dates.

For example

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pages.disable("Sep*")  // Disable all pages for September
if ( theDate() >= 925 ) pages.enable("Sep25")
if ( theDate() >= 926 ) pages.enable("Sep26")
if ( theDate() >= 925 ) pages.enable("Sep25")

Using mmdd only works properly until the end of the year though. Pages will get enabled as that date passes and stay enabled until Dec 31, but then Jan 1 will return 101, and those pages will remain disabled until September rolls around again. You could of course adapt your testing to account for that like

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pages.disable("Sep*")  // Disable all pages for September
if ( theDate() >= 925 && theDate() <= 1031) pages.enable("Sep25") // Only enabled from Sep 25 through Oct 31

That could be way cool though. You could have a tease that only works at the proper time of year. Would be awesome for something like an advent calendar type tease or whatever.

The following modification to the function will give you a date in yyyymmdd format and allow you to restrict things for this year, but then have it all available all the time after that.

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function longDate() {
  // Returns the date as an integer in the form yyyymmdd
  var now = new Date();
  var temp = now.getFullYear() * 10000;
  temp = temp + (now.getMonth()+1)*100 + now.getDate();
  return temp;
}

You would then need to code your checks to test for 2023mmdd as in

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pages.disable("Sep*")  // Disable all pages for September
if ( theDate() >= 20230925 ) pages.enable("Sep25")
if ( theDate() >= 20230926 ) pages.enable("Sep26")
if ( theDate() >= 20230927 ) pages.enable("Sep27")

Hope that helps

PG

[SlenderSissyNewbie]

Thanks a bunch. It certainly boosts my motivation!

The seasonal tease thing is an interesting idea, but maybe I'll release a full version after october.

Well that is, if I finish this thing anyway.

Anyway, thanks again!

[icehash23]

It would be good to allow future players to enjoy the tease, too - that is, put a wildcard in the logic for the year section of the date object... Or just never include the year at all.

Just my 0.02... I am a (hobbyist) programmer, but have zero clue on EOS, GuideMe etc, except for being on the clueless-recipient end

[indyc]

Another idea if you can't get the code to work or the scope is too large:
You could potentially release just part of the tease whenever and add later and re-publish when those dates arrive. This would over-write the published tease with your new additions "unlocking" new stuff for your fans to enjoy. This has the added benefit of breaking it up into smaller pieces to stay motivated and potentially adding more in beyond your initial plan.

There are some that can bypass timer checks in the code to look forward further that this would also get around but I don't think that would be much of a "problem" to plan around.

[SlenderSissyNewbie]

Thanks again, I used your date function and then created a hub-page with a button to each day.

The buttons will are disabled till the right date is reached.

I'll just remove the condition once the week is over, so all options stay active.

Gave you a techsupport credit by the way and will be releasing the first part tomorrow.

[PlayfulGuy]

Thanks again, I used your date function and then created a hub-page with a button to each day.

The buttons will are disabled till the right date is reached.

I'll just remove the condition once the week is over, so all options stay active.

Gave you a techsupport credit by the way and will be releasing the first part tomorrow.

Awesome! Glad I could help, and thanks for the credit.

PG