Mahz's Dev Journal

[JBRam2002]

I think there's room for both a welcome committee and a learner's tag. A lot of the RPs I'm in, it feels like people expect the DM to say "figure things out or pack your bags." In tabletop games (and likely arena too), it takes a little while to learn the ropes. Heck, any game that has combat, whether through dice or storytelling, has a bit of a learning curve. I know I'd be more likely to join an NRP if I expected the DM to help teach the basics along the way, as it's a genre I've never touched. I'm sure plenty if people think similarly about various types of RPs.

[Lady Absinthia]

@Odin Yeah there was talk of a mentor style program a while ago - long while ago. Don't think any of the staff was in on it though. More of several of us just general Rpers discussing it.

When I was modding for Adventure Quest on the Battle-On Forums, we started what was called an RP Academy which taught the basics of Rp. People could start out there and were taught the ropes - How to develop characters, we gave them scenarios to post to and then we dissected the posts to point out things they missed or metagamed or bunnied. Walked them through battles post by post. Ect. Once they got through a certain amount and had a good grasp they were moved to general and then if they grew from their they were promoted to Advanced Rper - each level of Rper had a different area they could post in.

Now it was a smaller community of Rpers - which was easier to keep up with since it was just a sub section of a larger forum for a game. So I doubt that would work here. But the part I do believe would work was having RP Tutors. They were the teachers, ones that fielded the questions, taught, took people under their wing, etc. (They were appointed by the RP Staff. Not mods but not general Rpers)

I would love to see that here but it is a LOT of work. (Took a lot more to mentor than it did to mod over there.) - If we had an Academy section in the RP - omg, that would be awesome! Not a place to Rp but a place where people could post asking their questions and such. Example - Can someone take a look at my CS and see if the back story and skills line up? How can I better develop the personality. I want this character to get from here to here, tips? I have writers block, help me break it. And so forth.

Yes we have an RP Discussion area but that is a general thing. And the Tutorials are all the way buried at the bottom of the forum (Which I still say needs to be moved up and either placed in the top section with Newcomers and New - or in the RP section at the top.) - Though if we had a sub section (A new one like Expanding Horizons got) - We could have an RP Academy and the Tutorials there.

But again, if we could just get a "Mentoring" tag that would be awesome.

[Lady Absinthia]

@Mahz Can we please get a close tab for the status updates? I know it is never going to stop being what it is but two pages of cock talk is too much.... (And it's calm right now compared to what I have seen on that bar over the last six months.)

[AlteredTundra]

@Mahz Though it might be minor, I've encountered a small bug regarding the posting message box thing(I forget the name). Whenever I do a post, there seems to be a flash of black where the BBcode icons are. And it does seem that whenever I click `preview`, the errors part on the bottom left is above the contents of the post and not the other way around.

[Genkai]

@Mahz More of a minor inquiry but any possibility we could go to someone profile and see what they're viewing (thread, homepage, PMing or something)? The Who's Online page used to do this on the old site and while I love seeing who is viewing a thread, I'd love to see it taken a step further if possible. It's not a big priority by any means but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[Mahz]

@Lady Amalthea Yeah, sure. It's on my list now. Just trying to wrap up some other progress. And I also haven't yet made it to the hidden-post fix we discussed on the other page, but it's on my list as well.

@Altered Tundra Weird, could you take a screenshot?

@Genkai I think it'd be a nice feature. Maybe I could start with something simple like showing your last viewed page (if ghost-mode permits).

Working on some bugs and chore/foundational work right now.

Some of the posts above I haven't yet responded to since I had more to say than time allows.

[Lady Absinthia]

@Mahz Just knowing it is on the "list" makes me feel better. Thankies hun for all the work. ^_^

[AlteredTundra]

@Mahz Here you are!

le-screenshot

[Mahz]

@Altered Tundra Do you you know when about it started happening?

30 days ago I launched the autosave system which I think is the only time I touched the editor in quite a while.

[Mahz]

@Lady Amalthea You should be able to collapse the statuses sidebar now.

[Lady Absinthia]

@Mahz Oh sweet Jesus! Mahz, I might actually love you for this. Thank you!!!!

[Black Ninja]

@Mahz More of a minor inquiry but any possibility we could go to someone profile and see what they're viewing (thread, homepage, PMing or something)? The Who's Online page used to do this on the old site and while I love seeing who is viewing a thread, I'd love to see it taken a step further if possible. It's not a big priority by any means but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

@Genkai I think it'd be a nice feature. Maybe I could start with something simple like showing your last viewed page (if ghost-mode permits).

@Mahz

@Mahz You mentioned if ghost-mode permits.
Does that mean that ghost mode makes this void - if not, will you be tweaking it so we have the option that others can't see what we're doing? If not that's fine, I just like my privacy. But I can make do either way.

Thanks

[Genkai]

@Mahz Sure, that would be nice! I think if people were set to invisible on the old site, you didn't see them online at all. So hopefully those who do want privacy keep it. I'd hate to ruin things for them. ^^;

[AlteredTundra]

@Mahz Hard to say, but I think I noticed it sometime last week. I thought I was seeing things at first or maybe the bulk of my post was causing it somehow, but then I noticed it happened in just a small post.

[Mahz]

Okay, /search is finally back and it's paginated this time.

I'm definitely pushing my database to the limit on that one. If I have to take it down again for performance issues, I'll find a database actually optimized for search.

---

Within the last 10 pages, I discussed some experiments I was doing to evaluate potential improvements to our current BBCode editor.

For fun, here's a buggy prototype I threw together a month ago: guilded.surge.sh



The editor itself would need a lot of work. But what's more interesting is what's going on in the boxes below the editor (if you click the link).

I wrote the start of a transformer from the editor's internal data representation (the last box) into HTML (the top box). I also made progress on transforming the editor's data into BBCode. If I can implement the reverse, a transformer from BBCode -> editor state, then I think I could implement an improved editor alongside the Guild's current editor with a button that lets you switch between them on the fly.

Don't be too hard on it, though. It's just something I hacked together. Prob did the first 1% of it.

It would take some serious dev muscle to finish that project, so it's on the long-term track, but I figured I'd share some progress in the spirit of the dev journal.

---

Gonna shift focus back to this thread now.

[Mahz]

@Odin Yeah there was talk of a mentor style program a while ago - long while ago. Don't think any of the staff was in on it though. More of several of us just general Rpers discussing it.

When I was modding for Adventure Quest on the Battle-On Forums, we started what was called an RP Academy which taught the basics of Rp. People could start out there and were taught the ropes - How to develop characters, we gave them scenarios to post to and then we dissected the posts to point out things they missed or metagamed or bunnied. Walked them through battles post by post. Ect. Once they got through a certain amount and had a good grasp they were moved to general and then if they grew from their they were promoted to Advanced Rper - each level of Rper had a different area they could post in.

Now it was a smaller community of Rpers - which was easier to keep up with since it was just a sub section of a larger forum for a game. So I doubt that would work here. But the part I do believe would work was having RP Tutors. They were the teachers, ones that fielded the questions, taught, took people under their wing, etc. (They were appointed by the RP Staff. Not mods but not general Rpers)

I would love to see that here but it is a LOT of work. (Took a lot more to mentor than it did to mod over there.) - If we had an Academy section in the RP - omg, that would be awesome! Not a place to Rp but a place where people could post asking their questions and such. Example - Can someone take a look at my CS and see if the back story and skills line up? How can I better develop the personality. I want this character to get from here to here, tips? I have writers block, help me break it. And so forth.

Yes we have an RP Discussion area but that is a general thing. And the Tutorials are all the way buried at the bottom of the forum (Which I still say needs to be moved up and either placed in the top section with Newcomers and New - or in the RP section at the top.) - Though if we had a sub section (A new one like Expanding Horizons got) - We could have an RP Academy and the Tutorials there.

But again, if we could just get a "Mentoring" tag that would be awesome.

@Lady Amalthea

A forum I posted at long ago had a mentor system as well.

While I wasn't particularly involved with the program nor do I remember it in great detail, I liked the spirit of it.

Definitely lots of work though. One thing I do remember was the high rate of newcomers simply vanishing which wears away at the energy of the mentors, but that's the nature of forums.

As usual, I'm always willing to build something if someone can pitch me a detailed game plan.

Regarding the Mentoring tag, any further ideas on it? I think it needs to involve something more interesting than just creating yet another tag and hoping people figure it out.

For example, something I want to do with the 18+ tag is hide the tagged checks/RPs except from users that have opted-in to the 18+ system. Basically a feature that's connected to a single tag.

[Hank]

If anyone wants to have a brainstorming session with me in which we can discuss the details of such a tutor/mentor program, my PM/Discord inbox is open.

The Guild is also closing in on its 10th anniversary! I'm looking for ideas to do something fun with the whole community to celebrate the occasion. Ideas for that can also be pitched to me.

[Mahz]

Update: I restyled hidden posts so that they are a lil more out of the way but also expandable.

[JBRam2002]

@Mahz My thought with the Mentoring tag is that it would only be used for helping people learn the ropes in one system or another. Having it simply be an additional tag would be the easiest thing to implement, but if you want more ideas, I might be able to help with some.

1) If you implement a forum dedicated to mentoring, linking threads that are tagged with Mentoring into that thread might be helpful (especially if it's split apart into the different types of RPs like the forum is). Perhaps even just interest checks or threads that have been posted in within the last month so things don't get too cluttered.

2) If the Mentoring tag was a different color, showed up first in the list, and had specific rules for use (perhaps that showed up when you first select the tag), that might also aid in people finding them. People who create Mentoring RPs should be aware that they are inviting questions about literally everything and should be expected to assume a slightly higher level of both professionalism (as they represent the RP and the genre as a whole) as well as the responsibility to answer all of those questions to the best of their abilities.

3) Perhaps an eye can be kept on some of these Mentoring RPs. We could have a sort of monthly recognition for ongoing RPs that work to improve the quality of their players' skills. This would obviously take a lot of extra effort, but it would both bring attention to the feature and recognition that this feature is a priority in the Guild. The latter makes the Guild more accessible to newcomers and would likely improve first impressions significantly.

[Ellri]

not bad ideas, @JBRam2002.

As an added thought to that... If the mentors are being judged by others as well as helping the newbies, there should be a system in place for dealing with "bad" mentors. Dealing with those who prove they are unsuitable for mentoring anyone. Simplest we can think of there is for the staff to have a tool in place for disabling someone's ability to use the mentor tag.

naturally, we hope such a system would be utterly without use, but the guild is (mostly) populated by humans, and humans are fallible. We don't really feel someone should be banned from the guild entirely for just being poor at teaching newbies the ropes. (but of course, extreme cases will demand extreme measures.)