Mahz's Dev Journal

[Mahz]

The quiet game is over. New record: 3 Days. But I suppose we're all waiting for this weekend and feature implementation.

@LegendBegins

Unfortunately this weekend my main goals are:

- Take another shot at what I tried to do last weekend (unread-post system).
- Make improvements to the general user-experience. For instance, if you try to make a topic and trigger a validation error (too many tags selected, title too long, etc), then the forum under most cases will silently fail, redirect you to an empty form with no error message, and leave you wondering wtf happened.
- Migrate old-guild content to current-guild by scraping archive.org. Not going to have time.

Not very exciting, but I'll be excited if I can make progress in those areas.

At work we launched a product we've been working on for a while, so my time during the week is booked right now until things settle down. Usually I have some time on weekday evenings to work on the Guild, but not for the next 30 days or so.

[Rilla]

WHICH OLD GUILD DO YOU MEAN?!

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>
Unfortunately this weekend my main goals are:

- Take another shot at what I tried to do last weekend (unread-post system).
- Make improvements to the general user-experience. For instance, if you try to make a topic and trigger a validation error (too many tags selected, title too long, etc), then the forum under most cases will silently fail, redirect you to an empty form with no error message, and leave you wondering wtf happened.
- Migrate old-guild content to current-guild by scraping archive.org.

Not very exciting, but I'll be excited if I can make progress in those areas.

At work we launched a product we've been working on for a while, so my time during the week is booked right now until things settle down. Usually I have some time on weekday evenings to work on the Guild, but not for the next 30 days or so.

@Mahz

Has archive.org stored every thread? Even the Wayback Machine only stores information up to a few links.

WHICH OLD GUILD DO YOU MEAN?!

@Rilla

I would assume Pre-GuildFall, considering The Guild still contains all data from the previous year.

[Rilla]

Oh God. yes please. please. I have shit there I need.

[LegendBegins]

Oh God. yes please. please. I have shit there I need.

@Rilla

Don't get your hopes up. It's a web crawler, and dies after a few links. You may get a couple posts of information if you're lucky, but it works by sending web spiders to click and log links, and after a few links, it stops logging. If you can find a living pathway long enough to find your thread, it's another matter to find pages. Normally, the best you'll get is the first page, all the numbers to pages displayed at the bottom, and if the sun smiles on you, the links from those pages onward. Sorry, but even beginning to attempt to restore a bulk of OldGuild information would be entirely impractical.

[Mahz]

Oh yeah, to clarify, migrating data over from archive.org is going to be very limited.

If you can't find what you want on archive.org, then neither can I.

My main goal is to un-break as many 404 page-not-found results as I can when people stumble upon old-guild links from the tens of thousands of links on the internet that point to old-guild. Some topics are lucky enough to be fully-preserved by archive.org, many have only their first page preserved, and the vast majority of topics were not preserved.

[Mahz]

Pushing the broken unread-posts system back up to debug it live.

This is still an issue:



Seems that when you visit a topic, it often loads the wrong set of tags/co-GMs/join-status for the current topic.

I'm looking it into it right now. The infuriating part is that it only *sometimes* happens, and I can only recreate it by visiting the website, not by actually looking at the database.

Edit: I think I fixed it. Can yall post in this topic if it looks like it's still an issue?

[BBeast]

Oh yeah, to clarify, migrating data over from archive.org is going to be very limited.

If you can't find what you want on archive.org, then neither can I.

My main goal is to un-break as many 404 page-not-found results as I can when people stumble upon old-guild links from the tens of thousands of links on the internet that point to old-guild. Some topics are lucky enough to be fully-preserved by archive.org, many have only their first page preserved, and the vast majority of topics were not preserved.

@Mahz

Perhaps it might be best to have some form of redirect system, so you don't have to load all the related files from archive.org onto your databases. I am unable to comment on the feasibility of such an option, though.

In regards to the unread post system, I would be most appreciative if a go to unread posts button was placed in the subscriptions, considering that is where I (and many other people I imagine) go to access my main threads.

[Awson]

Oh yeah, to clarify, migrating data over from archive.org is going to be very limited.

If you can't find what you want on archive.org, then neither can I.

My main goal is to un-break as many 404 page-not-found results as I can when people stumble upon old-guild links from the tens of thousands of links on the internet that point to old-guild. Some topics are lucky enough to be fully-preserved by archive.org, many have only their first page preserved, and the vast majority of topics were not preserved.

@Mahz

For the love of god, don't save any Spam or Off-Topic. I do not need any amount more of my crazy 17yo self to be easily accessible on the Internet. I was kinda glad it got wiped.

Another thing: is making the "clear notifications" button NOT load a page on your list of things to do? Or is it even a possibility?

[Rilla]

Honestly I'm just hoping I can get

the first page of Allaria, presumably the last incarnation. Because it has all the relevant information for Allaria. I'm resigned to not having ALL the characters back from it. Because of I can then I can remember all the essentials.

[Mahz]

<Snipped quote by Mahz>

For the love of god, don't save any Spam or Off-Topic. I do not need any amount more of my crazy 17yo self to be easily accessible on the Internet. I was kinda glad it got wiped.

Another thing: is making the "clear notifications" button NOT load a page on your list of things to do? Or is it even a possibility?

@Awson

Yeah, right. I'm trying to just save roleplays since that's what people care about.

>Another thing: is making the "clear notifications" button NOT load a page on your list of things to do? Or is it even a possibility?

Are you saying you want the "clear notifications" button to *not* cause a page refresh and instead work how rating a post works?

[Awson]

I don't really care about what it does instead. I don't even know enough about coding to form a valid suggestion.

Ideally the notifications on that page would be "live" and would woosh away at the button press and not redirect you anywhere.

Though I would settle on it not doing anything visible, staying the same, and me being able to opt out of redirect.

It's not killing me or anything, it's just kinda annoying. I wasn't at the front page, I don't really want to go there.

[Mahz]

@Awson Ohh, I see. Yeah, it's a bug that it redirects you to the homepage. I'll fix that tonight.

I'll also add a "Delete Notification" button to each notification on the list. Many times I have 20 notifications and have already read/acknowledged 19 of them, yet I don't want to clear them all because that final notification is kind of a "TODO" to myself for something I need to respond to.

[LegendBegins]

@Mahz
A quick thought. Despite the fact that we have an arrow that leads to the latest post, is there any reason the text "X Time Ago" doesn't also link to the latest post on the subscriptions page?

[Mahz]

@Mahz
A quick thought. Despite the fact that we have an arrow that leads to the latest post, is there any reason the text "X Time Ago" doesn't also link to the latest post on the subscriptions page?

@LegendBegins

I'm trying to come up with UI consistencies that are also mobile-friendly.

For example, here's what a roleplay subscription currently looks like on mobile:



Obviously the UI design here kinda sucks at that width, but until I think of something better, the idea is that people can associate the [-->] button as the "go to the latest post" button.

If timestamps were always hyperlinked, do you think that would be obvious to people? Maybe I can just replace the buttons with hyperlinked timestamps altogether?

[Mahz]

Latest Push:

- [Enhancement] Fixed and re-released a basic unread-post system. I tried releasing this last weekend but had to roll it back during the week due to a bug I couldn't figure out quickly enough. Finally figured it out today.
- [Enhancement] You can now delete notifications individually from your /me/notifications page.

- [Enhancement] The "Clear All Notifications" button on that page now only deletes the notifications you have on the page when you click the button. In other words, it will not delete any new notifications you've received between the time you loaded the page and pushed the button.
- [BugFix] The "Clear All Notifications" now redirects you back to your notifications page instead of the homepage.
- [BugFix] Until further notice, I'm going to assume I fixed the issue of a topic reporting the wrong tags/join-status/co-GMs as seen in this screenshot:

Lemme know if you notice it persist!

Still working on some more things tonight, but that was Act I.

[Mahz]

My example: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/2317817

But I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, I could avoid hacks or requiring to change the Guild's parser by putting [/list][list] between each item (ie. close the list and open it again). It's only a small piece of effort to pay.

@BBeast

Thanks for the example!

I see what you're going for. You actually wrote that in exactly the proper way:

[h3]Header A[/h3]

[list]
[*] Item A
[*] Item B
[*] Item C
[/list]

[h3]Header B[/h3]

[list]
[*] Item A
[*] Item B
[/list]

I convert list BBCode directly into HTML lists where it's invalid to have anything between each list-item.

The fact that it's annoying to create lists is really a problem with our BBCode editor, and making our BBCode editor more usable is something I want to solve in time. For example, I want to support a WYSIWYG editor like http://imperavi.com/redactor/ (something I initially played with), but as yall can see by comparing how much time it takes me to make trivial changes to BBCode vs how fast I build other Guild features, the editor just involves a lot of hard, time-consuming problems.

[Captain Jordan]

Obviously the UI design here kinda sucks at that width, but until I think of something better, the idea is that people can associate the [-->] button as the "go to the latest post" button.

If timestamps were always hyperlinked, do you think that would be obvious to people? Maybe I can just replace the buttons with hyperlinked timestamps altogether?

@Mahz

Well, I looked through a swath of boards that I'm on, and here's what I see for last posts. By newest unread post, I mean the post directly following the last post a user read. By last post, I mean the final post in the thread at the moment.

IPB:

Title link: newest unread post
Timestamp: last post

vBulletin:

Title link: last post
> > button: newest unread post

SMF:

Title link: newest unread post

phpBB:

Title link: last post
> > button: newest unread post

XenForo:

Title link: newest unread post

To answer your question, @Mahz, no, I think that would be confusing behavior to link the timestamp to the newest unread post. You may be able to get away with linking the topic title to the newest unread post, however, as that seems to be conventional forum behavior in about half the modern boards.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>
I'm trying to come up with UI consistencies that are also mobile-friendly.

For example, here's what a roleplay subscription currently looks like on mobile:



Obviously the UI design here kinda sucks at that width, but until I think of something better, the idea is that people can associate the [-->] button as the "go to the latest post" button.

If timestamps were always hyperlinked, do you think that would be obvious to people? Maybe I can just replace the buttons with hyperlinked timestamps altogether?

@Mahz

It was in previous times, so I don't think people would have trouble finding them. The biggest problem on mobile in regards to this is accidentally clicking the username instead of the latest post button. If you kept the button, and linked it, it would increase the area, but then you would have two elements with the same function. Though, as CaptainJordan proposed, you could update the button to redirect to the last unread post, and the time stamp to the latest post. The users could most likely figure this out fairy quickly, and it solves the "no latest post button on the subscription page" issue.

[Rilla]

Is it at all possible to het one of the following?

1) The ability to see which thread had viewers without clicking on each thread. Like "Arena Chat Thread(1 viewer)"

2) Latest Post Viewed by -insert user- I believe Oldguild had one.