Mahz's Dev Journal

[skidcrow]

just wanted to say all hail based god @mahz

[JBRam2002]

@Vesuvius00

The friendships sidebar on the homepage shows your 10 most recently online friends, and then it plucks the ghosts out of those 10 and groups them together.

So am I right in thinking that all of your friends on the homepage sidebar have logged in within 12 hours? That would push some ghosts onto the "View All" list.

Lemme know if I'm wrong. Cuz then it's a bug.

@Mahz

I'm wondering if this feature should be modified to avoid such an occurrence, or perhaps to remove the Ghost Mode friends from the front page altogether. Here's my reasoning:

I have ~20 friends on my list. Perhaps 4 of them are ghosted frequently. During peak hours, it's not impossible nor unlikely that 8 of my friends may be online at the same time. The other two may have been online in the past half hour or so. Now, assuming one of these is a ghosted friend, I now know with certainty that they have been online within the past half hour, or may currently be online, thus removing the point of ghost mode.

I'm trying to think from a security point of view, where an individual might be ghosted because they feel insecure for any reason about their safety or perhaps receiving harassing PMs. Hopefully this isn't the case, but Ghost Mode at least allows them some security if it is. These changes can make a stalker or other undesired individual aware of their online presence with relative ease, especially if they have a large number of friends on their list. The main page gets refreshed with a high frequency, so it's not unlikely that this individual would notice the moment someone came online (or at least within the last 15 minutes or so). Moving the Ghost Mode friends completely to the View All page would mean someone cannot accidentally / casually stalk an individual that wishes to be ghosted.

[Vesuvius00]

@JBRam2002 People keep mentioning ghosting as a way to try and avoid harassment, but would that even work? I mean, if someone wants to send me a bunch of not-so-nice PMs and VMs or just @mention me in random places to be a jerk, I don't need to be online for them to do that.

[JBRam2002]

@Vesuvius00 This is true. However, stalking is a real thing, and being able to be effectively invisible makes constant harassment happen less frequently as the individual isn't reminded of the person whenever they log in. It doesn't end it, but it curbs it.

[Lady Absinthia]

Personally the ghosting thing makes me feel less secure. I've had to deal with stalkers and the like on forums, here included. Knowing they can "vanish" and still keep stalking puts me on edge. (It's one of the reasons I am glad my eldest no longer comes to the forum.)

Side note: If it were all possible, it would be a nice feature that if you collab with someone you name could be added to the post and the upvotes for said post notified you as well.

[Fallenreaper]

<Snipped quote by Mahz>
I'm wondering if this feature should be modified to avoid such an occurrence, or perhaps to remove the Ghost Mode friends from the front page altogether. Here's my reasoning:

I have ~20 friends on my list. Perhaps 4 of them are ghosted frequently. During peak hours, it's not impossible nor unlikely that 8 of my friends may be online at the same time. The other two may have been online in the past half hour or so. Now, assuming one of these is a ghosted friend, I now know with certainty that they have been online within the past half hour, or may currently be online, thus removing the point of ghost mode.

I'm trying to think from a security point of view, where an individual might be ghosted because they feel insecure for any reason about their safety or perhaps receiving harassing PMs. Hopefully this isn't the case, but Ghost Mode at least allows them some security if it is. These changes can make a stalker or other undesired individual aware of their online presence with relative ease, especially if they have a large number of friends on their list. The main page gets refreshed with a high frequency, so it's not unlikely that this individual would notice the moment someone came online (or at least within the last 15 minutes or so). Moving the Ghost Mode friends completely to the View All page would mean someone cannot accidentally / casually stalk an individual that wishes to be ghosted.

@JBRam2002

Another reason, which I use on occasion, is to avoid interaction but still be able to work on posts you feel like doing. No one is sociable all the time and we are able to get moody time to time (I know I am). If you know people will contact and bother you when they see you online, best way to solve that is by going ghost mode so they can't tell when or if you're online to shoot a pm at you. It doesn't need to be used for harassment as the main point for ghost mode, to me anyways, is to avoid direct interaction unless you provide it first.

Apologies if it feels like I'm butting in, but honestly thought I put that out there as another reason for keeping ghost mode invisible. Though there's actually a middle ground really to this from my point of view. What if you can make ghost mode view-able only to those individuals you're friends with (not that are friends with you, to be clear)? This would prevent stalkers as honestly, if someone is harassing you than you're not likely to have them as a friend and if you don't want them to know you're online then you can just unfriend them to eliminate that ability to see you online or not. Even for a limited time like when you're having a rough patch with your friend who's also on the site and just want to avoid each other until things cool off. You can even make that optional for the user to have only friends see them in ghost mode or not, like an additional feature on ghost mode.

[Ellri]

well, right now, if we recall correctly @Fallenreaper, the friend system is not connected. User A having B on his or her friend list does not equal user B knowing that A has him or her friend list. to have "remove friend" have an effect against stalking, the system would have to be reworked into one where friend additions need approval by the potential friend, and where removing such equals removal on both ends.

---

Yes, it would be very nice with a feature to be able to mark "collab partner(s)" for posts, @Lady Amalthea. We suspect that for forum convenience it'll be easier to still only have one "owner" but maybe this could use some of the same type of code as the previously discussed checkbox thingy for GMs to allow co-GM post editing?

[BrokenPromise]

What if you can make ghost mode view-able only to those individuals you're friends with (not that are friends with you, to be clear)? This would prevent stalkers as honestly, if someone is harassing you than you're not likely to have them as a friend and if you don't want them to know you're online then you can just unfriend them to eliminate that ability to see you online or not.

As a GM I strongly oppose this idea. I like being able to see if someone is logging on daily so that I can take proper actions with them. If you haven't posted in my RP, or otherwise contacted me, and you log in daily, I know you dropped out of my RP. But if you haven't been on the forum for weeks, you could be going through an emergency.

Perhaps having an ignore list that prevents you from receiving PMs from users would be the best of both worlds. GMs could still monitor ghost users, and ghost users could protect themselves from unwanted stalkers.

[Lady Absinthia]

Is there anyway that if someone gets banned and nuked on the forum it auto deletes their visit from people's pages? Because seriously I have one that is KillAllN*****s that I really don't want showing up on my Visitors log ><!!!!!!!

[Ruby]

Is there anyway that if someone gets banned and nuked on the forum it auto deletes their visit from people's pages? Because seriously I have one that is KillAllN*****s that I really don't want showing up on my Visitors log ><!!!!!!!

@Lady Amalthea

Threw your profile link up in chat. That account's off your Last 10 now.

[Lady Absinthia]

@Ruby THANK YOU!!!

[Mahz]

@JBRam2002 Yeah, I'll need to improve it so that you can't trivially de-ghost someone by having an active friends list.

@Lady Amalthea Good point, someone else made this recommendation on Discord as well.

For example, if someone gets banned for harassing you, it's kinda lame that they can continue to show up on your profile and in your topics. I'll have to fix this.

[Lady Absinthia]

I don't mind having ghosted friends, in fact having them visible on my friends list is needed. I have to check log in habits of my Rpers, and those applying to my rps. If they are ghosted but it doesn't show on the friends list I would have to make a rule that required all members of my rps to stay off ghosting mode at all times. (Otherwise I can't keep them in rp because their log ins couldn't be monitored like the rest and wouldn't be fair.)

How about making the friends list a two way street? You add a friend, it has to be approved by that person. Then the friends list only shows those that mutually agree to be friends and shows them ghosted or not, like it used to, on the friends list.

This removes stalking issues using the friends list, requires it to be mutual, and allows Gms to keep doing their job.

[NuttsnBolts]

Talking bout privacy, something I noticed was that User Bios are able to be seen while someone is not logged into the forum, and yet signatures are not able to be seen by visitors. Seems like maybe this should perhaps be the other way around.

Branching off from that, when logged out of the forum and you enter a link such as the subscriptions page, the resulting page will be a "Not Found" page. Should this perhaps create a redirect to the login page?

[Mahz]

@NuttsnBolts Yeah, the Guild has some confusing and ugly error pages if you're logged out that I need to fix.

I'll make improvements to the ghost / friendslist intersection, but right now I'm trying to release a /search overhaul.

For the few people that read my dev journal: Do yall have any examples of the most frequent searches you do or would do if the Guild supported it?

I'm also working on a simple tag search.

[NuttsnBolts]

@NuttsnBolts Yeah, the Guild has some confusing and ugly error pages if you're logged out that I need to fix.

I'll make improvements to the ghost / friendslist intersection, but right now I'm trying to release a /search overhaul.

For the few people that read my dev journal: Do yall have any examples of the most frequent searches you do or would do if the Guild supported it?

I'm also working on a simple tag search.

@Mahz

Searching by IC, OOC and CHAR can help for times when you want to look up a specific character by someone, or one you made eons ago that you wanna relook at. Maybe something where if multiple posts from the same RP are marked in groups to help reduce time, (eg: search "star wars" and the RP from 2 years ago will be on page 20 of the search)

[Vashonn]

For the few people that read my dev journal: Do yall have any examples of the most frequent searches you do or would do if the Guild supported it?

I'm also working on a simple tag search.

@Mahz

Honestly, just this - I feel like having the ability to find a new RP/IntChk by searching by tag would do wonders.

As for other searches that would be done, I imagine I'd be looking for keywords similar to "dedicated", or perhaps "original", or something along those lines, to determine whether a GM is planning on making their RP last for a long while or if they've created the world themselves, as opposed to drawing ideas from fandom. This is just my personal preference, though.
I wouldn't see the practicality of having the search go through every single post all across the entire Guild, hunting for the word "original", because that's bound to show countless results that don't necessarily apply to whatever I would be looking for, even if I was only scouring, say, the Advanced section. So perhaps if there was some way to further narrow down the results I would receive for keyword searches, that would probably save people a lot of trouble of having to sort through a lot of clutter to find a very particular thing. (Though, I can understand how difficult that may be)

[Jerkchicken]

Hey Mahz, I'm curious to know what measures you're gonna take to prevent spambot incursions. Because honestly it's kinda annoying those times when the spambots got active and their threads would appear on the front page's sidebar for new and active rps.

[Mahz]

@Jerkchicken Various measures have already been taken over the last couple weeks I've been improving the Guild.

For example, nuked spam topics are far less likely to show up on the homepage and sidebar. And new users are submitted to the moderator Discord channel for review.

There's more work to be done, but it's getting better every week.

[Ellri]

if the search feature supported it, we'd probably be looking for RPs based on tags.

by the way... maybe you could add an automated tag to topics in Interest checks marking them as such?

Also, it probably wouldn't hurt to increase the tag limit a little again. Some RPs actually fit with a lot of tags.