Mahz's Dev Journal

[Robeatics]

Not sure how relevant or good of an idea this is, but how about a donate button? Maybe it wouldn't be huge, but you put a lot of effort into this site, @Mahz.

[LegendBegins]

Okay, my biggest opinion regarding a seniority system is that we should never limit the number of posts per x amount of seconds. I know for at least my RP, we rapidly post, because that's just the style, and how it works. Limiting the posts per time would be a huge detriment to us, and many others who post in that style. Are there really so many spammers to sacrifice the convenience of loyal members, even if they just so happened to recently come across the Guild? In fact, I believe this is one of the features that is very unique about the Guild, that it doesn't restrict you or think you are a spammer because you post often.

[Mahz]

Question about signatures: I use my scrollbars responsibly and put things in hiders, mostly to spread world about my ICks. Now, it is ruined. What should I do? I do not want to delete my beautiful sword, but now you can't even see the credit!

@UltikanaRe

A signature is something that's imposed upon everyone viewing every post of yours ever. Either offload some glitter to your bio or shrink your image. I recommend simply shrinking your image to free up space. Edit: Soon I will make the "" link open a "pop-up" with the user's bio instead of redirecting to their profile. This will make it more pleasant to quickly view bios, and people will be more likely to view yours.

[Mahz]

Not sure how relevant or good of an idea this is, but how about a donate button? Maybe it wouldn't be huge, but you put a lot of effort into this site, @Mahz.

@Robeatics

No need. I'll be putting ads back up soon. They pay for the server. Thanks.

[Robeatics]

<Snipped quote by Robeatics> No need. I'll be putting ads back up soon. They pay for the server. Thanks.

@Mahz

Alright! Good to know.

[Captain Jordan]

<Snipped quote by duck55223> I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm going to implement a trust system so that I can give trusted members more privileges while restricting the privileges of potential spammers (i.e. new users). My core philosophy is that trusted users (i.e. users that have no record of system abuse, users trusted by the system) should be given a full toolkit to use as they see fit. If a trusted user wants to start convos with 10+ people and all 10+ people are down with that (i.e. it's not abuse), then the system should let them do that. - New members are considered untrusted. They can only create a convo every 60 seconds (or some duration). They can only create a convo with 1 other participant. This is to put the final nail in the coffin of a special class of PM spammers. - As a member participates in the community, they become more trusted and unlock more privileges. - Gaining trust needs to be slow enough to punish people that get banned (they have to start from scratch), but it shouldn't feature-starve new users from basic functions. - Trusted users should be able to expedite the trust process by "vouching" for users. Vouching for someone will boost their trust a fraction of your trust and put you on their vouch list that mods can see. If done right, this system will be simple and nearly invisible. Current users will notice nothing different but enhanced privileges, mods will have a better toolkit for evaluating bad actors, the system will be harder to abuse, and new users will unlock more features as they get acclimated to the community. As the guild rapidly climbs back to its pre-guildfall activity levels, I'd like to get this sort of system in place sooner than later. (I spent a lot of time hacking similar countermeasures into oldguild's vBulletin)

@Mahz

Hmm. Ambitious. Certainly, users can tend to rack up a lot of posts in Spam or Free RPs. This could skew the system towards escalated privileges for these users, unless you implemented a weighting system for boards. It might be awkward and lead to some grumbling, but it would slow down the advance of someone formerly banned by simply posting heavily in Spam. You could do other things to accelerate users into trusted groups by detecting things that generally denotes thoughtful/helpful posts. Things like posting length, internal links to the Guild, or number of ratings a single post receives might add weight to someone's current trust level and boost them up faster. Perhaps these weights would be calculated randomly, so that not every post that satisfies the thresholds would be counted, allowing for a more realistic measure of trust and avoiding the ability to game the system. Honestly, I think the number one criteria for such a system is to keep its details hidden. Not that Guild members aren't trustworthy (indeed, that's the entire point of this measure) or that you must have secrets. But simply that such an invisible system should be like a black box to users. At some point, they get awarded with more trust, and huzzah! But the actual steps taken to that point shouldn't be possible to replicate exactly or document so that someone else could game the system. My $0.02, given freely.

[AlteredTundra]

This is more a general inquiry rather than an actual question/request: Will there be an option to have different fonts in the near or distant future?

[Shienvien]

The ratings table is now restricted to only your own profile.

I call it positive development.

I prefer the pop-in buttons for the ratings. They would be a bit garish against the simple gray theme of the Guild if they were permanently visible.

Suggestion that should cover both: Make them grayed out until a rating has been applied? The pop-in is really annoying, for some reason, and the already applied ratings are colorful anyway.

But I do agree that the count of ratings on a post should be moved into a more discrete corner. It is probably the way it is because that was the easiest way to format it, but I say it should be changed soon.

Agreed.

One idea I had. How about introducing user titles, such as those we had prior to GuildFall?

I'd sort of like user titles as a bit of extra customization - the sort that goes under the avatars and applies sitewide.

If you want people to copy some text, you may want to wrap it in [pre][/pre] tags.

Could the things in [pre][/pre] please be displayed in dark boxes rather than white? These white boxes hurt.

I've noticed it took a (relatively) long time for several people I roleplay with to notice this change and upload a new avatar. Some of them still haven't done so. You could argue that this means that some people don't really care about their avatars, but it can also be interpreted to mean that this implementation is too vague.

Well, I never saw the message, and there seems to a handful of people who concluded that avatars are bust. (Though I admit that I tend to occasionally wait for things to fix themselves rather than investigate immediately when there are no announcements/notifications in place. I've also been quite out for the past couple of days.) Eh, and no support to the proposed style of "trust"-system. In almost all new sites I've joined, it has been very detrimental to the enjoyment of new members, mine included. We go in ... and then we discover we can't make collabs amongst ourselves (no making multi-party PMs for new members ... seriously?), there is await before we can post or our posts show up, et cetera, et cetera. In the end, it is more likely to end up an inconvenience new members mechanic over a improve the experience of older members. My proposal: more mods. (Perhaps we can then do away with the terrible warn-ban system we have in place now - I know at least one member who has gotten a warn for a random ambiguous comment.)

[Mahz]

I like the idea of graying out the ratings. And yeah I'll change the code-block sometime.

Well, I never saw the message, and there seems to a handful of people who concluded that avatars are bust. (Though I admit that I tend to occasionally wait for things to fix themselves rather than investigate immediately when there are no announcements/notifications in place. I've also been quite out for the past couple of days.)

If it's working, you should see this message. I'll check the code to ensure people can actually see it.

[Shienvien]

Hrmh... *nods* A small note on some links not working: it appears that links to posts made before the transferral to the new codebase just link back to the IC of the RP, whereas newer links work. This holds true for both links from the chain-symbol (in the form of https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/[postnumber]) and links copied from the address bar (in the form of http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/[topicnumber]/posts/ooc?page=[pagenr]#post-[postnumber]).

[Mahz]

A small note on some links not working: it appears that links to posts made before the transferral to the new codebase just link back to the IC of the RP, whereas newer links work. This holds true for both links from the chain-symbol (in the form of https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/[postnumber]) and links copied from the address bar (in the form of http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/[topicnumber]/posts/ooc?page=[pagenr]#post-[postnumber]).

@Shienvien

Could you give an example? Here's a random OOC RP post from 1 year ago: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/2044 It goes to the second page of the OOC tab. Are you saying that you've found links to non-IC posts that always go to the IC tab?

[Mahz]

Latest push: - Added custom user titles.

[Mahz]

This is more a general inquiry rather than an actual question/request: Will there be an option to have different fonts in the near or distant future?

@Altered Tundra

Yes. Some day.

[Syben]

Also inquiry, mahz, will we see the return of the color button in the reply box? (Like the bold button) It was much easier to selectively highlight character speech and hit the text color button than to manually wrap tags. Just a curiosity, as I am glad to have color options at all, so thank you.

[Mahz]

Also inquiry, mahz, will we see the return of the color button in the reply box? (Like the bold button) It was much easier to selectively highlight character speech and hit the text color button than to manually wrap tags. Just a curiosity, as I am glad to have color options at all, so thank you.

@Aeonumbra

Can you elaborate?

[Syben]

So that's something. I was always taught not to push strange buttons. My aplogies, thank you kind sir.

[Captain Jordan]

<Snipped quote by Aeonumbra> Can you elaborate?

@Mahz

Maybe tooltips would help discovery. EDIT: Sweet, awesome titles.

[Hank]

Now I can have my short & snazzy username while simultaneously retaining its origin. Splendid.

[Ellri]

User title needs to be experimented with, but for now, we are legion.

[LegendBegins]

Would it be difficult to reintroduce editable font sizes?