Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

I implemented Visitor Messages today. Not a high priority feature, but I wanted to see if my notification system was general enough for it, and it forced me to make some improvements to my notification system implementation. I followed the vBulletin/Xenforo visitor-message implementation where visitor messages have one level of nested comments. You always get a notification when someone creates a visitor message on your wall, but any nested comments on a visitor message collapse into a single notification instead of spamming you. It's like the convo/PM system in that way. I also decided to *not* send notifications to you when someone replies to your VMs on other people's walls. Instead, I'd rather lean on the @mention system for that. (Of course, @mentions don't actually create notifications yet) Finally, each notification is cleared when you click its go-to link. With convos/PMs, I can clear the notification any time you view the convo. But I decided not to assume you've noticed new VMs or VM replies just because you've visited that page of your user profile. I'll finish the UI and roll it out when I wake up sometime.

If someone wanted to RP/write only to oneself...

How would someone go about doing single person RP's/writing sessions? Would it be posted in the art section or something? I just want to make sure I don't get in trouble, because I don't want to PM myself.

@Fleeter

I recommend creating it in one of the Roleplay forums. Whichever one is most relevant. If you can't decide, just put it in the 1x1 forum. That way, it's a "roleplay" in the system rather than just a regular topic, and I'll use that kind of metadata sometime in the future. Like displaying how many roleplays you've been involved in and such. Solo-RPs should definitely be part of that metric! :)

Mahz's Dev Journal

If OldGuild ever had this kind of userinfo-above-post layout, then it must have been done away before late 2010 ... I never got to witness it.

@Shienvien

Ah, just 2007-2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20090330105033/http://roleplayerguild.com/f3/important-please-read-16338/

Comprehensive List of Requested Features - Please read before making a new request thread

Speaking of reaching other players, are you going to bring back the member list anytime soon? Being able to organize it by join date (good if I wanted to post visitor messages to the new users), post amount and any other thing you can think of besides the default of ordering it by username might be good to impliment as well.

@Kirra

@TheMaster99 actually just submitted a patch for this: https://github.com/danneu/guild/pull/26 (I think it's just sorted alphabetically right now, but an option to sort by join-date is a good idea) I will review and merge it once I've cleared my plate of my current work.

Path of Exile is a fun game

Never played the game, but I've played its skill tree. http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree

Mahz's Dev Journal

Also, I'm moving the userbit for each post from the left side to the top. Wasn't the guild like that before guildfall?

I really do not like this kind of positioning, to be honest... It generates a lot of visual layout-breakup between the posts and makes the forums look far more disorganized. (I sometimes disable signatures just for this reason - fluff between posts is distracting clutter more than anything. Especially in IC.) And no, the Guild did not have this kind of layout before the "guildfall."

@Shienvien

Yeah, I like how left-sided userbits make the post content flow together rather than being punctuated over and over again with, say, Mahz's avatar, join date, post count, user title, etc that you see every. single. time. Ah, so I reverted back to userbits-on-the-left at some point on oldguild. Heh, even worse. I suppose I can just hold off on the userbit extensions I have in mind, then. I don't want to downgrade some people's experience for some ancillary features. I may just have to deal with the view layer complexity.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Also, I'm moving the userbit for each post from the left side to the top. _{Wasn't the guild like that before guildfall?}

@Mahz

http://nooooooooooooooo.com I prefer the left-aligned postbit. It makes it easy for me to keep track of which post belongs to who, and while it doesn't look as pretty, I think it's easier to read.

@Captain Jordan

Yeah, I hear you. On a desktop-sized browser, less horizontal width on post content also makes posts more readable. That's where the left-side userbit makes particular sense. Also, with userbits on the top of each post, the avatar introduces a 150+px gutter before you even reach the post's content. I'm just trying to consolidate my effort. Too much view-layer duplication right now. :(

Mahz's Dev Journal

Also, I'm moving the userbit for each post from the left side to the top. _{Wasn't the guild like that before guildfall?} It makes it easier for me to extend the userbit with information since there's more room. It's actually implemented on the current site if you shrink the width of your window: I bent over backwards to get that working. Making all userbits display on top will simplify the code and reduce potential rendering issues across differently sized devices (once I'm ready to toggle on mobile-view support). If enough people are significantly opinionated about where the userbit should go, I can eventually turn it into a configurable setting. And, in other news, I'm playing with some much more readable typography, sizing, and spacing for the guild's posts. Helvetica (default font for the CSS framework I'm using) is just so hard to read. Captain Jordan pointed this out a year ago, but you can barely even see when posts are emboldened. _{← Did u notice?}

Comprehensive List of Requested Features - Please read before making a new request thread

Yeah, as Jorick's signature says, he's moved on to another forum. So that's me updating the OP. :) He did an amazing job on this thread. One of my priorities right now is to improve the Guild's social aspects. Keeping in touch with people needs to be much easier, and there needs to be more avenues to do so. More ways to express yourself and communicate too, like a "like" system for posts, visitor messages, and PMs. Someone recently pointed out Iwaku's "like" system which uses this Xenforo plugin: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-ratings-taking-likes-to-the-next-level.410/. Much more interesting than the simple upvote system I had first started implementing. Though I've come up with better ratings than those lame defaults. _{I hope}

Mahz's Dev Journal

I haven't caught up reading this thread yet.

As a side note, I'm actually curious how far we can nest posts. Anyone care to give it a try?

@Captain Jordan

The Reply button makes a request to the "View Raw" endpoint, wraps it in [quote=@<Username>][/quote], and appends it to the editor, so it's far from being smart enough to strip embedded quotes. I would need to edit the bbcode parser itself. It's a problem because my goal is for people to use the Reply button incessantly without thinking about it. The current implementation gives you the entirety of nested quote context. What do you think of having Reply and Quote&Reply buttons on posts? - Reply just does the @Mention-injection for you. Simply serves the purpose of indicating who you're responding to and sends them a notification so they're aware of your response. Ideally so simple that people will use it to respond to the post above them where you wouldn't want to quote. - Quote&Reply is like the current Reply button except it contains no nested quotes. Or includes just one nested level but collapses them into some glyph like "[Snipped Captain Jordan quote]" (i.e. in particular, @mentions need to be removed from inner quotes). As we talking about before, I can extend the quote bbcode with [quote=Captain Jordan post=42]...[/quote] so that quotes link to the target post. That way, if you do want to see the nested quotes, it's just one click away. But 2+ levels of nested quotes by default is just awful and generally not what people want. Also, perhaps I can support a special empty quote like [quote=@<Username> post=42][/quote] to drop a simple one-line glyph like "In reply to @Captain Jordan, <link to post>:". The above Reply button could inject that. In other words, I really want to lean hard on the @mention system once I extend the notification system to support it. Like reddit's orangered envelope, @mention notifications will kinda represent your TODO-list of posts to reply to. The lack of awareness when someone replies to you is probably the most unforgivable feature of legacy forum software. New platforms like Vanilla Forum and Xenforo are finally addressing this.