Mahz's Dev Journal

[Mahz]

@Vashonn Agreed.

@Buddha I actually have a feedback form that I used two years ago that nags you on the homepage until you either provide a suggestion or click ignore.

I think it's time to invoke it again to get a reading of the community's priorities.

[Mahz]

@Ellri I started implementing a tag editor on the admin panel.

To test it, so far I extracted and added time-period tags:



I'll add some of the thematic ones soon.

I should probably bump the max tag count up from 5 to 6 once I add more.

[Eventua]

For some reason the chat isn't working for me? Every time I open it up it displays

"Welcome to the Guild's chat. Be cool, don't spam." and a little Fonzi emote, but the chat itself is no longer there...?

I'm using a Lenovo laptop with Google Chrome, and I've turned off the ad-blocker I was using.

[Mahz]

@Eventua Can you open the browser's Javascript Console on that page and see if there are any errors?



Usually in this case there's some red error that's preventing it from loading.

[Ellri]

@Mahz

Excellent start. looking forward to seeing more.

Just out of curiosity, would you say Star Wars belongs in "Ancient" or "Future"? (any can answer this, not just the Guild's dark overlord)

[Eventua]

[Mahz]

@Eventua Can you right click that "socket .io.js" bit and see if you can "Copy URL" or "Open in New Tab" and give me the URL it's trying to load?

I would expect it to be: roleplayerguild.com/vendor/socket.io-… (Does this load for you, or does it say Not Found?)

[Mahz]

@Mahz

Excellent start. looking forward to seeing more.

Just out of curiosity, would you say Star Wars belongs in "Ancient" or "Future"? (any can answer this, not just the Guild's dark overlord)

@Ellri

Honestly, I'm not sure Time Period really makes sense for a fandom for this reason: you're only leaking the lore rather than describing the roleplay.

Maybe "Ancient" vs "Future" makes more sense if your roleplay takes place in the ancient vs future part of that universe rather than using IRL present day as a time reference.

[NuttsnBolts]

@Mahz

Excellent start. looking forward to seeing more.

Just out of curiosity, would you say Star Wars belongs in "Ancient" or "Future"? (any can answer this, not just the Guild's dark overlord)

@Ellri

I would say alternate future if anything. Ancient would imply that it has less tech where as Star Wars is ancient in culture but futuristic in thematics and full of ideas that aren't even possible yet.

@Mahz with your tag system there is a way to sneak in an extra tag in some of the sections.
Eg: selecting casual will include that in your 5 tag count, however if you do not select it, choose 5 other tags, and create your role play in the casual forum, it will display the 5 selected tags + the additional casual tag added by the forum itself.

This works across the forums with the writing style tags (free, casual, advance) as well as 1x1.

Example: Sample Roleplay
(Note: even editing topic to remove the "free" tag will reselect it)

[Eventua]

Yeah, it's the same URL that you just linked, where it just reads 'not found'

[Mahz]

<Snipped quote by Ellri>

I would say alternate future if anything. Ancient would imply that it has less tech where as Star Wars is ancient in culture but futuristic in thematics and full of ideas that aren't even possible yet.

@Mahz with your tag system there is a way to sneak in an extra tag in some of the sections.
Eg: selecting casual will include that in your 5 tag count, however if you do not select it, choose 5 other tags, and create your role play in the casual forum, it will display the 5 selected tags + the additional casual tag added by the forum itself.

This works across the forums with the writing style tags (free, casual, advance) as well as 1x1.

Example: Sample Roleplay
(Note: even editing topic to remove the "free" tag will reselect it)

@NuttsnBolts

Thanks. You basically get a free tag for the forum you create the RP/check in. The issue is that the UI doesn't reflect it.

[Mahz]

@Eventua Thanks, I'll try to figure out why.

Edit: Oh, I see. It's served from cache but doesn't exist on the server anymore for some reason.

[Ellri]

Indeed. Star wars has the futuristic feel to it, yet it claims to occur a long time ago. When you look at it like that, you can either add both tags, or neither. One of the two would simply not fit right.

anyways, we presume tying the tag system to the search system is a feature that will take far more work to implement, right?
(same goes for filtering away tags (i.e. hiding everything with a tag))

[Mahz]

@Eventua Okay, I think I fixed it.

[Eventua]

Thanks man! :D

[mickilennial]

@Mahz

Excellent start. looking forward to seeing more.

Just out of curiosity, would you say Star Wars belongs in "Ancient" or "Future"? (any can answer this, not just the Guild's dark overlord)

@Ellri

*mic drop*

[mickilennial]

On another note, Mahz told me to remind Mahz that adding a Wild West/Western tag would be a good idea.

[BrokenPromise]

Are the tabletop, arena, and nation tags redundant since we have entire sections for that sort of thing?

[Mahz]

@BrokenPromise

Yes, but one idea I've wanted to experiment with (once I've made more progress with core forum work) are some alternative ways of browsing the Guild.

Like unified /roleplays and /interest-checks views where you see all RPs/checks at once but can quickly filter the list based on tags. I've even shown design mockups of this idea in the past.

For example, sometimes you'll see someone copy-and-paste an interest check into General Int Checks, Advanced Int Checks, Casual Int Checks, and Free Int Checks because they don't really have an option -- that's just how the Guild is currently silo'd. Ideally you'd be able to express that instead by creating just one interest check and adding [Advanced], [Casual], and [Free] tags if you're open to all three. Or perhaps some sort of [Any] tag to express that you're open to all writing styles.

So right now every RP created in the Advanced forum gets the Advanced tag, and so on. It kind of sets the stage for this sort of feature in the future.

I do try to filter out the redundancy though. For example, even though every RP in the Advanced forum has the Advanced tag, this tag doesn't show up when you're browsing the Advanced forum.

It's just an idea, and it's something I've had to postpone until I make more headway with core forum features and issues.

[JBRam2002]

@MahzI expressed this opinion elsewhere, but one of the main things that drew me to the site was that there was an obvious section for different levels of dedication. If everything was lumped together, it would have been much less obvious, and I may not have joined.

One suggestion (probably slightly more difficult to manage) is to maintain the different forums (Free, Casual, etc), but have an indepth search feature that allows you to search threads by tags like you listed above. Another option is to let people post IntChecks and RPs, and the same thread shows up (or is linked) in each forum that shares a specific tag (no idea on how hard that is to code). A third idea is to mix all the Interest Checks together and let people filter by tags, but leave the RPs themselves separated out once the level of commitment is decided (not sure how I feel on that idea, as it simply makes it harder to find things in my opinion).