Mahz

Invisible

So Invisible is basically meant to show that you're offline even when you're online so that no one knows whether you are or aren't online (helps prevent stalkers and the like or something).

@Drakel

No, invisible mode means that people can't tell when you're online vs offline. The "Invisible" marker is something that only shows up for you so you're reminded that you're invisible. Here's what you look like to others:

Change username or delete account please.

I'll PM you.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Pushed up some changes to server: - [Enhancement] Post limit increased from 2¹⁶ to 2¹⁷ (65k to 130k chars) - [Fix] PM count added back to convo list. - [Experimental] [Performance] A garbage-collection hack replaced with what is hopefully going to trigger an incremental sweep. The nasty GC loop was a temporary fix that may have been causing an error a few people experience from time to time. And other random bits. I'll be monitoring that GC fix.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I've made progress stubbing out a dice system on my local computer. Here's how it kinda works so far and/or I've planned it to work so far while I'm experimenting with it. In the Tabletop RP forum (naive implementation): - GM can add players to the roleplay's player whitelist. These are the only players that can post IC and create rolls. (i.e. RandomDude69 can't just start creating incessant rolls in random RPs) - GM can enable the "dice-enabled" flag on their roleplay which adds a "Rolls" tab. - For the Roll tab, I pretty much mimic http://orokos.com/roll/?action=view_all which should be a familiar site to a lot of people in that forum. I started writing a dice expression parser (Example: "2d12+2r3"), but my friend pointed out that it'd be much nicer if I just made an actual widget/form. The widget would let you test your roll and it could spit out the dice expression for people familiar with dice-expressions to double-check their rolls. - People can link to their rolls from IC/OOC. <-- Seems lame to me but not sure how to improve it, yet. In other words, I can make it a bit less painful and a bit more integrated than Orokos. The above is just what I've come up with so far looking at how people are actually using a dice-rolling service. Not sure where to take it from there. Have no tabletop experience, so I've got no intuition for how it can get more integrated than that. I tried to think of ways to show rolls nicely inline with IC posts, but didn't come up with much.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Here's my take on the current appearance: Things also feel so spaced apart, and there's a discord between the font sizes of headers and such. For instance, the thread's title is larger and more jutting than the site's title. Posts in each thread shouldn't have space between them. They need colors and boundaries, but they don't need that padding, unlike the reply box where the padding is necessary. I like quotes, but I don't like the hiders. The double-underline on top-level headers might be a little excessive.

The guild right now is pretty ugly, though I reckon one of the biggest offenders is simply the weird, unrelated mix of greys and the lack of contrast between its dark colors. Example: Also, there are too many white elements that are just blinding against the darkness. Like code tags, the trim of the editor, and other random components that leave spots in my eyes. Sometimes I surf the guild with sunglasses on.

@Mahz

Good god, this. Definitely this. The white hurts. I'd like to see it changed to a different color like blue, yellow, or red, like an accent. I want something a little more like a modern Android app layout where things are flatter and sharper. There are typically less glows, less rounded corners, etc. in the interface. I like that. It's not flashy or distracting. I want to find a harmony between that and the rich formatting of posts. Some of the tags suggested like OP, GM, co-GM, admin, and moderator could be implemented in a format similar to the way Reddit marks original posters and moderators in comment threads. The last of my demands for RPG's appearance is for the thread listing on the forums to reflect the same columns as those on the subscriptions page. I want consistency from the guild's appearance most of all, and updates to some of the images and such used on RPG to create a coherent style for emoticons, buttons, formatting icons, and the like. Pretty demanding, I know, but I don't think all of this could be handled in one simple overhaul. It's best to work on each issue with the Guild's appearance one step at a time as they come. That's just my little spiel on it. But on the plus side, the new appearance isn't as intimidating as the old Guild's appearance.

@ravenDivinity

Your post is agreeable and only demanding in that it (for most points) requires someone to explicitly come up with real values for what things like "less" and "better" actually mean. I often sit down to try and making something feel right that doesn't feel right. I open the file and see that the font-size is "1.2 em". So what looks better? 1.1em? 1.15em? 16px? 15px? Comic Sans with serifs? Depleted of stamina, I close the file and move on to something nice and objective like writing code. Though good point about recreating subscription-list consistency across the roleplay forums. The guild last year had that but I forgot to reimplement it.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Hey Mahz, very casual question - ever any plans to implement an alternate theme for the guild? For example a white 'stealth' type skin? I only ask because as I've mentioned I use the site lots at work and it would be much more subtle. I realise that this is so low priority it barley registers, but I figured I'd ask.

@Lord Pie

That's something I'd like to offer, but I'm going to wait until I actually skin the Guild in a way that pleases me and most people.

Though speaking of Guild styles, are we ever going to implement the home page art that was submitted around page two or so?

@LegendBegins

( To give credit, @redPANDA made that mockup you're referring to) Implementing a skin is a big effort, but it's something I'd like to do soon. The guild right now is pretty ugly, though I reckon one of the biggest offenders is simply the weird, unrelated mix of greys and the lack of contrast between its dark colors. Example: Also, there are too many white elements that are just blinding against the darkness. Like code tags, the trim of the editor, and other random components that leave spots in my eyes. Sometimes I surf the guild with sunglasses on. I'm not really skilled enough with colors and design to run with redPANDA's mockup as it currently stands since they just stubbed out the homepage. I'd need help with other pages like convos and topics and posts and user-profiles. Though they might be down to stub the rest of those pages out. But, moreover, I'd need some feedback on whatever the next skin will be including feedback on redPANDA's ideas. I'm reluctant to put a few dozens of hours of effort into something that just one user and I came up with. A short-term idea is to aim for a less ambitious re-skin, just pick better colors that work with each other, and polish what we have. Like swap out the generic looking buttons with more stylistic buttons and weave a coherent style through it all. That's actually a quick iteration I might put a few hours of effort into this weekend. At least it's not so open-ended.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'm currently working on user search, not topic search, but most of the code will be reusable for that purpose. Topic search is next on my list.

@TheMaster99

I may tackle it since it involves fulltext search and I need to figure out what that's gonna look like for the guild in general. Particularly the performance implications and potential rate-limiting. Though if you do decide to take a stab at it, just check out that link. That's what we'll be using. Also, I may postpone the visitor messages system to implement the idea that @Captain Jordan had about notifying everyone involved in a visitor message "thread" + the option to mute notifications for a thread. Check out the database schema changes involved in just the implementation I posted: https://github.com/danneu/guild/issues/27 And that's just the first iteration with a little bit of UX polish. This weekend I'd like to clean up some loose ends like implement topic title editing, review+merge your user-search pull request, and then take on one big feature like @Mention notifications.

Can I get a warm welcome?

Welcome, @Eraser! What kind of things do you like erasing?

Mahz's Dev Journal

I really hope that's not going to bite you in the ass once the database has accumulated a high amount of posts/convos. Deletes are going to be a bitch if that happens.

@Captain Jordan

It scales because it's incremental at the same cost whether there are 2 posts or 1,000,000 posts in the topic.

So it essentially generates "pages" based on the number of posts to display, while no true pages are being generated, but simply a number of posts to display before breaking forward, which is why you can't go back? Because there's theoretically no place to go back to?

@LegendBegins

Yeah, pretty much. If you hover over your "Next" button on recent-posts, you can see that it's passing in the ID of the last post on the current page. I could probably implement the "Previous" button as the inverse. Probably in the time I've been talking about it here.