Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Any image I upload now is being turned into webp. I don't want anything converted to that format, so please put the image hoster back the way it was. I realize you're trying to improve and/or fix it, but this isn't it.

@FalloutJack

Are you talking about images in albums?

Can you give me more context? What's wrong with webp? It simplifies my image system now that all images (avatars and images) are one single format. But at the same time I don't want to negatively impact your experience in a major way.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Ok, I've made tables responsive again by default, but it only applies posts created or re-saved going forward (since that's when the bbcode is re-converted into html). I can't modify the behavior of existing posts. Let me know if it works though.

I also want to add a way to opt out of it in the future.

@BrokenPromise @FalloutJack Hmm, webp does support animations, so I guess the problem is in my conversion logic? But when I test the system, it does turn animated gifs into animated webp.

Maybe link me a gif that doesn't get converted to a working animation so I can take a look.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Yankee @Terry Bogard Hmm, I was worried about removing table scroll.

What if I default to scrolling tables and let people opt in to tables that don't scroll if they are doing some weird design stuff?

I do want to prioritize mobile usability over table hacks.

@Terry Bogard Is the image resolution issue a new issue?

@Exit Not sure the best way. Maybe cell can take a nopad argument or something?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Fixes:

- Discord link should work again
- Unfriending from /me/friendships should work (@Bork Lazer thanks for making a Github issue )
- Very niche: Bad roll urls like "/rolls/123]" now work instead of triggering an internal server error. Saw this pop up in the error logs.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Bug fixes:

1. You can now rename yourself to usernames that you've used before (but there's still a 3-month rate limit)
2. You can view individual imgs again in your album
3. Avatars in convos/pms now finally link to user profiles

Mahz's Dev Journal

The way to think about the safety/security of html vs bbcode is that you start with bbcode like [table]

Now modify the bbcode parser so that it expects [ instead of <: <table>

Is it dangerous now? No, it's the exact same code as before except the parser looks for < instead of [

Just like with bbcode, you would parse it and turn any misbehaving tags into plain text.

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Anyways, I have to admit I get delusions of energy/time grandeur in this thread from time to time. Any time I've made a lot of code progress like I did this last week, I start to feel like any of my long-time ambitions with the guild are just a couple weekends away as if this were my fulltime job.

So let me snap out of it and focus on short term achievable goals with much better bang for the buck.

On my list are the bbcode updates and various bug fixes.

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Re: donations. I have no plans to support donations, and that aligns better with the fact that the guild is a hobby project.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@BrokenPromise Fwiw, that's true for when I might modify the html that bbcode produces, but it's not true for when I change the CSS.

For example, when you use [table] bbcode creates this html: <table class="bb-table">.

If I were to modify the ".bb-table" CSS class in the guild's style sheet, it will affect all existing tables on the site.

What I probably should do is version the bbcode CSS. So, do something like add a .bb-table-v2 or .bb-sub-v2 that new [table] or [sub] bbcode generates if I significantly change its styling.

But you can see how these kinds of concerns can become a full time gig.

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Once I extend the bbcode as I specified above, I'd like to revisit the idea of letting people optionally write html.

There isn't much difference between html and bbcode except that bbcode is obscure, ad hoc, with no tooling, and annoying to parse. Do you know how many times I've started writing my own bbcode parser over the years?

They're almost equally bad to write by hand. And my job is no different between them: I have to somehow map bbcode to html, and most bbcode maps 1:1 with html anyways. Like [list] and [*] are just <ul> and <li>. So what's even the point?

If I were to do this, I would let you choose whether your post is in "bbcode" vs "html" mode so that it doesn't touch the existing bbcode system.

Of course, I'm just spitballing here since every time I try to touch the guild's editor, bbcode system, or post styling, it eats a lot of time. Though some of that is because of bbcode itself.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ducksworth Oops, thanks. I somehow broke this.

Added it to my todo list: github.com/danneu/guild/issues/244 (Looks like the AI bot fixed it )

Mahz's Dev Journal

@BrokenPromise Can you explain the text alignment you want?

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Roach Thanks for weighing in.

Man, I forgot that the table cells support a weird "active" / "success" / "danger" / etc parameter. I had to go look in the code to even remember what you were referring to. Yeah, those are terrible and thankfully undocumented.

I'm open to pretty much all of these. Here's how implementable I think they are.

Image align: Planned

[img align=left|right] -- Float the image left or right text reflow (aka CSS float property)

I like this and it should be simple to implement. Though presumably there might need to be some sort of float-clear tag? developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/…

Image resize: Needs work

[img width=200] [img height=200] -- Keep aspect ratio the same by change one dimension
[img=100x200] -- Hard-code image resize.

While it's obviously useful, the downside of image resize is that it makes it easy to grab some massive image and resize it to 200px x 200px so that it secretly wastes bandwidth. I'm not sure how to handle that. At least with the current system, it's obvious when you're accidentally using a huge image.

Edit: Actually I have a great idea for this.

Cell background color: Planned

I'll remove support for the current weird parameters like [cell=danger].

Swapping it out for [cell=#39b54a] seems reasonable.

Table/cell border color: Needs work

Not sure of the syntax on the cell vs table. Too niche to think about at the moment.

Text background color: Needs work

I suppose I could add [bgcolor={color}] for symmetry with [color={color}], but I'd need to think about unintended effects and how it interacts with other bbcode.

Horizontal scroll: Low priority

I'm open to ideas like [table nowrap] where table cells won't wrap which could allow the table to scroll when it overflows. But it's so niche that it's low priority.

Text shadows: Planned

I could create a bbcode tag that maps directly to CSS text-shadow: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/…

Check out the demo at the top of that link.