Hey, @Mahz, with the recent implementions of the status updates and the Bio, would it be totally wrong of me to assume that some time in the future, be it distant or near, there will be a visitor messaging feature or something like it, at least?
Yeah, I'm definitely going to implement them soon. Every week the Guild's core improves and it becomes easier and easier to make progress. Also, my power levels keep growing. I'm almost super saiyan.
I actually implemented a visitor message system many pages ago in this thread and posted some screenshots, but I scrapped it because the weekend ended while I was still trying to hook up the notifications for it. More complex than I expected. But these days I'm better at gauging what I can get done in a weekend and how to break down a hard task.
It's too early in the week for me to guess at what I'll try to build next weekend, but here's a random sampling of things that come to mind right now when I think of the Guild's TODO list. Obviously some things are much more important than others.
- Add notification support to subscription system.
- Add email notification opt-in.
- Add album/image management system. I really want people to be able to upload their images to the Guild instead of depending on 3rd party hotlinking. It sucks to visit old threads to find out all of the hotlinked images are lost. Ideally every image on the Guild will be served by the Guild's servers.
- Implement visitor messages
- Implement a basic chat system. This would be a fun feature for me for when I need a break from hard problems, and it's a precursor to the Etherpad system since it gives me more experience with websocket tech. It's also just a good way to build friendships, meet people, and I've never tried catering to any chat-based roleplaying subcommunities before.
- Unread post tracker. Lots of stuff can be built on top of such a system. Even small conveniences like "Go to last unread post".
- Better pagination. Better navigation tools in general.
- Finish mobile/tablet support. It hurts me that portable-device users have to zoom scroll zoom scroll, but man this is a hard feature.
I chip away at it a lil more every week.
- Build the search+filter system for roleplays and checks including the ability to sort by any parameter (like show the newest roleplays first).
- Mature/adult opt-in system that helps these players find each other.
- Post/PM autosave/draft system. The UX right now when you get a validation error upon post/topic creation is absolutely horrendous.
- Allow people to delete/leave/archive private convos.
- Dice system.
Damn, I'm just going to stop there.
Most of my time actually goes into the small tweaks/improvements. They just take up a lot more time than I ever expect. Little things always need to be fixed, like how this doesn't dismiss when you click outside of it:
2x Laugh
