Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Latest push:

- Super basic and buggy unread-post system.
- Example bug: Often goes to last post instead of first post.
- User-status button in the post userbit should now correctly work on hover/click/tap.

Still hackin on it, but wanted to look for performance regressions before I burn more time on it.

Mahz's Dev Journal

30% of Guild users (and growing) access the site on a smartphone and 15% of users use a tablet, so my go-to UI paradigms have been forced to change.

I've always been a fan of tooltips, but there is no mobile equivalent of a desktop-user dragging their mouse cursor down a bunch of list-items thus sending the hover event to each one. While I can overload tooltips so that they display/dismiss on hover and click/tap, it's not something I can depend on anymore since you can't have a tooltip on a link or button that changes state.

I need to set aside some time to study UI paradigms for small/touch devices.

Mahz's Dev Journal

And, @Mahz, is it absolutely necessary to have one-click access to both the OP and Latest Unread Post? I'd be curious how many clicks to the OP you're going to get once the Unread feature goes live. As much as I sometimes detest it elsewhere, I'm wondering how awful it would be to just default those tabs to the Latest Unread Post.

@Captain Jordan

That's a good question. I default to forum convention when I can, but I would like to use analytics to experiment with other possibilities. I'm using Google Analytics, so maybe I already have the data I need to measure that kind of stuff. As it stands, the first page of a topic is important for the original context. But for a roleplay, it's a bit more open ended.

Similarly, I often wonder what the best "OP" for a roleplay is. For instance, if I link you to my roleplay /topics/142, it currently redirects to the first page of the IC tab which kinda makes sense since the OOC and Character tabs are supporting behind-the-curtain tabs for the main production: the IC tab.

...But it's kinda weird when you look at it from the perspective of Google search results. Do I tell Google to index the IC, OOC, and Characters tabs of each roleplay? Then, if someone searches Google for a roleplay title, what is the most relevant result? I'm also splitting the relevance between three pages (page 1 of each tab) instead of representing a roleplay as a single page to google.

Maybe it makes sense to have a "dashboard" or "hub" page for each roleplay. A high level overview of the roleplay of some sort that also acts as a landing page. I don't know. I think the right solution will emerge as I continue to make incremental, uncontroversial changes to the Guild. I'm already stressing the forum metaphor as it is. The codebase is already littered with "if roleplay, do this, if regular topic, do that" branch logic. I can't wait until the topic and roleplay systems naturally separate from each other in time.

That said, I still have plenty of work to do just catching up to what people expect of a forum.

The activity Spam shows during a bandwagon

Reminds me of the autopsy scene in Blade II when they pour human blood on the vampire heart and it briefly comes back to life.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Shienvien Good idea, I'll have to play with darker backgrounds. Made an issue so I don't forget.

Your "ask me" topics are bad and you should feel bad.

Spam is developing some of its first lil post-relaunch baby memes. kawaii!!

Mahz's Dev Journal

Why the continued light-grey on medium-grey on all buttons, though? Still not exactly the most comfortable color scheme for reading text. o.õ

Else, good work. Go to last read is indeed a rather important addition, especially regarding fast-moving threads.

@Shienvien

Alright, I've updated the grey-button CSS class to have a font-color that's almost white. I'll deploy the update to the server later tonight.

Mahz's Dev Journal

WHOA! Interface needs work, but WHOA!

Hope to get a Mark Read/Unread feature, too, at some point.

@Captain Jordan

Not sure where else to but these buttons, but here it is with the padding fixed:



Gonna launch it soon with minimal features (no mark-as-read) so I can ensure it doesn't introduce a large performance regression.

Also, I'll recreate the /subscriptions page layout on the topics-list of each roleplaying forum (i.e. make it so you see the latest IC, OOC, and CHAR post for each roleplay).

Finally, the "Latest" button for each topic/roleplay is going to be swapped out with the go-to-first-unread logic.

Can't post in the 1x1 int check

@X-Rae Thanks.

- Do you receive any sort of "Success" or "Error" message at the top of the screen after you submit the form?
- Are you trying from a smartphone, tablet, or laptop/desktop computer?
- Have you selected at least one tag?
- Can you verify that your topic's title is no more than 50 characters long? <-- Most likely problem (I know the form says 3-150 characters, but it's wrong. It's only 3-50 characters)

Edit: I just found a bug that makes it likely for you to receive no error message if you're making a topic and your topic fails validation. So make sure your title is 3-50 chars, you choose 1-5 tags, and your post is 1-150k characters.

I consider this a high priority issue, so I'll try reproducing/fixing this issue ASAP.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Decided to implement a hard feature this weekend: the unread-posts tracking system.

Here's what I've got working so far:



Those "Unread" buttons will appear on each tab that has new posts, and clicking one will take you to the first unread post of that tab.

The tracker is backed by the database, so it'll remember your unread posts across computers/devices.

New mobile issue: The status box cannot be closed at all unless you tap another element with user interaction capability (ie pictures, replies, another user's status). Not even clicking the status button again will close it.

@LegendBegins

Thanks, I'll try to fix it right now. (Edit: Think I fixed it, I'll deploy the fix later tonight)