Mahz's Dev Journal

[Mahz]

This is more of a power-user feature, but you can see a list of any unsubmitted post drafts saved in your browser at the bottom of the Guild:



I had this turned on only for myself, but I realized it would be useful for everyone.

Sometimes I'll forget about a post I'd half-written, and this widget reminds me about it and lets me pick up where I left off.

You can click a draft to go to the thread it's saved for, and the reply box should populate with your progress.

[Lady Absinthia]

Since many of the Gm's on the forum host large group Rp's - is there any way we could get the number of people involved in a PM upped so we don't have to break down group pm's to two or even three pm's?

[JBRam2002]

@Mahz How difficult would it be to have an [@everyone] tag that notifies those who are subscribed to a thread? Or perhaps those who have posted, but that could get annoying. Perhaps the tag is only usable by DMs to prevent spamming?

Also, I assume the 18+ tag is a new feature. Would mods be able to go around and add it to recent/active threads that are marked as mature?

[Mahz]

@Lady Amalthea I'll bump it up to 10 on next server deploy.

@JBRam2002 The Guild probably needs a way for people to officially join/leave a roleplay. That way [@everyone] would ping the straight-forward list of participants. Kinda like a convo.

[Lady Absinthia]

Awesome! Thankies!!!

With the join leave, maybe a way for Gm's to add to a roster (Maybe even could be tied into a mass pm for the RP, or a way for Gm's to auto tag everyone active in the RP when there are updates.)

[Lady Absinthia]

Okay, expanding universe - I have got to get the details on this one >.>

[JBRam2002]

Awesome! Thankies!!!

With the join leave, maybe a way for Gm's to add to a roster (Maybe even could be tied into a mass pm for the RP, or a way for Gm's to auto tag everyone active in the RP when there are updates.)

@Lady Amalthea

@MahzPotentially building on this idea - what if there was also an Inactive roster? GMs (and co-GMs) could move an individual to and from the inactive roster (possibly sending a notification to the individual and all GMs to prevent abuse). The Inactive individual would no longer receive notifications sent to [@everyone], but might receive PMs or other items of high importance. Or vice versa... or perhaps there's some other combination of effects that I'm not thinking of that would be useful.

[Mahz]

Interestingly, I was working on this back on the vBulletin version of the Guild. Found this rough draft in my archive.



The simplest v1.0 solution might be to just let players submit a Join Request that GMs/Co-GMs accept.

For example, maybe you submit a Join Request when you submit your character sheet, and then GMs accept your request.

I've always wanted to have some sort of Roleplays <-> Participants link on the Guild which lets me build interesting things. One example that yall brought up is the ability to notify all the active participants of a roleplay.

The first challenge is to come up with a system that people are actually incentivized to use because it's useful.

If you have a roleplay with four players and only one person bothered to "join" it, then it doesn't really do anyone any good.

But it would also be a mistake to impose too much just-cuz rigidity on the freeform-by-design nature of the Guild.

[Mahz]

Oh yeah, the textfield paginator has been added to the show-convo view (PMs) like it exists on the show-topic view.

[Ellri]

@NuttsnBolts@Mahz
We asked about that specific-fandom tag thing simply to save up on the time of people (potentially) asking for such here, knowing that the answer would be what it was (more or less).

---

The idea of a "RP membership" function is nice. Perhaps start it out simple for now with the "join RP" button thingy.

An "invite" function (available only to the GMs) could also be added, where there are two executions we think of right now:

• Automatically added, but can say no to not get added. If no response, counts as yes.
• Invited, but has to say yes to actually get added. If no response, counts as no.

later on, more features (like group PM and such) can be added in.

ability for GMs to notify everyone in the RP would be great to have built out from that.

[Mahz]

@Ellri I'm playing with the /me/subscriptions/archive idea right now.

Maybe I can get some notifications working soon for subscriptions.

[Mahz]

Something is locking up the database, so excuse any issues.

Edit: I may have to temporarily disable /search until I can fix an catastrophic issue.

[pugbutter]

Interestingly, I was working on this back on the vBulletin version of the Guild. Found this rough draft in my archive.



The simplest v1.0 solution might be to just let players submit a Join Request that GMs/Co-GMs accept.

For example, maybe you submit a Join Request when you submit your character sheet, and then GMs accept your request.

I've always wanted to have some sort of Roleplays <-> Participants link on the Guild which lets me build interesting things. One example that yall brought up is the ability to notify all the active participants of a roleplay.

The first challenge is to come up with a system that people are actually incentivized to use because it's useful.

If you have a roleplay with four players and only one person bothered to "join" it, then it doesn't really do anyone any good.

But it would also be a mistake to impose too much just-cuz rigidity on the freeform-by-design nature of the Guild.

@Mahz

If you do this, you should totally add a stat to users' profiles, too: the average time they spend "joined" to an RP (a ratio of total "joined" time to the number of threads they've officially joined). Similar to the "posts/day" stat you added to profiles not very long ago. This would be great for letting us know who in the Guild is abandoning RPs, and allow us to make acceptance choices based on that. I'm sure you know this community has some "commitment issues" when it comes to RP loyalty, so maybe this will help to alleviate that, or at least let the GMs receive some warning in advance about fickle players.

[NuttsnBolts]

<Snipped quote by Mahz>

If you do this, you should totally add a stat to users' profiles, too: the average time they spend "joined" to an RP (a ratio of total "joined" time to the number of threads they've officially joined). Similar to the "posts/day" stat you added to profiles not very long ago. This would be great for letting us know who in the Guild is abandoning RPs, and allow us to make acceptance choices based on that. I'm sure you know this community has some "commitment issues" when it comes to RP loyalty, so maybe this will help to alleviate that, or at least let the GMs receive some warning in advance about fickle players.

@pugbutter

You have to be careful with stats like that cause they can negatively effect the forum. We don't want to create a vibe of elitism and ostracize people based on how we view their level of commitment. There are many reasons as to why people leave roleplays and why they have to abandon them. Yes it is frustrating, but you can't remove a problem like "commitment issues" by painting members under a bad light.

[Etcetera]

The Subscriptions page formatting is really skewed right now. Also, I personally think the block of text may fit well underneath, since it's kind of a pain to have to scroll every time you go back to the subscriptions page. That's how my friends and I all monitor our RPs.

[Mahz]

I pushed up an experimental notification system for when someone posts in one of your subscribed topics / roleplays.

You'll notice you can now archive subscriptions: roleplayerguild.com/me/subscriptions

- Regular subscriptions will notify you when someone posts in them.
- Archived subscriptions do not notify you. They're more like bookmarks, topics / roleplays you want to keep on your "favorites" list but you don't necessarily wanna know when they receive updates.

Special thanks to @Ellri for what I think was a simple implementation idea.

If you encounter issues, lemme know.

[Mahz]

@Etcetera Thanks, looking into it.

Good point about the instructional text. I'll hide it by default or shrink it.

[Mahz]

@Etcetera Okay, I hid the help text to try to reclaim some vertical space.

You said the formatting is screwed up though. Can you gimme a screenshot or something?

Here's what it looks like for me:



I had to change the grid layout of the panel to fit the checkbox alongside each row.

[Webmaster]

@Mahz

(Same person as Etcetera)
It seems that something I noticed before is better than it was (other than the better spacing). but I can't put my finger on it, exactly. However, the two biggest things I notice in this screenshot is that it feel really off that the posts and latest posts column dip down like that and that "Click check boxes to mass..." isn't in line with the "Total: 2, Max: 200" above all the roleplays. I may just be a formatting junkie, but the seemingly random up and down is hard to not notice (at least for me).

myImage

[JBRam2002]

I pushed up an experimental notification system for when someone posts in one of your subscribed topics / roleplays.

You'll notice you can now archive subscriptions: roleplayerguild.com/me/subscriptions

- Regular subscriptions will notify you when someone posts in them.
- Archived subscriptions do not notify you. They're more like bookmarks, topics / roleplays you want to keep on your "favorites" list but you don't necessarily wanna know when they receive updates.

Special thanks to @Ellri for what I think was a simple implementation idea.

If you encounter issues, lemme know.

@Mahz

Would it be possible to have archived or no-notification subs on the same page as normal subs? For example, if an RP has a lot of OOC chatter, I don't necessarily want a notification every few minutes, but I still want to be involved IC.