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Mahz's Dev Journal Page 232

Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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@Exit I won't change [sub] behavior just yet, but we should think of coming up with specialized bbcode for specialized behavior instead of relying on unintentional quirks. That way, it's less likely to break in the future. e.g. I can't guarantee that sub tag styling will never change.

For example, if you want to be able to position something in X/Y space, I could invent something like this:

[layout=200x200]
[at=20x10]Hello[/at]
[at=50x20]World[/at]
[at=30x30]Goodbye[/at]
[/layout]
In other words: "Create a fixed-size 200x200 box that lets me position things inside it with x/y coords using the [at] tag."



(White border added for clarity)
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Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by BrokenPromise
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BrokenPromise With Rightious Hands

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Just reporting in to say the new forumception is looking pretty good and I have no complaints with it on mobile regardless of phone orientation. Posting again if anyone else wants to look at it.



The only issue I could see for my typical use cases would be if a table contained too many columns. It would absolutely be spilling off the right side of the screen if I had too many. It's unfortunate that there's no way to tell table columns to appear on a new line in the event of limited screen space. I may have to carry out some of my own tests at a later date to see how far I can push tables without using weird code.

EDIT: Though if we're talking about custom code for tables, maybe being able to add "column breaks" or telling column's to take up a certain percentage of the screen would be useful. Like "Cell=20%" would make sure that particular cell would take up 20% of the screen. Maybe have "Cell<20%" and "Cell>20%" to allow the cell to shrink or grow beyond that threshold?
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Roach
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Aloha! @Exit messaged me, and while I am very much retired (well, you never know) I thought it might be fun to drop some old wishlist items that others might want too. The sight of the table code being fixed — borderless tables! — brings tears to my eyes ;_;

1. Issues w/ Automatic Column Width

2. Cell Background Colour

3. Text Wrap

4. Drop Shadows & Highlights/Backgrounds on Text


I tested some ancient COVID-era stuff in my drafts and found that some abandoned projects now work properly. (RIP horizontal scrolling timelines, though. A worthy sacrifice for the new features.)

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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Lord Wraith
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A proper image wrap or align code would save me a ton of code.

Adding a proper left algin code would also be nice for nesting inside of centered hiders or tables. I very briefly had one (that only I could see) courtesy of a plugin from Legends.
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Kuro
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Kuro ᴋᴇᴇᴘ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴇʏᴇꜱ ᴏɴ / ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴏᴀᴅ ᴀʜᴇᴀᴅ

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@MahzAdding a proper left algin code would also be nice for nesting inside of centered hiders or tables. I very briefly had one (that only I could see) courtesy of a plugin from Legends.


+1 for left align. It's sorely needed. Same with a [justify] align too.
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Exit
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For example, if you want to be able to position something in X/Y space, I could invent something like this:

[layout=200x200]
[at=20x10]Hello[/at]
[at=50x20]World[/at]
[at=30x30]Goodbye[/at]
[/layout]
In other words: "Create a fixed-size 200x200 box that lets me position things inside it with x/y coords using the [at] tag."



(White border added for clarity)




and TYTY @Roach! Very literally sums up pretty much every thing I think I've ever wanted as a 'fix' or 'feature'.
Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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@Roach Thanks for weighing in.

Man, I forgot that the table cells support a weird "active" / "success" / "danger" / etc parameter. I had to go look in the code to even remember what you were referring to. Yeah, those are terrible and thankfully undocumented.

I'm open to pretty much all of these. Here's how implementable I think they are.
Image align: Planned

[img align=left|right] -- Float the image left or right text reflow (aka CSS float property)

I like this and it should be simple to implement. Though presumably there might need to be some sort of float-clear tag? developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/…
Image resize: Needs work

[img width=200] [img height=200] -- Keep aspect ratio the same by change one dimension
[img=100x200] -- Hard-code image resize.

While it's obviously useful, the downside of image resize is that it makes it easy to grab some massive image and resize it to 200px x 200px so that it secretly wastes bandwidth. I'm not sure how to handle that. At least with the current system, it's obvious when you're accidentally using a huge image.

Edit: Actually I have a great idea for this.
Cell background color: Planned

I'll remove support for the current weird parameters like [cell=danger].

Swapping it out for [cell=#39b54a] seems reasonable.
Table/cell border color: Needs work

Not sure of the syntax on the cell vs table. Too niche to think about at the moment.
Text background color: Needs work

I suppose I could add [bgcolor={color}] for symmetry with [color={color}], but I'd need to think about unintended effects and how it interacts with other bbcode.
Horizontal scroll: Low priority

I'm open to ideas like [table nowrap] where table cells won't wrap which could allow the table to scroll when it overflows. But it's so niche that it's low priority.
Text shadows: Planned

I could create a bbcode tag that maps directly to CSS text-shadow: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/…

Check out the demo at the top of that link.

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Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by BrokenPromise
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I think the list Roach made pretty well sums up what I could reasonably ask for.

Being able to adjust the Automatic Column Width is probably what I'm most looking folward to, as even on desktop it's kind of a pain to adjust cells so that they show images at max size or dedicate the right amount of space for text. I didn't see that specific feature mentioned in the above list.

Edit: Specifically for text alignment. I did see the ones for images.
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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@BrokenPromise Can you explain the text alignment you want?
Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by BrokenPromise
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@Mahz I would like to be able to set the width of a column of cells. Ideally to a percentage of the available space.

In the past I had a character sheet that featured two twins, and I wanted both twin to take up exactly half of the screen so that you could compare them side by side. It was kind of a nightmare to get working, and I eventually ended up having to use multiple tables and carefully using the column widening method Roach pointed out.

Column width seems to be loosely based on the size of the biggest word (Which is why Roach's stretch method for images works) and number of words in a cell, but it's tricky to figure out how to balance it to get a specific column size.

Edit: If you want to know how I'd like it to work, I think I'd like it so that you determine the size of the top cell to get the column to be the right size. Though it would not be the end of the world if I had to manually tell every cell what size I wanted it to be. something like "Cell=XX%" would be great.
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Ducksworth
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Ducksworth Quack.

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I don't know if this has been reported yet but I can't look at individual images from my profile? Like, I can see the images in the preview, I can change the folders and stuff but clicking on an image basically refreshes the current page? Not a major issue but thought I'd mention it.
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Mae
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@Exit I won't change [sub] behavior just yet, but we should think of coming up with specialized bbcode for specialized behavior instead of relying on unintentional quirks. That way, it's less likely to break in the future. e.g. I can't guarantee that sub tag styling will never change.

For example, if you want to be able to position something in X/Y space, I could invent something like this:

[layout=200x200]
[at=20x10]Hello[/at]
[at=50x20]World[/at]
[at=30x30]Goodbye[/at]
[/layout]
In other words: "Create a fixed-size 200x200 box that lets me position things inside it with x/y coords using the [at] tag."



(White border added for clarity)


OK this is low-key the bomb tho

Agree with not changing sub/sup tags, they're used for alot of formatting so it'd make alot of older posts weird
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Hidden 12 mos ago → 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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@Ducksworth Oops, thanks. I somehow broke this.

Added it to my todo list: github.com/danneu/guild/issues/244 (Looks like the AI bot fixed it )
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by BrokenPromise
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Agree with not changing sub/sup tags, they're used for alot of formatting so it'd make alot of older posts weird


I agree, but as Mahz explained to me earlier, older posts preserve their code and appearance. So no future updates should affect older posts.
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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@BrokenPromise Fwiw, that's true for when I might modify the html that bbcode produces, but it's not true for when I change the CSS.

For example, when you use [table] bbcode creates this html: <table class="bb-table">.

If I were to modify the ".bb-table" CSS class in the guild's style sheet, it will affect all existing tables on the site.

What I probably should do is version the bbcode CSS. So, do something like add a .bb-table-v2 or .bb-sub-v2 that new [table] or [sub] bbcode generates if I significantly change its styling.

But you can see how these kinds of concerns can become a full time gig.



Once I extend the bbcode as I specified above, I'd like to revisit the idea of letting people optionally write html.

There isn't much difference between html and bbcode except that bbcode is obscure, ad hoc, with no tooling, and annoying to parse. Do you know how many times I've started writing my own bbcode parser over the years?

They're almost equally bad to write by hand. And my job is no different between them: I have to somehow map bbcode to html, and most bbcode maps 1:1 with html anyways. Like [list] and [*] are just <ul> and <li>. So what's even the point?

If I were to do this, I would let you choose whether your post is in "bbcode" vs "html" mode so that it doesn't touch the existing bbcode system.

Of course, I'm just spitballing here since every time I try to touch the guild's editor, bbcode system, or post styling, it eats a lot of time. Though some of that is because of bbcode itself.
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Exit
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Once I extend the bbcode as I specified above, I'd like to revisit the idea of letting people optionally write html.

There isn't much difference between html and bbcode except that bbcode is obscure, ad hoc, with no tooling, and annoying to parse. Do you know how many times I've started writing my own bbcode parser over the years?

They're almost equally bad to write by hand. And my job is no different between them: I have to somehow map bbcode to html, and most bbcode maps 1:1 with html anyways. Like [list] and [*] are just <ul> and <li>. So what's even the point?

If I were to do this, I would let you choose whether your post is in "bbcode" vs "html" mode so that it doesn't touch the existing bbcode system.
OKAY
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by BrokenPromise
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@Mahz I appreciate you explaining things like this to me. I'm kind of dabbling in code but don't fully understand it's implementation on something like a forum.

I've looked into HTML a bit and it does seem like a fairly straight forward code to understand. That said, it feels extremely irresponsible to allow every forum user to write it, at least if you're doing full HTML with CSS support. But if you're just unlocking stuff that can be used strictly for formatting a post then that's okay. I just don't want to have to worry about someone creating a virus in javascript and then deploying it when you look at their RP.

Really, when I think about using any type of coded formatting, 99% of the time it's to make a post read better. If I'm going to do anything spectacular I'll usually boot up my paint software of choice and make it that way. Tables fall into a weird category because they usually display important information and may have additional functionality that a PNG won't have, like clickable links. I also don't want to fire up gimp and hunt through 20-50 layers to find out where I can tweak a name or number. That said, if it's easy to implement and saves everyone time in the long run, I'd be willing to try it out.

Unrelated topic, but have you ever considered taking donations? I'm not sure how much you'd get, but it could help offset the cost of keeping this place up. I wouldn't mind donating and getting one of those "supporter" titles.
Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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The way to think about the safety/security of html vs bbcode is that you start with bbcode like [table]

Now modify the bbcode parser so that it expects [ instead of <: <table>

Is it dangerous now? No, it's the exact same code as before except the parser looks for < instead of [

Just like with bbcode, you would parse it and turn any misbehaving tags into plain text.


Anyways, I have to admit I get delusions of energy/time grandeur in this thread from time to time. Any time I've made a lot of code progress like I did this last week, I start to feel like any of my long-time ambitions with the guild are just a couple weekends away as if this were my fulltime job.

So let me snap out of it and focus on short term achievable goals with much better bang for the buck.

On my list are the bbcode updates and various bug fixes.

Re: donations. I have no plans to support donations, and that aligns better with the fact that the guild is a hobby project.
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Mahz
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Bug fixes:

1. You can now rename yourself to usernames that you've used before (but there's still a 3-month rate limit)
2. You can view individual imgs again in your album
3. Avatars in convos/pms now finally link to user profiles
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Hidden 12 mos ago Post by Kuro
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Kuro ᴋᴇᴇᴘ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴇʏᴇꜱ ᴏɴ / ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴏᴀᴅ ᴀʜᴇᴀᴅ

Member Seen 0-24 hrs ago
Bug fixes:

1. You can now rename yourself to usernames that you've used before (but there's still a 3-month rate limit)
2. You can view individual imgs again in your album
3. Avatars in convos/pms now finally link to user profiles




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