Mahz Admin

> Forgive my inexperience in JavaScript, but (correct me if I'm wrong) as an object oriented programming language, wouldn't a dice-roller be as simple as creating a rolling method, reading user input for the number of dice, and perhaps the number of sides, and returning a random value between one and the maximum, and have the server display that value either on the post, or wherever you choose to place it? Even a rough prototype could roll a single die, and return the sentence "The rolled die value is: valueOfDie" to the post box, and while that could be easily manipulated, it's a start. Yeah, the logic of the dice roll itself is simple, but people generally want a dice system that's backed by the database. For example, you shouldn't be able to just edit your post and re-roll a new number. You also shouldn't be able to roll three dice for three events and then re-order the events according to favorable rolls. In other words, people want a verifiable, irrevocable ledger of rolls. I could easily support such a thing as a first-class component of the forum. The website escapes me at the moment, but the guys in the Tabletop Roleplaying forum sometimes use a webservice for this purpose that is a good example of what I mean by this. It's not a technical challenge so much as it's an open-ended one. I'm in a position to create a really good forum dice-roller that integrates with our roleplaying system, but since I don't use dice, I'm not sure what kind of UI people want. I could use some help coming up with some rough mockups.

> I like how evidently inconsistent avatars show. > > In one place it's yelling about it being too big. In others it'll show without issue. Well, your avatar is over 150px by 150px so you're running into my hack that tries to hide oversized avatars.  That image is 250x170. I scaled it so its max dimension was 150px on imgur.com:  I should display the max size of `150px x 150px` more prominently in the Edit Avatar box since it's so easy to glance over.

> Regarding the tabs, have you considered allowing the thread creator, or a designated thread administrator to add or delete tabs connected to the Roleplay? **Edit**: Someone just PMed me about this post. In my previous post, I was talking about BBCode tabs as an example of something that you can only do in a rich markup language like BBCode. In this post I was talking about custom tabs alongside the IC/OOC tabs you see in roleplay topics. Yeah, that was an idea under consideration even a year ago. I like the general idea of it, but it's non-trivial from both a system standpoint and from a UX standpoint. That sort of change would require a ripple of changes across the system, and it needs to be nailed correctly the first time since it's not easy to change such a big generalization of the tab system. I made mockups of some ideas for custom tabs, but a lot of people in IRC pointed out that it complicated what was an otherwise simple system. It's not something I'm comfortable inventing by myself. I would need help from people that strongly support that kind of feature since it's them I'm doing it for, after all. For comparison, creating the "IC"/"OOC" tabs was a rather uncontroversial/obvious upgrade. Same thing with the dice system. I'd like to come up with a few ideas and pitch them to those interested in on-forum support for dice. Edit: Reply to your edit, I agree. When I introduce BBCode again, I'm going to change the quoting mechanism to use BBCode quotes which retain info like which post you're replying to and who wrote it.

> Total PM count is broken for me - it is displayed as 81, when in fact it is nearing 200. > > Still impossible to access the site via roleplayerguild.com; all cached information has been cleared a couple of times, so this shouldn't be an issue. > > Do I understand correctly that BBCode/HTML-style tags are going to be brought back? The current system is rather wonky, to say the least (especially for a person who tends to use punctuation rather liberally, especially in OoC posts). Besides, Markdown is *not* unambiguously interpreted. (And hey, why is stuff between two asterixes italicized? Most other places that consider this to be text formatting - say, almost anything Google-related - bolds the text in between instead. And plenty of people I know use this format to signify actions or sounds...) > - And if there is one principle I want my text formatting to follow, then it is absolute unambiguity. I don't want to discover that my post has ended up looking weird due to my punctuation habits being interpreted as formatting or the interpretation process misfiring (both of which have already happened in the couple of posts I've made since the relaunch). Markdown has all the disadvantages of a WYSIWYG text editing (such as random parts of text deciding they need to be something else than intended as soon as you do anything a bit less standard ... like press enter), minus the actual WYSIWYG. It is *not* a good system. (Also, give me my asterixes back. I don't want them parsed.) > And how do I do text that is both bolded and italicized? > **...And why on Earth does this this thing eat single line breaks!?** That - omitting single line breaks - is a crime against all writers everywhere, if I've ever seen one. I have long preferred the line break and tab paragraphing (as seen in books) to the double line break common in many net environments (as the double line break makes especially dialogue visually rather hard to follow for me, atop of simply looking ugly and adding ridiculous amount of scrollable space), and now we have been stripped of single line breaks entirely? Well, be I damned... At least until I get my single line breaks back. Missing the tab key's functionality was hard as is. > > ...I had one more thing to point out, but honestly I forgot what it was when I noticed it omitting single line breaks in preview. > > Oh yes, I remembered - the formatting tends to take its time to kick in (I am writing this for a rather powerful PC that typically loads script-heavy pages instantly, Firefox browser). I am aware it it a clientside solution, however the time delay tends to be too significant for comfort - and sometimes the formatting doesn't pop in at all unless I scroll the text out of view and back. (I literally stared at a short OoC note of mine for two minutes, then went to edit the post because I became convinced that if it hadn't popped up by then, the interpreter must have consumed the formatting altogether. The formatting was there all right ... and further observation confirmed that this is indeed how "lazy" the formatting pop-in is. > > In-thread online markers haven't been implemented (same as forum-view Subscribed-markers). - Yeah, BBCode is coming back. I'm trying to do it right this time from the start rather than relegating BBCode to a hotfix shadow-world between real BBCode and what become known as QQCode. As QQCode became more and more entrenched over time, my attempts at patching it were breaking too many posts since everyone got used to its idiosyncrasies. - I agree - the current state of formatting isn't that great. Markdown isn't a rich formatting syntax that people generally expect from forums. But I chose it for the v0.1 relaunch because: 1. It's bare-bones. Markdown-formatted text is still readable even if I dropped support for it overnight. It's something I can build on top of because it's mostly non-intrusive and doesn't really clash with anything. 2. I found a good editor + Markdown parser + preview button + javascript library package that let me cobble together something that worked so I could focus on rewriting the other components of the forum. For example, I use this: <http://www.codingdrama.com/bootstrap-markdown/>. I recognize that maybe no formatting (rather, just line-break formatting) might have been better for the relaunch though. :( I look forward to extending the editor with BBCode and other features that assist post organization. Someone mentioned <https://www.iwakuroleplay.com/> recently as a forum with some cool formatting features like tabs that people seem to like. I like that! I also want to retro-patch posts to honor line-breaks which should be doable without breaking anything (well, just lines). - Regarding client-side Markdown rendering, it's not pretty. It may help to know that the render is triggered by an "appear" event on each post that unfortunately doesn't trigger until you start scrolling. Often you land in a topic and just see a wall of text as the first post until you move the page. I really want to move rendering back onto the server, but the naive solution (rendering posts on the fly when the server is generating the response) just wasn't performant enough for cases when you're looking at large posts. Since performance was my primary goal of the rewrite, I decided to offload the solution to the client until I can give it some thought and engineer a real solution. I don't really have the stomach for quick fixes anymore! Anyways, you're right on. Post formatting is a sorry situation at the moment. I'm trying to dedicate most of my time this first week of the relaunch to things like system errors. I've also started working on a real notification system. But perhaps post formatting would've been a better goal!

I can't explain why your convos aren't showing up. I checked other people's convos and can verify that their self-convos **are** showing up for them. When I finish with work, I will revisit my data-migration logic to see if your convos were somehow filtered out. Worst case scenario, I will manually import your convos from the old database. I took a snapshot of the old database before I migrated the data, so your convos are not lost. I just want to reassure you. :) Sorry for the delay. I added your issue to my short-term TODO list: <http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/75056/posts/ooc#post-2314861>

Speaking of EU, the first version of the Guild had a color scheme I copied from Paradox Entertainment's forums: - Their forums in 2007: <https://web.archive.org/web/20070406173015/http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/> - The Guild in 2007: <https://web.archive.org/web/20070421113235/http://www.roleplayerguild.com/> As you can see, I got no better at coloring a website since then.

Welcome back, dude! I remember playing CAH with you a year ago.

Thanks. I'll check it out. I see the errors in the logs, but there is no actual error message for me to read. I'll improve my error output to help track down this issue. It seems like you are sometimes able to post. Correct? So this error only happens sometimes?

> Can someone use Flicker to link Avatars and re-size them if needed? I'm asking if I could do it myself, not for someone to do it for me, by the way. You can put any URL in the avatar box. You just need to ensure that: 1. It's 150px by 150px 2. It's hosted on a website that lets you direct-/hot-link to the image 3. It actually links to an image, not just a page that the image is hosted on (common mistake) I simply recommend <http://imgur.com> because I know it's a good service. If Flickr fits the bill, then that's cool too.