Mahz's Dev Journal

[BrokenPromise]

@Mahz

Only thing that scares me about this is there is a comic sans button.

[Ellri]

What's so scary about Comic Sans, @BrokenPromise?

[BrokenPromise]

@Ellri looong running joke.

Comic sans is not a very pleasant font, but it gets a lot of hate for its wide misuse. You can read more about that here.

[Ellri]

heh. Interesting, @BrokenPromise.

[Meta]

@BrokenPromise

I think you meant to say "unironically the best font."

[Landaus Five-One]

@Mahz Is there a feature to delete autosaves? >.>;

[skidcrow]

@mahz that actually looks...

a lot better than what i was expecting. i agree with the idea you could integrate something akin to tumblr's text system, where we can switch between the wysiwg editor and bbcode/html/whatever else. all my suggestions involve things that require heavy coding i'm so sorry

also:

why do you forsake me, mahz?

[Ellri]

@Landaus Five-One Yes. Just open the autosave, then erase the text in it. Then it'll have "Autosaved 0 chars at tt:tt:tt"

[Landaus Five-One]

@Ellri Had to go all the way on the bottom of the page. Thanks. I was somewhat confused about that. :P

[JBRam2002]

@Mahz
I am a bit concerned about having an HTML or visual editor on the forum. One reason is because a large amount of what I do in some of my games involves copypasta from Excel (or more specifically, Google Sheets) with the coding already written into the cells. This allows me to place a lot of information into a single cell, which I can then update automatically with calculations and copy into the forum post.

An example of this is the 0th post I linked previously. If you look at the post, you'll see a very complicated table with a significant amount of work input into the correct BBCode tags. Switching to an HTML editor (a good time to note that I have no experience in coding HTML) would make the table creation significantly more difficult to input into a single line in Excel. I'll add that all of this information is automatically generated by changing values on my spreadsheet, and I do not actually modify the table itself when I edit the post - I delete the previous table and overwrite it using the copy paste from Excel.

I'm sure that a similar function is available with a HTML editor, but it requires every user on this site to learn a new form of coding. There are some limitations to this text editor (no font styles, limited description of tools, etc), but it is not a "bad" editor. People can do a lot with it. In fact, I personally would prefer the limitations of the BBCode to remain in place instead of allowing people to access all of the possibilities of HTML, making it more difficult for me to use the site while in a work environment (background images, auto-playing sound, and a whole host of other HTML options would really limit my usage of the site).

Yes, HTML is more powerful, but with more power comes more problems. The BBCode editor allows the moderators greater control over the media content of posts. Allowing HTML will potentially allow any number of major and disruptive issues. I would be grateful if this editor were improved rather than scrapped.

[Mahz]

@Landaus Five-One Yeah, you can see and clear your drafts in the footer.



Sometimes they get out of sync, like if you open the same topic in two tabs while writing a post.

@JBRam2002 I would certainly be uncomfortable rushing to replace the current editor with a new one that's half-baked in other ways. That's not what I'm trying to do here.

One realistic strategy is to somehow let both editors exist on the Guild together. It could default to the new one since most posts hardly even use BBCode. Yet people could opt back in to the old editor. Seems pretty fair.

The only reason HTML comes up at all is because it's a necessary feature, not because I think HTML is the ideal markup language for a forum.

After all, the Guild's current editor works by rendering your BBCode into HTML for display in the browser. That's all BBCode is. And BBCode is something I could eventually implement for the new editor. The new editor is just 100x easier to work with.

HTML doesn't mean that people would be able to write whatever they want. That would be an amateur security vulnerability. HTML is similar to BBCode where the server simply ignores codes it doesn't whitelist.

[Mahz]

@JBRam2002 roleplayerguild.com/posts/4317870 is pretty impressive.

[NuttsnBolts]

What's so scary about Comic Sans, @BrokenPromise?

@Ellri

My sister has completed a degree in design and they were told by her lecturers that if they were to ever use comic sans for anything, they would in instantly fail their course.

[Mao Mao]

pls remove comic sans before it's too late, mahz.

[JBRam2002]

@MahzIf you default the editor to HTML for new posts, could it potentially remain defaulted to BBCode for existing posts (with an option to switch to HTML later)? I'm picturing a scenario where I edit the 0th post above, and my BBCode fails because it defaulted to HTML in the middle of a combat, and I'd need to spend a day learning a new programming language while my RPers are wondering if they died or not. They probably did though. Dunno why they're wondering.

[skidcrow]

@MahzIf you default the editor to HTML for new posts, could it potentially remain defaulted to BBCode for existing posts (with an option to switch to HTML later)? I'm picturing a scenario where I edit the 0th post above, and my BBCode fails because it defaulted to HTML in the middle of a combat, and I'd need to spend a day learning a new programming language while my RPers are wondering if they died or not. They probably did though. Dunno why they're wondering.

@JBRam2002

it wouldn't actually take that long to convert from html to bbcode, so long as mahz doesn't expect us to code websites and the like.

i predict a lot of it will be the same tags we've used for years (bold, italic, etc.), just their html variants. and the html variants aren't that different. it'd be just like if mahz added new tags to the bbcode editor. and, in a worst case scenario where learning this new language is impossible, there's always the buttons at the top to add the tags in for you.

[JBRam2002]

<Snipped quote by JBRam2002>

it wouldn't actually take that long to convert from html to bbcode, so long as mahz doesn't expect us to code websites and the like.

i predict a lot of it will be the same tags we've used for years (bold, italic, etc.), just their html variants. and the html variants aren't that different. it'd be just like if mahz added new tags to the bbcode editor. and, in a worst case scenario where learning this new language is impossible, there's always the buttons at the top to add the tags in for you.

@Grimhildr

Understood. I know that <b> </b> converts to bold, etc. I'm more concerned about the more difficult things, like tables. I use tables a lot and have no idea how those work in html (could probably do some research to see, I assume it's somewhat similar to BBCode). Having posts that exist as BBCode format remain defaulted to BBCode would allow people who edit those posts to change it to HTML at their option, or allow them to continue to use the same format that the post was originally created in, allowing for the case of (likely rare) scenarios like mine to not be quite the hassle.

[Celaira]

@JBRam2002

<table><tr><td></td></tr></table>

where tr is the row, and td is the table data, or cell where you would put information.

[skidcrow]

<Snipped quote by Grimhildr>
Understood. I know that <b> </b> converts to bold, etc. I'm more concerned about the more difficult things, like tables. I use tables a lot and have no idea how those work in html (could probably do some research to see, I assume it's somewhat similar to BBCode). Having posts that exist as BBCode format remain defaulted to BBCode would allow people who edit those posts to change it to HTML at their option, or allow them to continue to use the same format that the post was originally created in, allowing for the case of (likely rare) scenarios like mine to not be quite the hassle.

@JBRam2002

yeah, i do agree with the sentiment that it may be a little difficult for edits of old posts after the new editor is implemented. to be honest, just leaving bbcode posts as bbcode (not even giving the option for the wysiwyg editor when editing them) would work.

@JBRam2002

<table><tr><td></td></tr></table>

where tr is the row, and td is the table data, or cell where you would put information.

@Celaira

man, this is so hardwired into my brain from computer science lessons.

[Celaira]

<Snipped quote by Celaira>

man, this is so hardwired into my brain from computer science lessons.

@Grimhildr

Lol, it took me forever to grasp it due to being self taught. The only reason it was hard, though, was I was trying to do full webpages in just tables. lol.