Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Major problem: Whenever I click on any link from the site, it forces open a new tab and redirects me to ads. Is it me or sm sort of s a site glitch?

@UltikanaRe

Sounds like malware. First I need to find out if it's the Guild or just you.

Can you give me any URLs of the pages you end up on after it redirects you?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Why are there so many posts here? What is this?

@Sage

Livejournaling

Mahz's Dev Journal

I know you're still e still probably working on the Search Feature but could you possibly include an option to filter when a thread was started? I know looking through places like 1x1 can be hard when you're aiming to see threads you haven't seen in the past two weeks (new) when they're muddled with ones from months/years ago. Just a thought. ^^

@Genkai

Yeah, good idea. It's pretty necessary to be able to sort by new stuff, really. But I didn't think of that.

I'm back

@Boboclown98 Welcome back

Mahz's Dev Journal

Just wanted to stop by to thank Mahz for all the work he's put into the site along side anyone else who has helped. I didn't have confidence in this site following the debacle towards the end of 2014 with the site constantly crashing and what not but the new improvements are impressive even if they aren't completely finished.

@vancexentan

Yeah, I feel that. The deletion of the Guild in Dec 2013 kinda forced my hand at the worst possible time in my life.

I had the choice to either restart the Guild on forum software like vBulletin or Xenforo again. But I also had been wanting to run the Guild on my own software for a while. I thought taking two months off from work would've been enough to write a skeleton forum that I could slowly enhance, but it wasn't enough time. I created some software that just couldn't scale with the load. I was also burning progressively more and more time on fixes that weren't really helping.

The Guild's towards the end of last year generated a lot of ill will towards me and the forum which was frustrating, so I took what I learned, bought some stability in my life, and rewrote the Guild again.

All things said and done, I think 2014 was somewhat necessary in a way despite the timing and the failure. If I had decided to just reboot the Guild on a fresh Xenforo/vBulletin installation, we'd probably still be running on it today. Too hard to switch away. Just another clone. But since my failure to scale the forum planted the responsibility firmly in my hands and ended up causing me a lot of stress, by the time I was in a position to stabilize my life, I had (and still have) the energy/fuel necessary to build.

The current forum still trails other forums on some basic features that come for free when using Xenforo. I'm still building a search system. Pagination still sucks. Still can't delete/archive convos. Have to manually refresh the /subscriptions page to see if new posts were made in the topics/roleplays/checks that you care about.

But the upside is that I'll catch these features up within the next couple months. I kinda interleave these boring features with cooler features. And once I catch up, 100% of my time will be spent working on cool features instead of just 50% of my time.

Anything Happen Lately?

@Talonnightshade Lots. Hopefully you like the changes so far.

Mahz's Dev Journal

That wording, TheMaster99, is exactly how we wanted to word it ourselves.

by the way, @Mahz... Will you bring back the [img=url] code for images, or will people have to stick to [img]url[/img]? There are a few places we've come across with pre-newguild entries breaking code because of using the old and shortform image code.

EDIT: Noticed a funny thing about the code brackets now... they add a space after. If you see the question mark above, in the raw code there's no space between that and the ]

EDIT#2: Someone informed us that using images as link objects doesn't seem to work. not verified completely, but initial test confirmed that.

@Ellri

I removed the sweet [img=...] shorthand because the BBCode parser was treating it like an img tag with no closing tag.

But now that my hacked parser has matured, I think I can implement the shorthand form by processing the shorthand tags into images before feeding the markup into the parser. When re-writing the Guild early this year, I was reluctant to reintroduce BBCode that broke the BBCode "specification" of open/close tags, but now I regularly break the spec and I'm comfortable with my custom parser. See: hr and @Mahz.

The [code] tag isn't adding spaces but rather it just pads the content with a few pixels.

It makes more sense when you realize the code tag used to look like this: (Notice the pink background)

But I modified it to have a transparent background which makes the padding seem redundant. I may experiment with some different backgrounds, so I'll keep the padding in for now.

Finally, it is possible to link images:

← should be a linked image

Finally, I still haven't caught up in this thread since I'm too easily distracted. I need to devote my limited time to finishing the search feature prototype.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Haven't caught up with this thread, but I had originally said I was gonna launch search over the weekend.

I had a v0.1 version ready on Saturday night after working on it all day, but then I found that my database's built-in full-text search really wasn't scalable. It's common for forums of the Guild's size to use external full-text indexers like Elasticsearch (Xenforo, for example, offers this as a $140+ plugin), but I was hoping my database could handle it.

I decided to host the Guild's full-text indexes on Amazon's CloudSearch. I've migrated the data there and have hooked up a mechanism for syncing it to the Guild's database, but then the weekend ended. I may have to wait until this weekend to finish building a UI around it.

Update 1: Nevermind, found out how to make it scale just using my own database's full-text indexes.

Update 2: Nevermind, a bug in the latest version of my database prevents it from handling some of our largest posts. While I wait for a fix, I'll resume implementing search with the CloudSearch service I mentioned above. Might not finish til this weekend.