G-Chron 2016

An Inkompatible Adventure Pt. 2

As said previously; when I first joined Gab.ai, Gabs interface and feature set were much different than what they are now (2022) and Gab ran on a completely different stack infrastructure. They would eventually be censored/de-platformed from almost all of these infrastructure and thrid party 'services'in the near future and over the years regularly. Including web domain registry, frameworks and session management services, financial processing services and even the denial of their own personal credit card processing.

All that aside, you had free speech, no ads, no tracking and no blocking on the platform.

You had a feature/attribute and options set per user profile as follows:
Score: This amounted to the number of likes (up-votes) attributed to all your posts/comments combined. This attribute was generally used as a Karma/Reputation indicator by most users.

Posts: Total posts count.

Followers: Other users following you.

Following: Other users that you follow.

On each post/comment there were options not only for repost/quote and upvotes, but there was an option to down-vote the post/comment as well. This had a direct effect on each users total score (rep/karma) and it was possible to see people with actual negative scores (bad rep).

You also had only the Mute option to not see posts made by certain people, but that didn't stop them from flooding your TimeLine on your profile w/whatever they pleased by simply @mentioning you. You wouldn't see it, but everyone else would when they visited your profile page.
*Screen capture of profile page coming soon.

The people were generally welcoming and it wasn't a big deal to see posts with 10k+ upvotes as the userbase grew and people started connecting. There was an 'unofficial volunteer welcoming committee' of sorts then, just as there is now. There was also much more engagement w/the community at large from Andrew Torba than there is these days. You'd actually see replies from him much more often than seen now and he asked questions pertaining to what the user base wanted and listened to their input.

One of the first things that I noticed was that there was no way to get notified when Andrew made a new post, unless you went and checked his page frequently manually or he happened to specifically @mention you in his post. I wanted to keep up with as much as I could concerning where the platform was heading and how/what it was being built upon. I'm an inquisitive person.

So after following a few hundred other users and finding my way around the system, I set out to write my own software that would alert me whenever Andrew made a new post. I was running a Win7 machine and writing in VB6, but hadn't really done any coding in a couple years. At this point all the attributes to a users statistics were actually right there in the source code of their profile page, including their post count. All I had to do was monitor that count somehow and alert myself if it increased, sounded pretty simple.

The first problem I ran into was that Gab was running behind CloudFlare Mitigation services and their access policies didn't allow for some of VB6's older controls. Browser and I-net controls were a no go and were denied access at the CloudFlare access point level. This left me w/two other options that I was familiar with, winsock32 data control or https2xml parser control. I chose the latter and was able to complete a working Beta.

download the source to a text box
find the post count via string manipulation
store the post count number for comparison at next check
set timer control to check again in 60 secs.
repeat fetching the number
compare stored number w/new number and send alert to screen (msgBox) if not equal.
reset new number for storage comparison
contine to monitor (or stop/take other actions like opening the profile to new post etc.)

Mission accomplished, I could now be notified directly to screen when Andrew makes a new post.

Late December (I think) I started using my Gab Monitor (GabMon) to monitor for new posts made by Andrew and testing it myself. I would later release it for public use in 2017 for further testing and development. It sufficed as it was for the purpose intended, so I didn't mess w/it much for the next 6 months or so. Lots of things were realized by me and in 2017 that would encourage me to further develop it for another purpose or two. With Andrews approval at the time even. But that's all part of next years adventure (2017)

What was Andrew doing? I'm not quite sure, but I did learn that he was living in the Austin, Texas area (tech. corridor). and I also learned that @e and @u were the two guys helping him mostly.

@e as lead coder (CTO)

@u as lead public relations/promotions (of sorts)

Notice: This will be by far the shortest of the articles in this series, as it only encompasses a couple months. The ones following will take longer to compile and be longer as well.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series of Gab Chronicles - An Inkompatible Adventure.