Mahz's Dev Journal

[Shienvien]

Could there be a method implemented to allow every page/post in a thread to be saved? Even if it's a hacked in solution to allow all posts to be displayed on an (extremely long) page, wouldn't something to archive a thread be possible?

@LegendBegins

Right-click -> save web page as makes a HTML pull. Works well enough for backups. Has to be repeated for every page, though.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins> Right-click -> save web page as makes a HTML pull. Works well enough for backups. Has to be repeated for every page, though.

@Shienvien

That's the issue. As of now, our RP has 3325 pages.

[Ellri]

You're planning to back up ooc too? Or is it an RP dating back to the Old guild, @LegendBegins?

[Shienvien]

<Snipped quote by Shienvien>

That's the issue. As of now, our RP has 3325 pages.

@LegendBegins

Whoa. I am going to assume most of those are OoC posts (unless we're speaking free RP, which could feasibly reach tens of thousands of posts within a couple of years)...

I believe Mahz intended to make posts-per-page customizable at some point. I don't think displaying them all on one page is viable, though - simply because some part of the system or another might simply keel over trying to spit out that number of posts at once. Especially if a number of users are trying to do something like that concurrently.

I could technically see an export function which puts out mostly just the text info and usernames, though, about two hundred posts at a time or so (track would be kept). I made something vaguely similar for a database, once (as rolling the entire backup up in one go was physically impossible). If people won't abuse it, we should be fine.

[Ellri]

@Shienvien if it is that "myriad reality" RP in his post history, it has 66k IC posts.

[LegendBegins]

You're planning to back up ooc too? Or is it an RP dating back to the Old guild, @LegendBegins?

@Ellri

I'd like to back up both, if possible. The RP dates OldGuild, and is three years old.

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins> Whoa. I am going to assume most of those are OoC posts (unless we're speaking free RP, which could feasibly reach tens of thousands of posts within a couple of years)...

I believe Mahz intended to make posts-per-page customizable at some point. I don't think displaying them all on one page is viable, though - simply because some part of the system or another might simply keel over trying to spit out that number of posts at once. Especially if a number of users are trying to do something like that concurrently.

I could technically see an export function which puts out mostly just the text info and usernames, though, about two hundred posts at a time or so (track would be kept). I made something vaguely similar for a database, once (as rolling the entire backup up in one go was physically impossible). If people won't abuse it, we should be fine.

@Shienvien

Actually, the OOC is another 2309 pages. We're in Casual, but we've done it for three years and are all on for most of the day. With all the time we've invested, you can see why I would like to back it up.

[LegendBegins]

@Shienvien if it is that "myriad reality" RP in his post history, it has 66k IC posts.

@Ellri

It is.

[Hank]

wtf mahz.

[Mahz]

I'm back for a while.

Since this bump is gonna knock HeySeuss' departure thread off the homepage, I'll link to it here. HeySeuss has been one of the Guild's biggest contributors over the years including the time he took it upon himself to host an alt-Guild forum during Guildfall. I'll never forget that because it's one of the key things that gave me the energy to build a new Guild from scratch: being able to see all the people that were willing to help rebuild a new community gave me the confidence that it was possible.

I have a lot to catch up on, so I'll be choring through all my notifications/PMs shortly.

If anybody has something they need to talk about, now would be a good time to either bump our convo or send me a new PM if we don't have one. This helps me prioritize my slog through my PMs.

Some things I'll be focusing on in the short-term:

- Performance improvements. A lot of this is low-hanging fruit. For example, the Guild is running on version 0.12 of a platform that is now version 5.4, so I'll be upgrading that along with a bunch of the Guild's dependencies. I'll also be deploying a server change in a moment that will fix the intermittent downtime that the Guild experiences by running out of memory.
- Critical chat bugs.
- Catching up in this thread.

As I hack on the Guild right now, yall may experience some downtime here and there, so please be extra sure to save your post before you submit it in case you land on an error page. And if you ever land on an error page, the first thing you should do is press the back button which will often let you recover the contents of the "new reply" form.

Anyways, it's been six months or so since I last did some work on the Guild. Any major developments that I should know about?

[LegendBegins]

@Mahz
Everything appears to be working as usual; there were some players wondering where their great and glorious benevolent dictator for life had gone amongst those months, but it seems that the only immediate changes would be general tuneups across the Guild.

[Mahz]

Ouch, looks like my "performance patch" did nothing but wreck the server's memory:

(The vertical line is where the patch went into effect)


It's weird because the patch just implements my webhost's recommended performance-tuning settings.

Gonna roll it back and focus on upgrading my platform instead. Apparently the newer version has massive memory savings.

[Ellri]

There's not that many major issues. There's the few regular annoyances like the bots and people regularly requesting various features that would be of great use, but we do not recall any issues of great import. If there are any that we've forgotten, we think they've been PM'd to ya before.

It might be worth looking into implementing some slightly newer anti-robot measures to save the moderators work, seeing how those kitchen bots still get through the current measures.

[Darkmatter]

wtf mahz.

@Hank

I PM'd Mahz already regards something, but I felt the need to post here also.

>Hank nowhere to be seen for ages.
>Posts as above.
>Mahz appears.

I sense a conspiracy theory.

Edit:
>What is this sweet new formatting feature?

It's no doubt been discussed at length before, but I still lament the death of the News. It added a sense of community which I feel is somewhat lacking in the Guild right now.

Also, @Terminal asked me to very politely inquire as to the status of the prizes of their "Twelve Labours" contest, with a view to keep the contest running smoothly.

On a personal note, I think I may resume the unofficially made and then unofficially unmade role of welcoming new players. There seems to be a huge number of new members recently and the forum is as in-depth as it's ever been.

I'd highly recommend assessing the anti-bot measures in place. A lot seem to have been telling me about kitchen deals as of late.

I do really wonder though, with memory being the number one recurring issue as far as I see, how feasible would attempts at future proofing be? I.e. migrating to a server well beyond the immediate needs? I'd assume it is out of budget?

I'd also like to once again commend the inclusion of the community in the iterative design process!

Perhaps it's just a changing of the guard but I am personally of the opinion that many of the 'faces' of the guild, good and bad, have drifted off. I'd love to do something to help foster the sense of community spirit as lame as that sounds.

[Ellri]

We agree with much of that, @Darkmatter.

We suspect that many of the newer drift away due to two reasons:
1. their RPs not working out
2. some of the missing "basic" features.

Without delving into the big list of feature requests, we can think of one feature that should be simple to make:
a link from the recently online friends list on the right side to a complete list. Such can easily be a plain text window if nothing else.

[Shienvien]

The bots aren't all that numerous, as far as I know. I've presonally spotted two - one of which posted in the main boards, and another which used the status functionality. Nothing a couple of bot-terminator mods would not be able to handle.

Closing the browser still/again logs me out regardless of "remember me" being checked.

>Greentext is not new. It's been here over a year, I believe. Some people have been noting that it tends to trigger when they don't want it to, others like it, yet another category doesn't care.

[NuttsnBolts]

It's no doubt been discussed at length before, but I still lament the death of the News. It added a sense of community which I feel is somewhat lacking in the Guild right now.

@Darkmatter

Probably not the first one to notice, but we haven't had an RPG News post in a while, and they did show a bit of life in the forum. Without allocating a single person as such, would it be possible to have a bit of an editing committee that could put together the News for the month? Maybe each month could have a topic theme as well for discussion, or a poll for fun. Just food for thought.

Now when it comes to this...

We agree with much of that, @Darkmatter.

We suspect that many of the newer drift away due to two reasons:
1. their RPs not working out
2. some of the missing "basic" features.

Without delving into the big list of feature requests, we can think of one feature that should be simple to make:
a link from the recently online friends list on the right side to a complete list. Such can easily be a plain text window if nothing else.

@Ellri

...I think a sense of belonging is what people are probably after. Yes this can be achieved by friends lists, VMs and RP groups and other such additions, but what we need to aim for is achieving that desire to return to talk to your friends, not just return to catch up on an RP.

[Ellri]

agreed, @NuttsnBolts.

Getting various new stuff will undoubtedly help out too. Other features on the list that'll show the guild is truly better for pbp RPing than other sites.

Another feature that'd make the guild chat used a lot more: rooms.

but to be honest, there's just too many good potential features on our list in the suggestions forum to pick just a few...

[Darkmatter]

<Snipped quote by Darkmatter>

Probably not the first one to notice, but we haven't had an RPG News post in a while, and they did show a bit of life in the forum. Without allocating a single person as such, would it be possible to have a bit of an editing committee that could put together the News for the month? Maybe each month could have a topic theme as well for discussion, or a poll for fun. Just food for thought.

Now when it comes to this...

<Snipped quote by Ellri>

...I think a sense of belonging is what people are probably after. Yes this can be achieved by friends lists, VMs and RP groups and other such additions, but what we need to aim for is achieving that desire to return to talk to your friends, not just return to catch up on an RP.

@NuttsnBolts

Agreed on the whole. As I mentioned, I'll do my part anyway, and attempt to greet new members! Try give people an anchor to stay with the guild.

I was initially involved with the News on a minor level, years ago, then it went through some large procedural changes and I didn't resume. It was always a fantastic feature, in its various iterations and I feel it needs to resume.

It might sound insane, but the spam section used to also have a little heart of its own, even if it was a rotten one.

[Rina]

Yes! We need a reboot on the news now that both mods involved in it is gone. I've been around for it since July more than a year ago and am more than willing to stick around for that yet again if support is needed for it

[Mahz]

There's been a lot of activity lately, especially in my inbox, about the next step for the RPGN project. So I'm looking forward to seeing what I need to do to help with that.

Also, @Terminal asked me to very politely inquire as to the status of the prizes of their "Twelve Labours" contest, with a view to keep the contest running smoothly.

@Darkmatter

I'm about to catch up with the Contest Mods right now. I wish the trophy system wasn't bottlenecked by me.

Perhaps it's just a changing of the guard but I am personally of the opinion that many of the 'faces' of the guild, good and bad, have drifted off. I'd love to do something to help foster the sense of community spirit as lame as that sounds.

@Darkmatter

I think it's best to look at the post-Guildfall Guild as a new forum entirely since it's growing from scratch. The metric of old members leaving can be depressing, but the Guild also has a healthy influx of new users.

I'm not very good at building community spirit. I frankly don't know how. I'm always interested in supporting people that want to give it a shot though.

Updates since my last post in this thread:

- Going to catch up with contest trophies right now. This is priority one for me.
- I'm still working on upgrading the Guild's platform. Taller order than I thought, but I'm excited to pay off this technical debt and see what it does for the server's performance. This is my second priority today.
- Ran into an issue while upgrading the chat server last weekend on my local computer. When I figure that out, I'll push up the chat server changes that allow mods to mute users in chat. Third priority, and I doubt I'll get to it since the Guild platform upgrade will take me a while.

Finally, Darkmatter requested this in a PM, so I might as well share it here as well:



Here's a graph of Guild activity over the last few days. Those peaks represent over twice the activity than the valleys. Each peak starts at 10:00am CST each day and abruptly falls off at midnight. Basically, morning to midnight for Americans.

Not terribly helpful information since I'm sure anyone that's been during the valleys (including 3am night owls like me) have gathered that the forum is asleep during that time. :)