Mahz

Guild Weekly/Quarterly/Daily?

@Lillian Thorne Yeah, I need to make things more visible. I don't like that my topic dominates the news. I have a few ideas in mind. One idea is to make a sort of "blog" system where staff can check a box on their blog post that publishes their post to all users' feeds as if all users were subscribed to them (i.e. they receive a notification). Site news, feature announcements, rule clarifications, RPGN posts, etc. could all go through this system so that updates are pushed to users instead of waiting for users to hopefully meander to the news subforum. I also want to add a sidebar to the homepage with small widgets that show things like the latest X news items, your latest X subscriptions, etc to increase breadth visibility of things happening on the forum.

Mahz's Dev Journal

the definition for high and low fantasy as with how commonplace and/or understood magic is can be a good one. but there's no single definition that'll cover the entire genre.

@Ellri

We don't need to be all-encompassing with our one-liner definitions. Perhaps a wrong definition that everyone sees+obeys is better for a tag system than making everyone bring their own varying definition (tower-of-babel problem). I'll have to refactor some of my cringeworthy defs. Either way, I changed "High/Epic Fantasy" to just "Fantasy", and the definition to "Wizards, hobbits, axes". Maybe being prescriptive with genre cliches works — the cliches get the idea across but it's obvious not to take them too seriously? Anyways, if someone else has an opinion on some tag definitions, please take a stab at it and share your attempt.

Hm. How about the ability to delete PM conversations?

@La Inquisidora

Yeah, it's a feature I want to add but its ratio of payoff/effort is just too sad for a project that's relegated to my free-time. It's kinda like when you finally have a day off from work but you spend it going to the bank and running errands because you finally have time.

@Mahz Discovered something that might need fixing on the @mention buttons. No matter where you are in a prospective post, pressing the button will put the @mention text at the end of the post. Putting it where the text marker is instead would make said button even better.

@Ellri

Oh yeah, nice. I need to hook it into the editor's cursor location. @KeysOfKayes Good points. Another issue is that colors are hard. It took me hours to tweak the editor for very little gain.

Hello lovely people

@Storm Welcome

Mahz's Dev Journal

I have a question @Mahz can we get a "mention" button at the bottom of posts so we can just click that and have the mention tag already filled in? Would that be possible?

@Genkai

Implemented it. Right now when you click the button, the "[@Mention]" BBCode injects itself to the end of the editor and scrolls you to it. Would there be a more convenient way of doing that? Should it auto-scroll? Should it inject onto its own line like how the Quote button does it?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Nice tags. Not entirely sure on the description for the high fantasy tag. Not all high fantasy is about defeating some great evil. Might be better to have its description be based around the magical content, which is usually fairly significant in high fantasy.

@Ellri

Haha, I couldn't even find two definitions online that agreed with each other. Even the wikipedia page meanders on and on.

promotio test

Nope. Can't promote from here. Ahhgh.

@zombieaccount

What do you mean by promote?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Pushed up a super basic tagging system (Roleplays and Checks only). It's still a work in progress, but I'm done for the day. Was gonna add some more tags but too tired to come up with more descriptions (visible on hover). Tags can be added/removed when creating and editing topics. Note: The system automatically gives you a tag depending on which forum you're creating it in. For example, if you create a roleplay in the Casual section, even if you don't select the "Casual" tag, it'll be assigned to your roleplay. The tag UI doesn't really reflect this yet.

Mahz's Dev Journal

<Snipped quote by Mahz> My main concern was that if the GM happened to delegate the RP to someone else or someone took over the RP, the all-important first post can't be changed, especially if the GM is gone for good.

@whizzball1

Yeah, I hear ya. I agree that it's a great feature. As far as GM-/co-GM-specific powers, what do you think of each tab having its own post that's shared between the GM and co-GMs? It's kind of like auto-creating the first post in each tab except that it's optional/invisible until a GM/co-GM actually puts content on it. All GMs can edit it, and the revisions are saved so that a rogue GM can't just forever delete the content. It solves some issues and can be easily built on top of the current system without touching anything. ( At the moment I'm working on the roleplay/check tagging system)

Mahz's Dev Journal

<Snipped quote by Mahz> That is a part of it. Does the Guild prevent image-code injection, SQL Injection, flood protection, etc?

@LegendBegins

- Avatar uploads are uploaded to and served from Amazon's servers. And first I check the binary blob to ensure it's an image. - SQL queries are all parameterized. - Not much in the way of flood protection yet, but that's not a security issue. Fortunately the guild's only sensitive data are private convos and email addresses, which narrows the surface area for me to watch.

Mahz's Dev Journal

<Snipped quote by Mahz> What I've seen other sites use is the auto-complete textbox to find a name, but then the name leaves the textbox and appears in a non-editable list with [X] boxes to remove entries.

@Captain Jordan

Yeah, that's what I would do since it's too much of a hack to make the auto-suggestion system aware of delimiters. However, I've been just using jQuery so far for all my Javascript hacks. It's pretty nasty for anything more complex than toggling a hider. Soon I'm going to switch to a library called React to write all the Javascript-heavy UI which makes things much much easier. The sort of interaction you describe is a breeze with React. Not so much with jQuery. I used jQuery to begin with because it's already a dependency for another library I'm using, so I just rolled with it.