Mahz is the Admin. He's the man with the plan and the Guild's head honcho.
Mahz
Admin
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Last Seen: 10 days ago
- Old Guild Username: Mahz
- Joined: 12 yrs ago
- Posts: 2023 (0.45 / day)
- VMs: 22
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Username history
- Mahz 12 yrs ago
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Status
Recent Statuses
1 yr ago
Ok, I made a major change to the database (but I'm not done). Please hop on discord if you find errors doing something!
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1 yr ago
I'm making some upgrades to the guild database. Sorry for any errors!
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3 yrs ago
I'm working on experimental server changes. Email mahz@roleplayerguild.com if you're having problems.
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7 yrs ago
Getting some more work done on the Guild today and tomorrow.
25
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8 yrs ago
Investigating the catastrophic performance issues.
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Bio
Some favorite links I find while scrolling around.
- @Roach: Advanced BBCode Hacks (Part 2, Part 1)
- @Exit: C O N C E P T S ᵇʸ ᴱˣᴵᵗ – Amazing experiments in BBCode design.
- @BangoSkank: RPing Ain't Always Easy : A Collaborative Guide to the Stuff that Makes This Hobby Less Fun Sometimes And How to Make It More Betterer
- @Roach
- @Exit
BBCode
- @Roach: Advanced BBCode Hacks (Part 2, Part 1)
- @Exit: C O N C E P T S ᵇʸ ᴱˣᴵᵗ – Amazing experiments in BBCode design.
Articles
- @BangoSkank: RPing Ain't Always Easy : A Collaborative Guide to the Stuff that Makes This Hobby Less Fun Sometimes And How to Make It More Betterer
Bios I love
- @Roach
- @Exit
Most Recent Posts
> I always found the idea of "Invisible, but tells everyone you're Invisible" to be really redundant/pointless.
What's the alternative?
I can't make it look like people in ghost-mode have never logged in because then that's just deceitful/confusing. I can't just display "Offline" because I've decided to represent "Offline" as "Online X hours ago" which I find *much* more helpful.
Ghost-mode is just a privacy feature that makes your online-status ambiguous.
It lets you do things like:
- Publicly rage-quit but privately lurk
- Avoid people
- Tell someone you're "off for the night" and then stay up for six more hours PMing your main guild squeeze
> > Unfortunately, fixing tag misalignment is a pretty hard problem if the parser itself doesn't expose that feature.
>
> Can you at least pinpoint line numbers even if the actual tags involved aren't identified?
As I become more familiar with the code of this library, I might find out that it's doable without too much hassle.
Obviously counting newlines comes to mind. But this library is implemented with regular expressions which are pretty opaque to work with. At least until I sit down and study it.
I've been patching this library to provide validation errors and better tag implementations. If I don't watch out, it will've been more economical to've just written my own recursive descent or PEG parser, which is something I want to do anyways to vanquish BBCode once and for all.
Imagine error metadata like: 'Expected [/b] on Line 10 Col 8 but found [/hider]'. And then exposing that to the user with some inline editor errors.
Anyways, I'm definitely wasting time by obsessing over my error system. I mean, who cares. :lol
> Two things we noted.
> mixing tags together means broken.
>
> [i][b]text[/i][/b] does not work.
> [i][b]text[/b][/i] works.
>
> Hiders seem to work well even nested. As does color, both text and hexadecimal.
> Combinations of basic formatting also works. (bold/italic/underlined)
I've been working on a validation system that gives helpful errors:
The BBCode implementation I'm using only exposes two vague types of errors, one of them being that "some tags appear to be misaligned" error above. I had to implement the rest of the errors in that screenshot.
Unfortunately, fixing tag misalignment is a pretty hard problem if the parser itself doesn't expose that feature.
Fortunately, the parser seems to handle things like misalignment well in that, instead of choking, it just simply doesn't render the misaligned BBCode into HTML. Bad tags and misaligned tags just remain unrendered plaintext for you to fix.
Hopefully between that and my validation error messages, it won't be too hard to debug a BBCode clusterfuck.
People writing format-heavy posts should have a decent feedback loop by clicking the Preview button periodically which triggers my error reporting system. (I'll deploy it to the dev server later tonight)
I pushed up the preliminary BBCode system to the dev-site: <https://dev-guild.herokuapp.com/topics/145/posts/ooc>
I could use some help testing it. I'm also collecting performance data on the parser.
Here's somewhat of a BBCode cheatsheet: <http://dev-guild.herokuapp.com/test>
I'd appreciate some feedback.
Notes:
- I still haven't implemented all of the BBCode that I would like to support
- Nesting some BBCode tags will simply generate broken output. Ex: If you try to nest `[tabs]`, the inner tabs are duplicated as top-level tabs. Haven't fixed it yet.
- If you can cause a "Internal Service Error" (server crash) from bad BBCode input, I'm especially interested. Bad input should never crash the server.
- I'd like to hear about BBCode rendering behavior that you didn't expect. Or enhancement suggestions.
- What do you think of the color picker? Does it work for you? How much does it suck on mobile?
Thanks for anything.
Updates and notes to self:
- TODO: Add aliases like `[colour]` -> `[color]` and `[centre]` -> `[center]`.
Well, I just want to do whatever it takes to make the system more obvious.
Have any other idea?
It's an optional tab that can be used to organize a roleplay's character sheets in one place.
Do you think I should add a simple description somewhere near the tabs explaining what they can be used for?
Or do you think a GM should be able to hide that tab if they aren't going to use it in their roleplay?
I'd like to know what I can do to make the purpose of that tab more obvious to others with the same question.
Ohhh, I think I see the issue!
Can you tell me the character-count of your post? <http://www.charactercountonline.com/>
I see a "cookie too large" error in the logs. Basically, if there's an error when creating a post (like if it's too long or short), I store the post in a browser cookie and redirect back to the form so you can fix your post and resubmit.
But I now see that max cookie size is 4096 byte (4096 characters). A post can have up to 65536 characters right now. My first suspicion is that you're trying to create a post longer than 65536 characters which is triggering a "post too long" error, but when it saves your post in the cookie, the server is rejecting it because it's too large.
Weird. No relevant error in the logs at all.
What happens if you try from <http://prod-guild.herokuapp.com>? (It's the same server that roleplayerguild.com points to)
> Mahz is an equal opportunist color-code supporter.
>
> That being said, the new BBCode looks good. My English fails me at this moment, but the big underscoring lines separating the (larger) headers from the text below, is that automatic?
I decided to add some heading tags `[h1]`, `[h2]`, `[h3]` since I usually like to have a quick lightweight way to break my posts into 2-3 levels of subheaders. Markdown has lightweight syntax here: `# Header 1`, `## Header 2`, `### Header 3`.
I added the underlines to make it more obvious which sublevel you were at, but I prob went a lil far.
Since I will support `[size=...]` and `[font=...]` tags, people can essentially roll their own headers. But I figured it'd be nice to have some opinionated h1/h2/h3 tags for when you can't be fucked.
----
I also spent way too long re-implementing custom buttons to the editor that support BBCode. Including a pop-up color-picker.
My goal for today is to finish up and push it to the dev server.
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