Shienvien

Mahz's Dev Journal

- Allow people to delete/leave/archive private convos.

And add new people to them. Such as we are currently posting in PMs in order not to have six different stories with two-three people each going on in a single IC thread, and adding one person to one of those would be very convenient once the characters of one such small group reach another small group of three people...

I personally would still like if the status buttons were :hover rather than click-based (also, that gray text on gray button...).

Mahz's Dev Journal

Not sure whether giving trophies to GMs to distribute would be a good idea. Too many people with their own personal standards each - such trophies would be arbitrary at best. Besides, RPs themselves shouldn't turn into competitions.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Finally, when trying to debug a search issue last week, I noticed that 100% of all posts with a length between 90k and 150k characters (the upper limit) were pure spam.

Well, I haven't tried to post any nation or non-minimal character sheet during the past two weeks... I will kill almost any character limit if I try to make sheets...
(On the second note, almost all of my RPing seems to be have been done in PM since Guildfall...)

@RoflsMazoy: Adding (and removing) people to (from) PM conversations is not currently possible, but I recall Mahz saying it is planned.

Mahz's Dev Journal

We think it would be fun to have a "here, have a goblin!" button. Fairly nonsensical, but surely someone will find uses for it.

@Ellri

I wonder how long it'd take before someone would be deliberately trying to build a virtual army of RPG goblins?

On a more serious note, I'd rather new ratings were only added if they were sufficiently different form the pre-existing ones. Well, and that we'd perhaps not have *too* many joke ratings over semi-serious ones.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Mahz:
The "fresh" tag is a bit better than it was before - it is now mildly annoying rather than ouch-damn-please-take-this-thing-away-now. I'd personally make it even darker - for instance #00a9a9 look goods to my eyes now that I tested different mildly similar text colors on RPG's background gray for a bit. (Personally not fond of the newly-added box-border around it ... eh.)
The white-ish text on Guild is agreeable with me - the background it is on is medium-gray rather than black, and hence the difference in brightness works out well. (Of the three listed, I'd say the second looks best, followed by the first and finally the third. The difference between how convenient the first two are to read is fairly marginal, but if I had to pick one, it'd be option two, so Harbinger and I am in the same boat.)
It can be a bit hard to explain how my specific brand of contrast/color sensitivity works... (Sunglasses are a good invention, I can tell you that, though.) Some color combinations are worse, some are better. That particular brand of bright cyan which was originally used for the "fresh" tag is almost universally painful, no matter on which background it is ... it just is a type of inherently evil color, I suppose. There is also a specific leaf-green, certain type of especially vibrant magenta (slightly less) and a very specific type of medium-light blue (worse on light backgrounds) which seem to have the same effect. There also are many reds which are absolutely fine on black background, but are terrible on any light background. Pure white backgrounds are especially bad - almost anything that isn't at least eighty percent black tends to feel uncomfortable, and even then the white background itself is too bright after a while, especially in a darker room. As a general rule, faded dark themes are the way to go for me (I have painted almost everything in my devices I can black and iron/steel/silver gray, including text editors ... especially text editors).
As for things that are perhaps a bit tiring to read (they aren't painful or particularly hard to make out, but just the kind which you probably wouldn't want as longer text), then the white text on almost any lighter gray hiders and buttons? (Same deal as with tags originally, really.) Else I'd actually say the Guild has actually done better than many other sites as far as color schemes are concerned...

I wonder whether the duration of the "fresh" tags should be applied somewhat according to the average level of activity of the forum, say a day for Free RPs, three days for Casual, a week for Advanced? Would make sense, at least for me.

As a sidenote, hey, I just noticed tags don't eat spaces anymore.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Eugh... That is an uncomfortably bright cyan. It hurts my contrast-sensitive eyes...

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...?)

Shienvien

- Since my poor reply was a bit buried under everything else.

Mahz's Dev Journal

To me? it means I'm not going to subject myself to a GM who has already shown their irrationality in the example of kicking me for no reason.

I can catch up with those fine folks anytime, but why go back to a game where the GM doesn't want me there, and could (likely would) come up with ways to continually mess with me?

@Rilla

You don't have to. To each their own, no?

As for me, I am both patient and thick-skinned*, and trying to copy over and somehow resolve potentially hundreds of IC-posts containing the existing story-line, trying to regroup all members of the RP somewhere else (who'll either have to take up two RPs with the same characters or abandon one of them), et cetera, et cetera, is often more work than putting up with a GM who might or might not do something irrational in the future.

* I do sometimes call people out when they are being hostile towards me in the form of "Hey, that was not appreciated; please cut it out.", but mostly only when I figure they might actually be a decent people who just stepped over the line a bit; otherwise I mostly just ignore jabs at me and only interfere if others are being targeted, and then it is often either just a dry request to remove the offending comment or a final warning before some higher authority will be summoned.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I don't even advocate the feature as a form of "problem prevention" - moreso it is simply something I see as an integral part of any such system. Both as a player and especially as a GM, I'd like it to be there (I see it as my duty as a GM to player do explain why I made the decision I did, designated box for it or no). It is furthermore not a "heavy" addition to code in.

As a sidenote, the no-posting list will also need to have an undo function.

Mahz's Dev Journal

As I see it, the commentbox would only be visible to three parties:

1.) The person who was barred.
2.) The person who did the barring.
3.) Mods.

Not public.

(EDIT: Yes, I think that letting the player know why they were barred is an absolute must. And the reason why the commentbox is post-sized, not 140 characters Twitter-style is exactly so it wouldn't be out of context, but you could quote/refer to some of the places where the player was being a disturbance, cite instances of powerplay/godmod and refusals to edit posts to remove such, state when the player last IC-posted and how long others have been waiting on them, et cetera, et cetera.)