October 2017

The MSPA Prophet Origin Story

I am writing this on February 20th, 2013. I do not know when, or if, I will ever post it. But since you’re reading it now, it can only mean one thing: the MSPA Prophet is dead, and it is now safe for me to tell the world how I knew when updates were coming.

It all started on December 31st, 2012, when a bunch of old amusing photos of Andrew Hussie were found in an unsecured directory on his site (along with the full text of Hussie’s incomplete Wizardy Herbert novel, but for some reason nobody really cared about that). If you were around that day, you may remember the insanely overblown reaction Tumblr had to those photos. I had some time to kill, so I casually watched the storm play out on the #hussie tag. Funny image edits were being made, laughs were being had, and all was going well—until this post was made.

I had no idea what that post was talking about, so I followed the link it gave. It went to some phpbb forum. Specifically, a profile page.

Oh, it was only a spam bot. Nothing exciting about that. But what was the forum itself? Why is there a forum hidden in the depths of andrewhussie.com? Surely this was worth investigating. So I went to the main page.

Curses, nothing visible to guests. Nothing except the member count and the…

Hmm. That post count number seems pretty familiar…

It’s almost… !!

The number of pages MSPA currently has!

That was when I was 90% sure I had stumbled upon something really excellent. If my hunch was correct, then the back end of MSPA was secretly, of all things, a phpbb forum. Probably with Jailbreak, Homestuck, Ryanquest, etc. all in their own topics, with each post becoming another page of the adventures. Yes, that sounded logical.

But what about that absurdly high member count?

… Oh.

From there, all I had to do was confirm my suspicions. After doing some basic math with the various missing pages and, unnumbered extra pages, I determined that it was at least feasible for all known MSPA pages to fit within the limit posed by the forum’s post count. And as a bonus, this also gave an upper bound to the number of theoretical undiscovered pages that may or may not exist. (I didn’t bother saving that number when I calculated it, but I believe it was around 20.)

At that point there wasn’t much else I could do. I tried registering an account (how could I resist?), but accounts needed to be validated by an administrator to be able to log in for real. Considering what would inevitably happen if this wasn’t the case, I am definitely glad everyone who wasn’t Hussie was locked out. (This is also why I decided to keep my source a secret until now—just in case there was some way to get in, I did not want to expose MSPA’s back door to anyone with bad intentions.) All I could do was wait for the next MSPA update to come, and then check back on that post count to see if it increased.

… But as a fellow MSPA reader, you should know how antsy we can get when waiting for an update. I bookmarked the page, and I found myself checking it every few hours. It was just like the old days, back before MSPANotify existed. Except instead of trying to keep up with the story and the fandom, I was trying to stay one step ahead. And then, through sheer chance,

I checked at just the right time. Andrew was online and posting. One by one, the post count increased over the next few minutes—until finally, MSPANotify signaled that an update had gone public—with exactly as many pages as had just been posted. I had my confirmation. Now I needed to figure out what to do with it.

At first I kept it to myself and a small group of friends. With the help of a page monitoring Chrome addon, I created my own personal update “prenotifier” as I called it, so I could cut the F5 habit before it became an addiction again.

I gave it an appropriate notification sound, and it went to work. For the next few days, everything went perfectly. Updates came, and I found out about them—not in that order. But it didn’t take long for me to realize I could be doing so much more with this knowledge. That was when I decided to make the Prophet.

The idea started as nothing more than a social experiment: updateiscoming.tumblr.com, on which I’d post “update is coming” every time my prenotifier went off, to see how the fandom reacted to someone ‘predicting’ updates before they happened. And to see how popular it got, if it caught on at all. Honestly, the “MSPA Prophet” title was an afterthought. In the early days of the blog I just referred to it as updateiscoming, and I assumed everyone else would do the same.

The first week was slow. We were in Act 6 Act 5 Act 1 x2, so the updates were twice as long, and they took twice as much time to make. I had also not yet automated the Tumblr posting, so I was always paranoid of missing a chance to prove myself. (Luckily, that only ever happened once or twice.) Despite those setbacks, everything was working as planned. Some people were noticing, and every day there was another person asking how I was predicting updates. There were plenty of other asks, too, including this one:

That’s when updateiscoming stopped being a social experiment. People were relying on me. I should have realized it sooner, but I was providing an important niche service: a Tumblr-based MSPA notifier. Even without the whole Prophet gimmick, there would be people who had a use for this blog.