Mahz's Dev Journal

[Mahz]

It's hard to reply to every point made in this thread. Just know that I regularly mine ideas from this thread when I have some spare time, especially to remember what I was last working on. It also cuts into my Guild work time to clarify my thoughts on every suggestion and serves as a channel for procrastination.

I want to resume work this weekend.

@Lady Amalthea Good ideas. I definitely like higher level tags like "Magic" and "Character Death". Especially the latter since it's a fundamental game mechanic distinction.

@Kuro Yeah, that's a good point -- isolating mature RPs from the rest so that you're not having to sift through one when you're only looking for the other. Even the roleplayerguild.com/roleplays view doesn't give you the option to blacklist tags, unfortunately.

@Calle I think I wrote a post within the last 5 pages that responded to the sidebar chat concern, but I have two ideas that should declutter the sidebar: only your first status message per X minutes appears in the sidebar, and a "Reply" button that lets you reply to a status without writing your own status -- as if it were a tiny forum topic.

@LegendBegins @Shienvien Good points. The PW is already doomed by its intrinsic lack of mass appeal since it's essentially a single roleplay. It's at the top as a trade-off that was supposed to be temporary. And by the time I got around to work on the Guild again since PW was created, the PW system was reset with a new theme which I thought would've been an unfair time to move it. I will move it soon.

It's a good point that it also may make the forum look like a Star Wars fanfic forum to new visitors.

[Vec]

A blast from the past!

You gave a pretty comprehensive answer at that time. I wonder how much the development of an alternative text editor has progressed? @Mahz

[Mahz]

I heard I might have come across strongly with regard to PW in my last post or people might have been reacting to it.

To clarify, the PW concept has been part of the Guild since Day One.

Here it's seen in archive.org's first ever snapshot of the Guild from April 2007: web.archive.org/web/20070421113235/ht…



It will always be "doomed" to a relatively small group of people by its very nature, the same reason a roleplay rarely scales beyond a few people. It's just fun and part of Guild tradition.

But I'd rather talk about other things in this thread than PW's placement on the homepage.

@Vec Building my own editor quickly proved to be a horrific amount of work, so I did drop that ball.

Lately I've been looking into getting something like CKEditor working on the Guild. There there are plenty of challenges there as well.

Working on the Guild quickly made me aware how much full time engineering muscle platforms like vBulletin/Xenforo put into their editor.

[Mahz]

Just wanted to write an update here to remind everyone I'm still alive.

I'm working on an update. It's a bunch of smaller, not so consequential improvements in the code that I've accumulated over a six month period. Some random bug fixes you might notice as well. I want to thank @LegendBegins for pointing out a security bug that will be fixed in this update.

In other news, I want to have a quick memorial for my cat that I had to put asleep on my birthday Sept 13th a couple weeks ago. She's seen in the first test pic of the Guild's image hosting system:



It's heart-breaking that such an innocent, sweet cosita has to suffer at all. :( But she's not suffering anymore.

I hope everyone is doing well.

[Byrd Man]

Hope you're doing well, Mahz.

[Byrd Man]

Bump

[Byrd Man]

Bump again.

[AlteredTundra]

Might as well present this issue:

I've been experiencing some secure/not secure issues with the site. Whenever I visit the homepage, everything is fine. The lock icon at the top appears next to the url, but every time I click on any roleplay I'm a part of, the not secure icon appears (though not in red text thankfully). Whenever I click on the "not secure", it's the one that always says "Attackers might be able to see the images you're looking at and trick you by modifying them".

Granted, it doesn't do this for every page and probably not for every roleplay, but I figured it was worth bringing up. I did post this in the Discord Server but I wanted to also bring it to the attention here in case @Mahz checks the site more often than RPGO (and likewise if the reverse is true).

[NuttsnBolts]

@Altered Tundra
That's all to do with site encryption.

A few years ago Mahz did a change where he HTTPS the site to allow for better security but I think it was only really done on a surface level for the log ins and such. It's not anything to be too concerned with as you're not doing any sensitive transactions as HTTPS is mostly reserved for social media, email, and moreso banking.

I'd also go through and do a clean up of your history/temporary files too as there could be a cookie from a Google ad which is sending off information as well. Most of the time they're harmless, but targeted ads are a thing and that will trigger the security screener in your browser.

There's also add-ons/plug-ins you can get too like "HTTP Everywhere" for Firefox which will force an encryption on all sites. If you're not using one you can always download one of those as an added security measure

[LegendBegins]

@Altered Tundra

Right, that would be because the Guild allows people to embed images that may come from insecure sites. The Guild itself is safe, but that warning can't be modified without modifying the site to host all images locally. If you want to prevent that when linking an unencrypted message, you can upload images to your profile, where they will be served over SSL/TLS.

@NuttsnBolts

The entire site uses SSL/TLS, but it's a byproduct of the Guild allowing people to embed images without uploading them.

[AlteredTundra]

@LegendBegins I mostly use Imgur for a majority of my image hosting needs but I've never had any problem with secure/not secure. Unless the total amount of said images took its toll on the site and it forced its hand, I'm still confused.

[LegendBegins]

@Altered Tundra

Do you have an example? Virtually any page I visit, I receive a "connection is secure" message.

[AlteredTundra]

@LegendBegins Let's use my own roleplay as an example. Click me. An "i" icon and "not secure" appears when I visit the page (only started to happen today tho).

[LegendBegins]

@Altered Tundra

Strange, I'm receiving a Secure icon, albeit in a different browser. In either case, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Carlyle]

@Altered Tundra@LegendBegins Nothing on my end, either. It's likely something on your end, Tundra, like @NuttsnBolts suggested.

[NuttsnBolts]

A few of those images on that page are not from sites like Pinterest or imgur. That could be where there's the potential issue lies as there's nothing stopping the other site from changing the image, and you'd probably find the original site has an unsecure page.

Great example would be one of those images you click to view, it has a jpg link so it looks legit, but then you get a gnome meme image instead.

[Shienvien]

The "not secure" most commonly happens if you have an embedded image or other media from a http site (no SSL/TLS) on a https site. A single [img]someimagesite.com/someimage.jpg[/img] will do it.

Also, neither [noparse][/noparse] nor [code][/code] tags evidently affect links... Links will be parsed. No! Matter! What!

(Just in case anyone is wondering - yes, the tags are completely different colors.)