Mahz's Dev Journal

[xXSINXx]

I suggest having the ability to change the color of your username so people can have there own unique touch. For example I'd love to be able to change my username from blue to hot-pink.

[Ruby]

@LegendBegins Yeah, it sustains its server costs.

I just wish it sustained its Mahz-labor costs.

@Mahz

Thanks for the hard work. <3

[Genkai]

@xXSINXx I feel like giving users that option would be a little excessive.

Currently, GMs and co-GMs do get their own "corner banner" which is a different color.

But if users get the chance to change their colors regarding their username, I feel like it would serve little purpose and just make people demand other colors. Personally, I don't see the usefulness in letting people customize a color when they can change their avatar and signuate already for personalization.

I think if you participate in a Content, you do get your user title in a new color or some other nifty code. I may be wrong, it may just be a trophy, but giving winners who have earned a standout color/trick is a way to encourage contest participation without seeing a flood of bright colored user names. Perks like that should be incentive for writers in my mind, since there are other ways to show your style.

And considering you mentioned wanting to go "from blue to hot pink" (which would hurt my eyes) I think the constant changing of colors would just look messy. I also think new users might get confused if they join and assume one color is a type of moderator while another type is just a normal user (since some forums do color code their staff).

[Hank]

@Genkai

They mean in the chat.

[Genkai]

Meally? Oh well, this is awkward.

Well...It would still look messy.

*shuffles away*

[Ellri]

in the chat, name colors are already based on a half-random system and tied to username. We think changing color was originally a thought there @xXSINXx, but its not a priority feature. Simple cosmetic features like that could require more code than expected and tend to get less priority than other features. But you never know for certain. The will of the Mahz is inscrutable.

[Phantomlink959]

ALL HAIL MAHZ!

[Shienvien]

@Mahz: Just in case you changed anything with the login cookies as you mentioned you might - browser restarts still log me out.

[Ellri]

@Mahz

Could you please fix that URL parser of yours?
Its making it impossible to use [code] tags to help people fix stuff like their sigs... It overrules disabled BBcode and eats ending tags like [/img].

[Mahz]

Not to be nagging, but we're wondering what sort of feature(s) you're working on currently for the guild, @Mahz...

There's not much to do down in our thread with the collection of suggestions other than to add new ideas from people to it. It'd be wonderful to remove ideas from the list due to them being coded in too. It feels sad to only add more and more good ideas without seeing anything come of them.

@Ellri

I haven't been making much visible progress. I've been trying to tackle more "soft" issues like the fact that I have 10-15 half-finished features sitting on my local computer.

For example, a couple months ago in this thread I announced the imminent release of the "local-save" post feature when I was 90% finished... but I ran out of time on Sunday night before I could finish the final 10%. Instead of blowing my load in this thread I should've just spent that time on actually completing it.

In general, I've been trying to clean things up on my local computer and remember just where the heck I left off on all these features.

It's like trying to finish an essay you started a year ago even though you just have to finish that final paragraph — to even write that final paragraph a year later, you have to re-read the whole thing multiple times to reverse-engineer your game plan and credentialize in your unfinished work which you aren't even that happy with since it's so unpolished/unrefined. And you spend half the time wondering if it would be faster just to start over from scratch.

My first task today is to improve the ContestMod kit so that @mdk and @Terminal can finally edit the "Current Contest" in the sidebar, so that's what I'll be working on. It physically pains me when I carve out a chunk of Guild-time only to realize (like right now) that I'm 7 days late on updating the sidebar, and it undoubtedly prevents contest participation from being what it could be. So I'm super amped to get this done finally, and I think it will be a boon for the contest system.

My second task is to try to fix @Shienvien's cookie issue.

A while back, @Hank pointed out how unusable the chat is on mobile and it's been sitting in my priority list. I took a look at what I'd need to do to resolve this and I need to just rewrite it to address these issues from scratch which escalates the task into it's-gonna-take-a-full-Saturday territory, so I have no ETA on that. Felt like Hank and anyone else struggling with chat on mobile or a slow computer deserved an update on that.

As usual, I'll keep this thread updated with any other development that I happen to tackle. Ideally my third task will be to finish off one of the unfinished features I've been organizing on my computer.

@Mahz: Just in case you changed anything with the login cookies as you mentioned you might - browser restarts still log me out.

@Shienvien

It's weird because I checked the code and I haven't touched it since I last "fixed" it months ago. As I mention above in this post, I'll implement my hotfix idea today and then query you later on to see if it resolves your issue.

@Mahz

Could you please fix that URL parser of yours?
Its making it impossible to use `code` tags to help people fix stuff like their sigs... It overrules disabled BBcode and eats ending tags like `img`.

@Ellri

Hmm, okay. I'll see if there's a simple solution. What makes it hard is that the BBCode pipeline looks like:

thePost -> processBBCode -> autolinkUrls -> html

The `autolinkUrls` step just doesn't have access to the `processBBCode` metadata to make decisions like "okay, ignore stuff between these tags" which is why I haven't though of a trivial fix. But I'll take a look at it after the work I've provisioned for myself earlier in this post.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

[LegendBegins]

@Mahz
Is repairing the glitch where moved threads can't be found in any forum directory on your list?

[Mahz]

Just finished a basic version of the first task I mention in my previous post.

Moving on to my next task.

@LegendBegins Oh yeah, I'll fix that now. Jesus, thanks for the reminder.

[LegendBegins]

Just finished a basic version of the first task I mention in my previous post.

Moving on to my next task.

@LegendBegins Oh yeah, I'll fix that now. Jesus, thanks for the reminder.

@Mahz

Haha, thank you. It's a bit hard to get new members when nobody can get to your thread.

[Phantomlink959]

Guild just keeps getting better.

Mahz, you are a total pimp.

[Mahz]

@LegendBegins I made some progress fixing the database query. It's pretty tough.

My database queries are eating some serious incremental complexity over time as I add/change features. Gonna have to break this up into two smaller tasks and finish the first task tonight.

Task 1: I'm going to remove the whole "Topic X was moved to Forum Y" UI papertrail system (which is the source of this particular complexity). That way I can get a clean, low-risk deploy that fixes the issue tonight at the expense of losing the feature that leaves a "redirected topic" behind on the forum that a topic was moved from.

Task 2: Then I'll have to reimplement the "redirected topic" feature in the future as a new commit + deploy that adds the complexity back into my fetch-forum-topics database queries.

That way I'll be able to monitor performance changes related to each task individually and protect against regressions.

[LegendBegins]

@Mahz

I do appreciate that. Realistically, the only use case for the papertrail beyond the first few days would be someone searching in a specific forum for a roleplay from long ago. However, I agree that it is worth keeping once the glitch is resolved. Thank you for your help.

[Mahz]

@LegendBegins Alright, finished Task 1.

Your moved topics should now be sorted correctly on the forum they were moved to.

Agreed that the papertrail is more of a cherry on top rather than a dire necessity. Definitely seems like an easier feature to implement than it really is. If it's not worth the complexity of bringing the feature back, one compromise is to have the forum send everyone a notification when a topic is moved that they posted in or subscribed to.

[Ryuzaki]

@Mahz I would like to suggest a feature for the Stalker Friend's Bar, I suggest that any member who has their Ghost Mode on will not show up there or be permanently offline.

[Mahz]

@Ryuzaki Agreed, I still need to fix that.

@Shienvien I pushed up a mild change. Can you try logging in again with remember-me checked to see if your browser is honoring the 1 year expiration?

[Phantomlink959]

I just lost a co-gm and his post has one of the team arrangements for the RP. where on the almighty features list is GM edit powers?