Mahz

Hello, Hello...

@The Dread Poet: Your avatar works for me. Though after looking into it I found a bug in the avatar system that might cause a problem in some browsers/devices. I'll start fixing it right now, so thanks for helping me indirectly stumble upon that.

Welcome to the Guild!

Yeah the signature limits are meant to be somewhat oppressive to discourage crazy signatures. Also, the larger I allow signatures, the more people turn off signatures completely and see none of them.

Mahz's Dev Journal

perhaps there should some sort of limits to unlock awards in RPs? RP Post count, Time since RP start, RP finish, etc? The more numerous posts, longer duration etc. an RP has, the more awards a GM "unlocks"?

If its all free from the start, you'll start getting people creating filler RPs simply to get themselves awards.

Parameters should probably vary a bit between free, casual and advanced, but not sure entirely how, or how much.

and to open a dangerous, but somewhat important, can of worms:
Whats to stop GMs from things like "n+ trophies required to join"?

@Ellri

I should introduce a Goblin Engineering trophy and award it to Ellri for consistently coming up with the most sophisticated contraptions.

Mahz's Dev Journal

How will the trophy system be integrated when a user has multiple accounts that are connected in the future?

@LegendBegins

It's pretty open ended, but nothing is impossible. Who knows what the trophy system or the multi-account system will look like in a few months.

If it wouldn't potentially cause a lot of mayhem, I would be cool to use trophies at the end of RPs. Some like, MVP, Most Awesome Moment, Best Character. Things like that. Up to the GM of course.

Or if we had yearly Guild Awards.

@Rilla

These are fun ideas. Reminds me of Goldeneye's multiplayer awards. I was under the impression that it's extremely rare for a roleplay to even reach an end/conclusion beyond just fizzling out.

Theme songs

Wait, how did yall know I added youtube tags? rascals!

Mahz's Dev Journal

quick thought:
Will the trophy system be primarily for the contests like RPGC, or will it cover other things too?

@Ellri

Though the contests compelled me to build it, I generalized the trophy system so that it can be used for anything. @TheMaster99 was awarded a trophy that had nothing to do with contests, for example.

I like the idea of using trophies to celebrate hard/unlikely/rare/competitive feats. I don't like "achievement unlocked" systems where you get almost every achievement just by playing through the game on normal-difficulty.

Either way, trophies are going to vary in difficulty/rarity no matter what, so I decided to go a bit further and make trophies expose their own difficulty. In the screenshot, you can see that the trophy reveals that @TheMaster99 was the 1st person to receive the award, and the trophy has been awarded once.

Once the trophy system matures and trophies accumulate, it will be possible to calculate the rarity of each trophy based on their age and award frequency. You should be able to sort all trophies by rarity to see who owns the most coveted ones.

Another idea that I mentioned before is to allow you to "Activate" any trophy in your trophy box, and you can only have one activated at a time. Maybe an activated trophy turns on the trophy's unique effect if it has one. For example, maybe some trophy's unique effect is to give you a special, colored title beneath your username (like the the award for contests on Oldguild). And maybe rarer or more special trophies have more creative/interesting effects when active.

- Just some random thoughts before I get back to finishing a basic version of the status system.

Mahz's Dev Journal

As an experiment, you should try dropping the brackets on @mention, at least for simple usernames. It'll probably require the username-feeding system or brackets for more complex usernames (with fancy characters like space or '), but for for a mention like @Mahz.

@Captain Jordan

The brackets essentially keep the parser super simple, so I think you're right: A good middleground would be for an auto-suggestion box to appear once you've typed an "@" symbol and then one character, and then choosing a name from its drop-down will inject the bracketed version for you.

This makes it nicer to mention people, prevents typos, yet keeps the parser simple (unchanged). Though the few methods I can think of for making an auto-suggestion box appear while you're writing a post are still complex enough for me to put this kind of polish on ice til I tackle some richer features.

It'd be helpful if post updates could send new notifications (up until a threshold is hit), but I haven't put much thought into how to constrain it from resending notifications. I know what I'll do: I'll change the notifications system so that notifications aren't deleted from the database, just "seen". That way I know how many notifications each post has generated (threshold detection), which users have already been notified, and a nice side-effect is that I can add a "See old notifications" button to the notifications page which can sometimes be useful.

Mahz's Dev Journal

If mine was Allir would anyone notice? lol.

Question. Do I really need both PM and Notification to tell me I have a new message?

@Rilla

The "bell" button shows your total notification count. Your PM button only shows your PM notifications.

When I added the bell button, my original idea was to make it the one-stop shop for notifications somehow and then remove the PM button once I obsolete it with something better. Like maybe when you click the button, it expands a small menu that breaks down your notifications or something. Don't even know anymore.

But then the weekend ended. And I figured that as long as I'm still displaying the PM button, I might as well display the PM notification count on it. So here we are, in limbo.

---

Latest push:

- Introduced a super-basic "trophy" system. I'll finish and polish the UI and other unfinished bits once the contest ends and I need to award the various winners, but I wanted to at least get a demo working.
- @TheMaster99 has been awarded the Guild's first trophy! You can see it on his profile here: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/users/themaster99#trophies.



The UI isn't done, but you can visit the trophy's page here: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/trophies/1.

---

Gonna leave it like that for now and try to get some other features done tonight/tomorrow.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I have zero issues with obscenity and the Guild is unrestricted by our personal limits as staff. I'm not even sure I have any. My goal for the Guild is for people to do as they please and to set boundaries that are optimal for the most amount of people.

I only care about a few things:

1. The Guild won't violate Adsense guidelines. I will rigorously re-examine those guidelines when the mature/adult system is actually the next feature in my queue (I still haven't even finished pondering what that system will be), but as @HeySeuss mentioned, and according to the guidelines last time I examined them, Adsense's restrictions only apply to each page the ads are on.
2. The Guild won't violate American federal law. This is another thing I will re-examine, but last I checked, there is no precedent for obscenity enforcement winning against written erotica. And for good reason. Imagine there was a fictional story that involves acts that would be illegal in real life, and imagine that it was illegal to write about such acts. But wait, the story ends with: "Note: All characters in this story are an alien race thousands of years old that only look like humans.". I'm not going to sit here and guess in advance what kind of content an adult system will fill up with. I just have to see how it goes and react accordingly.
3. Users must set their birth date and opt-in to see adult content. "Sensitive" content should be limited on the public Guild, and it should be tucked away behind an opt-in process.
4. People should be given the tools to manage multiple accounts. The Guild doesn't care about multiple accounts, as anything bad you can do with multiple accounts is already against the rules. People are going to make multiple accounts no matter what, and it's trivial to circumvent a system that prohibits them (for this reason I also don't bother with IP bans). Instead, I embrace them and would like to allow people to link their multiple accounts together so that they can quickly switch between them. For example, imagine a drop-down button next to your username in the top navbar that lets you switch between them.

Since the Guild's birth, its PM system has been filled with smut. People are going to do as they please. I'd rather at least offer the tools for these people to find each other in a way that doesn't impact the current system.

I haven't pondered the entire solution yet since I'm working on some other features. Maybe all it will be is an opt-in system that lets you tag and see checks with a set of adult tags and the content still takes place over PM. Not sure yet. Maybe that's the start and we'll go on from there.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'm not sure if this has been said before or mentioned, but there happens to be a minor problem regarding the subscriptions.

When I unsubscribe a topic from the subscription page, it redirects me to a "Not Found" page, and it's because the url had been redirected as "www.roleplayerguild.com/me/subcriptions" instead.

It's not that big of a problem, but I ought to point it out anyways. ^^'

@Gummi Bunnies

Oh man, I'll fix that right now. Thanks! I'd consider it a big problem because that's super annoying.

Edit: Should be fixed in about 30 seconds.

Mahz's Dev Journal

The only things I'd consider embedding are some select flash games. It's a silly feature, but as a competitive person, I'd be interested in an arcade built by embedding some flash games that have a score API that I can integrate into the Guild.

This weekend I will work on a basic trophy system that I'll be using to award the contest winner since that contest just closed.

Not a hard feature, so I'd also like to get some other smaller features done like a status system, finally.

Maybe I'll have time to implement the opt-in "adult/mature" RP system, too.