Mahz's Dev Journal

[Ellri]

Meh. we'll try to pick favorites even if no single favorite pops out.

Add notification support to subscription system.

Useful, but not essential yet. Not everyone would want to be notified about new posts in their subscribed topics. If implemented, would be best if it has a disable non-mention notifications option.

Add email notification opt-in.

Also useful, but not really critical.

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.

Not something we'd personally need, but might be useful for others.

Implement visitor messages

Not something we'd personally need, but might be useful for others.

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.

Complex, but might be beneficial. Might certainly remove the current issue of a few rare people using status system to chat.

Unread post tracker. Lots of stuff can be built on top of such a system. Even small conveniences like "Go to last unread post".

Very useful. We like this idea. Would save a lot of thinking.

Better pagination. Better navigation tools in general.

Not critical. Useful, though.

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.

Works well on tablets currently (at least on ours), but might be harder on smaller devices like phones. Thus not one we'd personally prefer focus upon. But useful for all those accessing with phones.

Build the search+filter system for roleplays and checks including the ability to sort by any parameter (like show the newest roleplays first).

Filter search and RP parameter search would be very useful for those not full up on RPs. This belongs high on some list.

Mature/adult opt-in system that helps these players find each other.

Caters a certain crowd. Might work even better if implemented after the tag system is upgraded to handle tag-specific browsing.

Post/PM autosave/draft system. The UX right now when you get a validation error upon post/topic creation is absolutely horrendous.

Useful, but not essential yet. For safety, we type complex RP post on google docs.

Allow people to delete/leave/archive private convos.

This is a common favorite with people. Not a critical feature to get (due to there being no small limit on total convo count), but very convenient.

Dice system.

Caters a specific section of the guild audience. Very useful for them, but not key to others. Would bring extra activity to tabletop if designed right.

So, that cuts the list down to six major candidates.
Of those, one appears to be tough work (mobile support), two cater specific sections of the community (mature-focused RPs and tabletop).
Cutting away those, leaves three that affect the whole community rather than just a sector of it:
PM archive/depart/join/delete.
Unread Post tracking.
Search system for tags and browsing by said tags.

We personally think most of the features above would at minimum be useful, but we tried to be more or less objective in the statements about each. We expect others would set different priorities, though.

hmm... on the thought of tag-specific browsing. We had (another) crazy idea... Would it be a feasible feature to hide (from a profile setting) all RPs with a certain tag? say if you hate Anime or Romance and would not want to take part in any such RP, would it be possible to have a feature to auto-hide such topics from your own sight? Or is that more work to code than it would be worth?

[Rilla]

Rilla as Mod to the list. Would prefer to be called President though. lmao.

Dice would be fantastic in the Arena, unfortunately I don't gave the Lancrist system saved in which we used Dice before.

Although not essential would it be possible to get a sort of Player centric interest check? Where GMs who need extra players can go to actively recruit people if they need more players/have a recruit only RP?

[Ruby]

- 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:

@Mahz

The PM bit would be nice. As would search+filter, but not nearly as high demand as the PM system upgrades I'd imagine.

Pagination, however, is the only other one that screams "USEFUL FOR RP!" to me.

[Ruby]

Rilla as Mod to the list. Would prefer to be called President though. lmao.

Dice would be fantastic in the Arena, unfortunately I don't gave the Lancrist system saved in which we used Dice before.

Although not essential would it be possible to get a sort of Player centric interest check? Where GMs who need extra players can go to actively recruit people if they need more players/have a recruit only RP?

@Rilla

I feel like you should be able to use the RP tag system for this.

I have a small group, Advanced, fandom, sci-fi RP...and it's recruited okay, I just need a few more people. It'd be very nice to go to a Members page, select relevant tags, and get a list of RPers that have set those tags (among others) as what they're looking for. Who knows, maybe even sort it by last Active, # of RP section posts in the last month, etc.

[Syben]

Rilla as Mod to the list. Would prefer to be called President though. lmao.

Dice would be fantastic in the Arena, unfortunately I don't gave the Lancrist system saved in which we used Dice before.

Although not essential would it be possible to get a sort of Player centric interest check? Where GMs who need extra players can go to actively recruit people if they need more players/have a recruit only RP?

@Rilla

The reverse interest check? Players go here and fill out profiles and examples, likes and preferables, etc? And GMs try to recruit them?

[HeySeuss]

- Add notification support to subscription system.
- Add email notification opt-in.

@Mahz

Huge, as it lets users know when an update is posted to the board. Also, reduces the strain on the Guild, as people get the e-mail and then check. They aren't randomly checking to see if any new notifications are up on the site.

- 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.

The VM system is a big one, I think, as Guild users remember that from OldGuild. A chatbox with IRC on it, perhaps one that can be opened to a larger tab, might be a good way to go on this, but difficult if you don't want to rely on third party. Mibbit provides, but I'm not sure about the advertising that you have to endure in return for using that. By the same token, there might be a way to integrate Chatzilla instead of Mibbit.

<Snip>

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:

Either way, we're a long way from where we started even two months ago, so that's a huge deal and pretty fast progress, all told. I'd call notifications by e-mail a huge one from a variety of perspectives, but I also imagine that it's not easily implemented. Once that goes and PM's can be deleted or archived, it seems like we're shifting focus toward community-building features; chat, VM's, opt-in, etc.

<Snipped quote by Mahz>

The PM bit would be nice. As would search+filter, but not nearly as high demand as the PM system upgrades I'd imagine.

Pagination, however, is the only other one that screams "USEFUL FOR RP!" to me.

@Ruby

Search+filter will eventually be a huge deal that will probably change how we search for RP's around here, and it was proposed a long time ago in here. That's why the tag system was implemented, to facilitate a transition into that sort of search+filter interest checking. Recruiting status (thank you whoever came up with that, because it's the little things that count) also is a huge step on that.

Also, as a note, we should try to add the like system to status updates. Just a thought that helps create more attention for this feature.

[Ellri]

excellent. People had other preferences than us.

A place for GMs with RPs that have been going on a while and want more players to recruit from would be nice. Or players can go and say hai and be recruited for such.
Perhaps a forum tab in the general interest checks section? and/or a searchable tag?

[Rilla]

<Snipped quote by Rilla>

The reverse interest check? Players go here and fill out profiles and examples, likes and preferables, etc? And GMs try to recruit them?

@Aeonumbra

Essentially this. GMs can scout through to find someone who they think would be a fit.

Downside is, it could lead to people getting high and.mighty and not joining unless personally recruited. Easily taken care of though.

[UltikanaRe]

Random idea: How 'bout we add '# of times read'? That way we can see if the problem is no advertising or something of that nature, or people read it and then are turned away?

[Captain Jordan]

Random idea: How 'bout we add '# of times read'? That way we can see if the problem is no advertising or something of that nature, or people read it and then are turned away?

@UltikanaRe

Read times are disingenuous. It's just counting page views, which could be the author refreshing (maybe they're editing), or several people viewing the topic many times. It can also be search bots/spiders crawling the forum and indexing pages. It really doesn't give you a good sample of whether a topic has been well-read or not.

[UltikanaRe]

True, but '# of users that have read' could probably work.

[LegendBegins]

True, but '# of users that have read' could probably work.

@UltikanaRe

But then you'd have to tag each user with every forum they've ever looked at, so it doesn't duplicate the views. Or, alternatively, saving every user who has ever viewed a topic on the topics themselves, neither of which are very efficient. Plus, it would be inaccurate if a user has multiple accounts.

I think it's perfectly acceptable to just count page loads. Sure it's not going to be an exact tally, but obviously an interest check with 150 views is getting a lot more attention than one with 15 views. Not all 150 views will be repeat visits/search bots/bots in general. The idea is just to know if nobody likes the concept, or if nobody is bothering to check it out, which would be very useful to me personally, as a current interest check I have running has only one reply, and I have no clue whether people dislike the idea, or just haven't looked.

[Punished GN]

Excuse me, I can't post a thread in the casual section... but when I post it in the test forum, it works just fine.

EDIT: I'm being sent to the Application Error page.

Nevermind, resolved the issue.

[BBeast]

I like the idea of showing page views, for the same reasons TheMaster99 mentioned. It can be very unsettling to not know whether your interest check is going poorly due to a poor idea or a lack of views.

I also want to put my vote in for a draft system. It can be very useful, if you don't want to outsource post writing (and, considering that this is a website for writing posts, it's not doing its job right if I have to outsource post writing).

[Ellri]

It might be useful to have the pageviews thing ignore OP/GM pageviews for the counter. It'd be too much to have it track everyone, but the thread author shouldn't be that hard.

[Shienvien]

Do hiders eat all leading (and potentially trailing) whitespace? Somewhat inconvenient, given that I actually want said whitespace there.

[Ellri]

that is quite probable.

Hider

Om nom nom

certainly looks like it does.
Just look at raw code of this post.

[Fillet]

I would like to add my voice to being able to delete inbox messages. And secondly after that, to have the automatic jump to the latest page in PMs as the normal board threads do when you click on the title. Thanks for all your hard work, hard working people.

[Syben]

@Shienvien Actually. I found a neat little trick for that.

Look at the Raw

Dun

Dun Dun

DUN DUN DUUUUN.

That trick also works for spacing lists bullets. Observe.

• This is
• Unspaced

• This is
  
• Spaced