Shienvien

Mahz's Dev Journal

The advantage of brackets are to differentiate code from text.

Duh. That's the challenge.

@Captain Jordan

Eeh... I sort of like to sometimes @ people without necessarily pinging them? Never mind all other occasions where the symbol might be used which will either create "empty" pings (the avoiding of which would be extra work for server) or ping someone who has no business being there. Happens often enough on some sites I'm on which also @-ping...

The brackets are there for the people even more so than the server, as I see it. So that things they don't want to be interpreted as BBCode, won't be.

*stares disapprovingly at some programs which insist on bolding everything in asterisks*

Mahz's Dev Journal

(not sure why they'd wanna go back, but hey! Masochism)

GM being irrational doesn't mean you don't want to continue the story you had going on with other people in the RP?

I agree, though - bar-from-IC needs a post-sized commentbox for the GM to leave a mark why they restricted the user.

Mahz's Dev Journal

It's much easier to justify not allowing someone than it is to justify eliminating them.

I disagree - unless you already know that specific RPer, you won't know in advance how they turn out (and sometimes not even when you have RPed with them before). Add-only is something I mostly see as extra work to the GM that will only be useful against bots - and bots are always a mod problem, anyway.

Mahz's Dev Journal

For others, they might prefer the earlier suggestion to opt out of the feature and let just anyone post in the IC (i.e. not manage a roleplayer list).

I personally would like the option. (As said, everything that isn't the bare minimal core feature should be opt-out.) That, and on the assumption that most people are reasonable enough beings, managing a list like that would be a nuisance rather than useful.

Or perhaps divide it into two thusly:
*Full management (add/remove)
*Restrict only (auto-add/bar from IC-posting)

Mahz's Dev Journal

I tend to agree with not giving GMs too much power - sadly, I've seen a GM go rogue when practically everyone else formed a good team. Copying over the posts of a large RP is a significant task...

Meanwhile, I'm mildly amused that in case your computer's clock is three hours behind (I boot the computer with this OS fairly rarely, and since it is the laptop that comes with me while traveling it sometimes remembers the last time, or just resets to GMT), the forum will actually say (in this instance) "Latest: LegendBegins in 3 hours".

The Prophecy

There, posted in one collab (so many distractions the past week). I think either Nessa or Jack could post next there, depending on who manages to do so first? (And again, if I got something wrong, just let me know.)

Random: Jack, any ideas what to make as icon (in the given context the little picture in front of site name in browser tabs, such as Youtube's red play button, RPG's weird pale green R, or Google's g in a blue rounded square) for the Compendium? Just noticed that unlike Chrome (which I seldom use) likes to squish its tabs when many are opened instead of making a sideways-scrollable list, and at some point only the icons are visible...
Any other design-related ideas also welcome; it is probably still a bit too plain-HTML.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Why?

Sometimes people may return and resume their duties? You never know why a person left when they did so without notice; they could be in hospital for months from some unexpected accident or illness from what you know.

They should also retain creative rights, or at the very least recognition for their creations, especially if it is an original creation RP.

Mahz's Dev Journal

So that people will actually read your status, I'm thinking of including it as a small button next to the "bio" button. When clicked, it can pop up a small window that shows the status with a small form that allows you to comment on it or rate it like you can a post. Perhaps the button even saturates into some color when you haven't read the user's latest status.

What do yall think? Any better ideas for how the status should be displayed on posts? It'd be possible to display the [possibly truncated] status directly on the post, but I'm reluctant to add clutter to posts.

I'd rather have it as hover-over tooltip for PC (disappears as soon as you move off the element) and tap-activated tooltip for touch-devices (goes away as soon as you tap anywhere but the button), also visible on profile above the bio; popup windows tend to be somewhat more annoying even when you can dismiss them with one button-press/tap/click. It being a popup-window rather than hover-over element will make me significantly less likely to actually ever look at those things, whereas hover-over statuses such as seen on Skype or the forum I'm thinking of below I occasionally do read them. (You can CSS-style tooltips, so appearances shouldn't be a problem.)
I've seen a quite functional forum-implementation of something very similar with the avatar working like the status not-button element described above - although the element being avatar rather than a thing with the word "status" written on it underneath the avatar tends to result in new people discovering the feature every now and then.
Uhh... But commenting and rating statuses? Don't like that thought. Far too social media gimmick for my tastes. (Whatever would even happen to these hypthetical comments and ratings whenever an user changes status - would they just get wiped with each and every edit, or would there be a graveyard of past statuses somewhere...?)

The active/nonactive RP system implementation seems ... interesting, but horribly cumbersome in its described form. (As I've said before, the fewer additional things an user will have to do, the better; anything more advanced and/or complex should remain opt-in.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

Honestly, I think fixing the unmentionable quotes (tehe) from notifying is going to be the solution, and you'll just need to remove the @. It takes a bit of forethought, but so does clicking the right button.

Captain Jordan

I think Mahz said (and BBCode cheatsheet states) that quotes already only notify if there is an '@' in front of the username (as I noted somewhere previously, I've been removing the '@'s in most places ... if I remember to do so, which I don't half of the time). Just to check, though, here is a regular quote which shouldn't have notified you.
- I'd like for both quotes and quotementions to exist (since both already exist and it'd spare people from quoting and also mention-pinging, in certain instances), but I'd rather it either defaulted to non-mention quotes or had two separate buttons for them. You're right that people who don't read the BBCode sheet would miss the ability to quotemention when it just defaulted to regular quotes, though.

Unrelated: Could the white text on hiders be turned black and shadowless on hiders, too? Right now they're the same white-ish text on light grey tabs used to be. (Same deal with several buttons on the site.)

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'd much rather know when someone's quoting me. But I think this is probably better resolved by allowing users to determine what will notify them, and be able to uncheck quotes.

@Captain Jordan

But here's the dilemma: sometimes I want to send a notification or be notified. Just ... not with (or for) all basic quotes. Only for those which actually require the person to see the post and potentially answer to it (and I sometimes also don't want to ping people in threads I know they are already watching closely either way). - Which is essentially where the distinction between quotes and quotementions comes in.
Does the current system even distinguish between mentions and quotementions? I noticed the "quotes sent" number counts regular quotes, but sadly I forgot to look whether a quotemention counts as both or just quote ... let's see with this post.

I also think that letting people disable mentions that people purposefully send interferes with the purpose of being able to ping them in the first place. Random things such as rating notifications being toggleable - I support that. Deliberate pings? Not so much (especially if others won't even know whether the ping "worked" or not - granted, there are people who don't check notifications either way, but on the other hand, being flooded with them is likely to increase the number of people who simply give up on keeping up with them).
As I noted before, I see notifications as something to be used rather sparingly, and only when the person's presence is needed (so that they'd be useful rather than annoying).

I wonder whether is possible to get several pings to the same person out of a single post with this system. Above there is a quote already, so... @Captain Jordan @Captain Jordan