The Unofficial Wheel of Blame

Question

Screenshot

About

The chat room Tavern on the Meta (MSO), in its early days, developed a habit of /blameing someone (anyone!) whenever something relatively significant went wrong. When something really significant went wrong (the entire web cluster crashed) one November day years ago, the perpetrator's confessional tweet was reposted by @radp almost immediately, followed by

@radp no need to spin the wheel o' blame here...
@YiJiang I have no idea what that does.

@YiJiang promptly created the first automated Wheel of Blame, which appeared an hour and a half later. Approximately twenty-three revisions later, this ultra-handy tool was welded to the Tavern's description box, so as to be easily accessible when something went wrong. About fifty-eight revisions after that, an updated version was bolted on to replace it (to quote: bolted on so it's secure, yet maintainable; that old weld was a pain to break). That's where I found it when I first visited the Tavern. I personally thought it could use some improvement - storing the things-to-be-blamed in HTML seemed horribly duplicative, and there was a lot of inconsistent text too, among other things. Unwilling to "rock the boat" at such an early stage of my MSO existence by blatantly pointing this out, I went ahead and quietly forked the JSFiddle.

License

Released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 ("you can share it under the same license, and make stuff based on it, as long as you credit me").

Download

http://jsfiddle.net/michaelb958/vSfXT/show/

For past versions, add a number from the changelog before show/; for example,

http://jsfiddle.net/michaelb958/vSfXT/12/show/

(Versions 20 and 22 are special, due to me not checking if I was logged in before hitting Update; delete the michaelb958/ before attempting to access those ones.)

Platform

It should work on Internet Explorer 10 and latest Firefox, as those are the browsers I have available to test on.

Contact

It's just me, @michaelb958. To get in touch, ping me on chat or comment on this post.

Code

Made with and hosted by JSFiddle, using jQuery 1.x, cssesc, and jQuery Easing.

Changelog

1. • Forked from the official version
   • Moved data on things-to-be-blamed from HTML to JavaScript
   • Upgraded to jQuery 1.9.1
   • Changed doctype from XHTML1 to HTML5
   • Changed subscript paragraph colour (for visibility)
2. • Gave C# an "image" (well, <code>d text really)
   • Changed sub-paragraph colour again (for visibility)
3. • Fixed the sub-paragraph (it still had the old name for Tavern on the Meta, and the wrong contact username)
4. • Tweaked the CSS controlling the wheel
5. • Changed "SO Dev Team" to "SE dev team"
   • Tweaked wheel CSS again
   • Added another sub-paragraph with quick link to be copypasta'd
6. • Tweaked wheel CSS yet again
7. • Found a better copypasta link
   • Changed sub-paragraph colour yet again (for visibility)
8.  
9. • Wheel items are now randomly shuffled each page load
   • Added myself to the wheel (after all, I've now contributed)
   • Added JavaScript to the wheel (infuriating language...)
   • Added jQuery to the wheel (seemed legit)
   • Added Internet Explorer to the wheel (there's lots to blame it for)
   • Significant modifications to wheel CSS
10. • Finally remembered to add "Unofficial" to the title and body
11. • Made the "Unofficial" in the page body red
12. • Adjusted wheel's spinning - now guaranteed to spin further
    • Image updates
    • Tweaked wheel CSS yet again
13.  
14. • Fragment identifiers now lock the wheel to specific items (however, it's bugged)
15. • Fragment-locks are, despite my efforts, still bugged
16. • Added a sub-paragraph with a link to the original Wheel of Blame
17. • Fragment-locks work now (yay!)
    • Removed jQuery from wheel (jQuery is the solution, not the problem)
      ^{I see you're trying to blame jQuery for a problem with SE. You should totally drop that and try jQuery.}
18.  
19. • Sub-paragraph CSS tweak
20. • Now works properly in Firefox (I was using a Surface RT as dev machine, so could only test with IE)
      ^{It's Internet Explorer's fault!}
21. • Added exotic characters to Spin button
22. • Wheel items can now have multiple fragment-locks (however, they're b0rked again)
    • Added the Chaos Monkey from the unseen most-recent Official Wheel; also updated link to said
    • Upgraded to automatically use the latest jQuery 1.x
    • Changed sub-paragraph colour yet again (for visibility)
23. • Made rounded corners on wheel viewport more pronounced
24.  
25.  
26. • Fragment-locks are finally fixed
27.  
28. • Added caching to the wheel (it causes 120% of all bugs)
      ^{Caching. It's always caching...}
    • Added localisation to the wheel (at the time, it was practically the new caching)
    • Capitalised Shog9's name correctly
    • Added more exotic characters to Spin button
29. • Added the Community bot to the wheel (we all know it's out to get us...)
    • Fragment-locks are now fully case-insensitive
30. • Added robo-reviewers to the wheel (dragging down quality on SO since /review was introduced)
    • Enhanced apostrophisation - names ending in s are now suffixed with ' instead of 's
31. • Added some more blameable employees from badp's wheel:
      • Rebecca Chernoff (rchern)
      • Sam Saffron (waffles)
      • Sklivvz
      • Anna Lear
      • Tim Post
      • Brent Ozar
      • Geoff Dalgas
    • Made copy-paste quick link better - now, just click the box to auto-select it
32. • Increased the spin time - with all those blameables to get through, it was going a little fast