Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Pushing the broken unread-posts system back up to debug it live.

This is still an issue:



Seems that when you visit a topic, it often loads the wrong set of tags/co-GMs/join-status for the current topic.

I'm looking it into it right now. The infuriating part is that it only *sometimes* happens, and I can only recreate it by visiting the website, not by actually looking at the database.

Edit: I think I fixed it. Can yall post in this topic if it looks like it's still an issue?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Oh yeah, to clarify, migrating data over from archive.org is going to be very limited.

If you can't find what you want on archive.org, then neither can I.

My main goal is to un-break as many 404 page-not-found results as I can when people stumble upon old-guild links from the tens of thousands of links on the internet that point to old-guild. Some topics are lucky enough to be fully-preserved by archive.org, many have only their first page preserved, and the vast majority of topics were not preserved.

Arena Chat Thread

This topic is a good idea. It's hard for subcommunities like Arena and Tabletop to emerge when there's no "Arena Discussion" or "Tabletop Discussion" subforums. Should I create such a subforum in Arena to at least get the ball rolling?

The Guild's Arena forum has always left much to be desired. Over the years, Rilla and other people have tried to come up with interesting ideas like "Arena Tournaments" and such. But they never received much help from the Guild as a platform. I would love to improve things around here.

Another idea that's come up before is to allow Arena GMs to mark their roleplays as "Ranked" or something. As in, the outcome of the fight actually goes on your character's record and you can browse a list of a character's Arena fights. Of course, one of the traits of a good Arena fighter is that they know when it's fair to lose a fight instead of constantly coming with "yet another card up their sleeve", you know?

Another idea, once we gradually improve the Arena subcommunity, is to have official "Arena Grandmaster Tournaments" up there next to the Guild's "Official Contents" system.

Time zones

@Ishmael Are the "3 min ago" timestamps not accurate for you?

If not, then you may want to ensure that your system clock is set to the right timezone. 99% of the time people have unexpected timestamps, the issue is with their system clock.

Mahz's Dev Journal

The quiet game is over. New record: 3 Days. But I suppose we're all waiting for this weekend and feature implementation.

@LegendBegins

Unfortunately this weekend my main goals are:

- Take another shot at what I tried to do last weekend (unread-post system).
- Make improvements to the general user-experience. For instance, if you try to make a topic and trigger a validation error (too many tags selected, title too long, etc), then the forum under most cases will silently fail, redirect you to an empty form with no error message, and leave you wondering wtf happened.
- Migrate old-guild content to current-guild by scraping archive.org. Not going to have time.

Not very exciting, but I'll be excited if I can make progress in those areas.

At work we launched a product we've been working on for a while, so my time during the week is booked right now until things settle down. Usually I have some time on weekday evenings to work on the Guild, but not for the next 30 days or so.

So once upon a time I took acutane

@Azarthes

I have friends that took it in their early teens. Seems like it cures you of acne but then makes you spin a wheel of misfortune to see which side-effect you're going to be stuck with.

- Two friends made it out with no side effects.
- Another was stuck in a suicidal depression until his early twenties.
- Another has skin that's permanently so dry that if he touches his face, it starts crusting/peeling.
- Another has bowel issues but manages it with some pill. Has to supplement her diet extensively so that she absorbs enough nutrients.

Reminds me of when I was on the last floor of some dungeon crawler and looted an unidentified ring from the corpse of the boss before the final boss. I equip the ring and the lil shit is a cursed -200 armor ring. Got rekt by the final boss because my enchanted armor was reduced to rags.

Except my friends got the cursed rings of sad thoughts, papyrus skin, and smooth intestines.

Hope it turns out to be no big deal man.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Mahz, did you or someone upload a virus to the site because the Mac* here at school is flipping the Hell out whenever I visit this site.

To make everyone comfortable: there's nothing going on I needed to pay attention to at this time.

*Yes I know this seems almost contradictory because "lolMacsDon'tgetViruses", which is surprising me.

@Dinh AaronMk

A lil light on the details, bro.

"It does some crazy shit!"

Mahz's Dev Journal

Due to the bug @Shienvien reported above, I rolled back the server to the state it was in right before I implemented the unread-post system. Some other minor changes were also rolled back (collateral damage).

Couldn't figure out the issue in 30 minutes, so I'll dig in this weekend. Makes me want to punch some pillows.

Let me know if it's still an issue. So far it seems to've gone away.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Also, a very odd glitch regarding Co-GMs: Suddenly, a RP that didn't have Co-GMs has two of them. The kicker? These are completely random people that to my knowledge have no connection to the RP, and the GM hasn't even been online since yesterday (the Co-GMs appeared after that).
Edit: Random Co-GMs have disappeared again. GM hasn't still been online.
Edit2: A new random Co-GM has appeared.
Edit3: New random Co-GM is gone. Original two random Co-GMs are back.
Edit4: Gone again. A fourth random Co-GM has appeared. Is someone with sufficient power deliberately messing with the RP?
Edit5: All gone for the moment.
Edit6: More random Co-GMs. Screenshotting for the sake of record-keeping.
Edit7: One more dropped in and disappeared.
Edit8: Some more disappearances and appearances. Giving up on reporting here. Going to take a few more screenshots, just in case.

Edit9: Just noticed that there is something odd going on with this thread, too - it goes between 1x1 and being "full" and having a whole bunch of different tags, to Casual, to Free...

Are tags broken?

@Shienvien

Now that is odd. I made a slight change to the "fetch topic" query for some changes over the weekend, but off the top of my head I can't fathom how it could cause this issue. I see that @TheMaster99 confirmed this.

If it's causing serious issues and I don't have time to look into it tomorrow or the day after, I'll just revert my changes until this weekend. :(

Edit:



#willfix

I'm certain the actual topic data is fine, it's just somehow fetching the wrong topic's metadata in the query. Must be a dumb typo. Checking it out. May revert my changes from the weekend.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Is there a way to disable the bright green NEW signposts? I know the threads have new posts; I don't care about them, the ones I do I am subscribed to them. New posts always bump the threads up fresh anyway, and the times shown are indicative enough of the last post. IMO all the "New" tag does is it clutters up space and yells at me to look at them. Some people might like them so fair game. I'm asking if I can have an option in user preference to disable them, pretty please.

@Fillet

Yeah, the feature is just unfinished. I often push unfinished features so that code doesn't rot on my computer. But this issue is particularly annoying.

I'll clean it up this weekend, remove the "New" tags, and introduce a way to mark entire forums as "Read". I also need to do various things like express unread posts on the subscriptions page.

Far from being finished like everything else on the Guild.