Mahz's Dev Journal

[Hank]

Taking a break from some harder/higher-priority stuff. Needed something easy. Implemented user bios.

Mahz

Neat. Thanks. This is just personal preference, but could we have a join date instead of "x posts in y days"?

Hank

Heck, might even be wortwhile to put people's guild user numbers right up there too.

HeySeuss

You're only saying that because you're #9.

[HeySeuss]

Heck, might even be wortwhile to put people's guild user numbers right up there too.

HeySeuss

You're only saying that because you're #9.

Hank

Guilty as charged. </epeen>

[Mahz]

Hey Mahz would downloading JavaScript on to my phone work?

Slendy

Javascript is enabled by default on most browsers. Since you were able to double-post and you can't Edit posts, it would seem that you have Javascript disabled. But I think that's unlikely since most websites would be broken on your phone if you have Javascript disabled. It's probably something else. What actually happens when you click the Edit button? Do you get redirected to the guild's homepage? I will need to offer another way to edit posts that's less fancy yet compatible with all browsers.

[Stella]

Don't know if this has been reported, but Ghost Mode and Hide Signatures can't be enabled together. Selecting one cancels out the other.

[Mahz]

Thanks. That's a bug.

[The Silver Paladin]

Um, on my iPad. (It seems to be only my iPad I haven't checked my PC.) it doesn't show how long ago something was posted or someone was on. It just says "in 2 days." Is this the iPad, or the Guild? I'm using a Mini 3.

[Ellri]

we'd guess it is your ipad. Try to check its system time. It might be stuck in the past. Sounds a lot like it thinks "now" is two days ago.

[The Silver Paladin]

we'd guess it is your ipad. Try to check its system time. It might be stuck in the past. Sounds a lot like it thinks "now" is two days ago.

Ellri

You're right! It's fixed!

[Slendy]

Yeah when I clicked reply I'd be redirected to the home page

[Mahz]

Yeah when I clicked reply I'd be redirected to the home page

Slendy

When you go here, what do you see? http://www.enable-javascript.com/ You should see this:

[Nightsage]

One thing I think would be cool to have again is a way to delete old PM's

[Slendy]

Yeah I see that also the time for me is a little goofed as well. Its on military time and its not in my time zone.

[BBeast]

Of course, when you do add deletion to things, make sure that you get it right the first time. Deletion isn't something you want bugging out.

[Mahz]

Of course, when you do add deletion to things, make sure that you get it right the first time. Deletion isn't something you want bugging out.

BBeast

Yeah, I'm pretty sensitive to deletion in general. The previous guild didn't even have first-class forum support for deletion. Everything just had an is_hidden boolean field. I would like to do something similar for this rewrite, but it's definitely more complex than a system where you can just do database-level deletion. For one, it explodes the codebase into a fractal of "is this thing hidden?" and "can current-user view hidden things?" checks. It involves a lot of defensive coding. Like, what happens if a rogue moderator decides to up and delete everything? How easy is it for me to reverse those deletions? I'd want to be able to do a query like "Set is_hidden to true for everything that rogueModerator touched in the last 24 hours".

[Mahz]

Just pushed up a massive update.

PM button now shows unread convo count

- I chose to show unread convo count instead of unread PM count because it's simply more useful. - If someone creates 100 PMs in a convo with you, then it will just add 1 to that count instead of 100. - Notification count is updated when you view the convo. - You can reset the counter back to 0 by clicking "Clear Notifications" from your convos page.

Better URLs for user profiles

- User URLs have been changed from /users/42 (user ID) to /users/hank (username) - Now it's actually possible to navigate straight to someone's profile if you know their username. - To convert a username into its URL-form (the user "slug"), just convert the username to lowercase and replace spaces with "-". For instance, if a user's username is "My_Name Is George 123", then their profile URL is /users/my_name-is-george-123. - Old-style URLs (e.g. /users/1) will redirect to the new username-based URL. This is so that old links don't break.

Experimental @Mention system

Example: -> @BBeast @Mentions will soon send notifications to the users you @Mention (maybe a max of 5 per post), but the notification part is not yet implemented. Notes/caveats about @Mentions: - It's experimental - Even if you wrap a @Mention in [noparse], [code], or [pre] tags, the mention will still be parsed. Low priority issue, though. - They are case-sensitive. Compare: [@mahz] vs @Mahz - If you try to mention a username that's not in the system, then it won't work. Example: [@ThisUserDoesNotExist] - Quoting will automatically mention the quoted person. Example:

Test

@Mahz

The idea is that you should receive a notification when someone quotes and replies to you. Kinda like Reddit. TODO: I need to tweak it so that if you quote a post with nested quotes, then the inner quotes should not trigger @Mentions. TODO: Typing "[@" and a couple characters will trigger a small username-suggest pop-up like Twitter and Facebook. TODO: @Mentioning someone will actually send them a notification

[LegendBegins]

Of course, when you do add deletion to things, make sure that you get it right the first time. Deletion isn't something you want bugging out.

BBeast

Yeah, I'm pretty sensitive to deletion in general. The previous guild didn't even have first-class forum support for deletion. Everything just had an is_hidden boolean field. I would like to do something similar for this rewrite, but it's definitely more complex than a system where you can just do database-level deletion. For one, it explodes the codebase into a fractal of "is this thing hidden?" and "can current-user view hidden things?" checks. It involves a lot of defensive coding. Like, what happens if a rogue moderator decides to up and delete everything? How easy is it for me to reverse those deletions? I'd want to be able to do a query like "Set is_hidden to true for everything that rogueModerator touched in the last 24 hours".

@Mahz

A simple fix would be to set is_hidden to true for x days, and beyond x days, delete all posts under is_hidden = true.

[ravenDivinity]

I second @LegendBegins's suggestion. Timed deletion would be a good idea. Administrators could hard-delete posts, and moderators could only soft-delete posts. While we're on the subject of rogue moderators, it might also be helpful to make edits reversible with a similar mechanism, where the old version of the post exists for a brief amount of time before it expires.

[Mahz]

Good ideas regarding deletion. I have a system in mind. The hard part, as usual, is finding the time and justifying the cost of implementation against the opportunity cost. For instance, right now, it's cheaper for me to just manually delete things in the database myself and ask users to PM me when they want something deleted.

[Rina]

I like this new batch of features! Make sure to reference the @mention in the BBCode Cheatsheet so that people have somewhere to use as a reference.

[Mahz]

I like this new batch of features! Make sure to reference the @mention in the BBCode Cheatsheet so that people have somewhere to use as a reference.

@Kirra

Oh yeah, thanks. I'll add it to the cheatsheet. There's a button on the editor, too: Edit: Added to cheatsheet: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/bbcode