Mahz's Dev Journal

[Captain Jordan]

But removing someone is on par with a personal attack.

@LegendBegins

No, it's on par with letting the GM's run their own RPs. A player does not have the right to play in a particular RP, and enforcing that is just going to cause the departure of GMs.

If a GM doesn't want you in an RP, you shouldn't be there. It's not instantly a personal attack, maybe you're just not a good fit. Maybe your character is incompatible, or you simply didn't write with people (loner in the bar scenario). Maybe you fell off the activity horse long ago and the story moved on. Maybe the game has a limited cast and had to replace you. The list goes on and on.

Yes, there are personal attacks, but those are the exception, not the rule. This is about GM sovereignty, not autonomy. A very subtle, yet critical, distinction.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote>I disagree - unless you already know that specific RPer, you won't know in advance how they turn out (and sometimes not even when you have RPed with them before). Add-only is something I mostly see as extra work to the GM that will only be useful against bots - and bots are always a mod problem, anyway.

@Shienvien

"I'm sorry, but you don't meet our qualifications" as opposed to "You prove to us that you're unworthy."

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>

No, it's on par with letting the GM's run their own RPs. A player does not have the right to play in a particular RP, and enforcing that is just going to cause the departure of GMs.

If a GM doesn't want you in an RP, you shouldn't be there. It's not instantly a personal attack, maybe you're just not a good fit. Maybe your character is incompatible, or you simply didn't write with people (loner in the bar scenario). Maybe you fell off the activity horse long ago and the story moved on. Maybe the game has a limited cast and had to replace you. The list goes on and on.

Yes, there are personal attacks, but those are the exception, not the rule. This is about GM sovereignty, not autonomy. A very subtle, yet critical, distinction.

@Captain Jordan

I only see more harm than good done through offering that feature. There are too many alternative solutions to a player-character issue.

[Mahz]

Haven't caught up with this thread, but I had originally said I was gonna launch search over the weekend.

I had a v0.1 version ready on Saturday night after working on it all day, but then I found that my database's built-in full-text search really wasn't scalable. It's common for forums of the Guild's size to use external full-text indexers like Elasticsearch (Xenforo, for example, offers this as a $140+ plugin), but I was hoping my database could handle it.

I decided to host the Guild's full-text indexes on Amazon's CloudSearch. I've migrated the data there and have hooked up a mechanism for syncing it to the Guild's database, but then the weekend ended. I may have to wait until this weekend to finish building a UI around it.

Update 1: Nevermind, found out how to make it scale just using my own database's full-text indexes.

Update 2: Nevermind, a bug in the latest version of my database prevents it from handling some of our largest posts. While I wait for a fix, I'll resume implementing search with the CloudSearch service I mentioned above. Might not finish til this weekend.

[Ellri]

so, because of the potential of one or two rotten apples in a barrel of five hundred, you feel the mods should be charged with every single change to RP participant changes on the RPs with restricted IC? How will they have time to deal with the actual moderator stuff if they have to check over all those things? And how can they possibly be expected to know when someone is abusing their role as GM from seeing such? Don't forget that the moderators are volunteers. They don't get paid for this.

[LegendBegins]

so, because of the potential of one or two rotten apples in a barrel of five hundred, you feel the mods should be charged with every single change to RP participant changes on the RPs with restricted IC? How will they have time to deal with the actual moderator stuff if they have to check over all those things? And how can they possibly be expected to know when someone is abusing their role as GM from seeing such? Don't forget that the moderators are volunteers. They don't get paid for this.

@Ellri

Think of it this way. I guarantee a plethora of GMs will simply remove people without warning or giving them a reason. Each person that feels it was unjustified will make a case with the mods. The only reason you would have to remove someone is if they were being purposely defiant, in which case, they become classified as a spammer that the mods can handle.

[Captain Jordan]

<Snipped quote by Ellri>
Think of it this way. I guarantee a plethora of GMs will simply remove people without warning or giving them a reason. Each person that feels it was unjustified will make a case with the mods. The only reason you would have to remove someone is if they were being purposely defiant, in which case, they become classified as a spammer that the mods can handle.

@LegendBegins

Call me crazy, but I don't believe it's as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. I don't think this site would still exist if that were the case.

Honestly, I think we've talked it all out. Since we can't come to a consensus, it might be better that Mahz just runs with his best idea.

[whizzball1]

so, because of the potential of one or two rotten apples in a barrel of five hundred, you feel the mods should be charged with every single change to RP participant changes on the RPs with restricted IC? How will they have time to deal with the actual moderator stuff if they have to check over all those things? And how can they possibly be expected to know when someone is abusing their role as GM from seeing such? Don't forget that the moderators are volunteers. They don't get paid for this.

@Ellri

I was going to make the point that @LegendBegins did. Either way, the moderators have work. The question is which method will require more work for the moderators--and I hold that allowing GMs to block people from posting in a roleplay is that method. For if a person is removed from a roleplay in a personal attack and the moderators are notified, they must look through the OOC to see if the victim really is a victim if said victim omits to include posts that prove their claim. It may be harder to figure out whether the expulsion was a personal attack or had valid reasons.

However, if instead the GM must ask the moderators, they will of course have to provide a reason, which means that the moderators will (1) not need to check as rigorously and (2) already have the presented reasons in mind, so they don't have to guess.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>

Call me crazy, but I don't believe it's as big of a problem as you're making it out to be. I don't think this site would still exist if that were the case.

Honestly, I think we've talked it all out. Since we can't come to a consensus, it might be better that Mahz just runs with his best idea.

@Captain Jordan

I suppose so. It seems to be split about equally.

[Syben]

Typically don't moderators ask for links to evidence in the situation? It's not their job to play detective, we should provide a situation and they should moderate it.

I still think giving GMs some actual power over their own roleplay is a good idea.

[RomanAria]

To add my own vote, though I am not a very big contributor in this discussion, I vote that GMs should be able to ban users from their RPs for any reason. Most people on here are mature enough that the feature won't be abused. And those who aren't... the moderators could deal with them, I'd think. There can't be more than one rotten apple in every barrel.

[LegendBegins]

Typically don't moderators ask for links to evidence in the situation? It's not their job to play detective, we should provide a situation and they should moderate it.

I still giving GMs some actual power over their own roleplay is a good idea.

@Aeonumbra

Actual power, yes. Full posting ability, no. That was the whole reason we opted out of giving GMs the power to delete threads in the first place. Locking out players is a moderator-level power that doesn't need to be available.

[Syben]

<Snipped quote by Aeonumbra>

Actual power, yes. Full posting ability, no. That was the whole reason we opted out of giving GMs the power to delete threads in the first place. Locking out players is a moderator-level power that doesn't need to be available.

@LegendBegins

A thread that wouldn't exist in the first place unless for it was for the GM's themselves. Personally, I'd rather not have to go running for mod help whenever I have a problem, even a simple one. Deleting threads, I agree, should be done by moderators only, if at all. However, choosing who is allowed to voluntarily participate in a group that you, yourself created, should be a GM level power.

Though as Captain Jordan stated earlier, I think we've argued this to death. Perhaps we should wait and see what Mahz has to say about it.

I know I'm a bit late to this party, but frankly I think this argument is ridiculous.

It will not be a problem, especially with an opt in/out system. I have yet to see a gm evil enough to lock someone out for no reason, or even without plenty of warnings. If a gm wants to micromanage their rp, let them. If they want to be a troll to someone, which I truly don't understand why you think will be so common, let them - the mods can deal with it, and I guarantee it won't happen often enough to be a problem.

Perhaps an appeal system would work? If a gm doesn't provide any reason at all, a player can hit an appeal button, immediately overriding his blacklisting and alerting the mods to check it out. It'd have a large warning stating that to abuse this will be punished severely. The mods then check it out (perhaps put a field for the gm to state a reason (required) before being allowed for both the player and mods' benefit) and decide who is at fault. Either way it is blatant trolling, and can be punished as such (especially for the player if they appeal just for the luls). Perhaps even limit how many appeals one may have for life? Say, 3?

Lastly, restricting the ability to post cannot be compared to deletion of content. Allowing any person to delete someone's hard work is evil. Allowing someone to police their own "territory" to keep order and/or be a dictatorial idiot (and be punished as such) is a great idea. Removing someone won't happen often to begin with, and when it does I am very confident the reasoning will have been discussed beforehand (and warnings probably delivered as such). But as said above, perhaps it is best to just let Mahz decide himself, since we clearly won't be able to agree?

[Ellri]

That wording, TheMaster99, is exactly how we wanted to word it ourselves.

by the way, @Mahz... Will you bring back the [img=url] code for images, or will people have to stick to [img]url[/img]? There are a few places we've come across with pre-newguild entries breaking code because of using the old and shortform image code.

EDIT: Noticed a funny thing about the code brackets now... they add a space after. If you see the question mark above, in the raw code there's no space between that and the ]

EDIT#2: Someone informed us that using images as link objects doesn't seem to work. not verified completely, but initial test confirmed that.

[Mahz]

That wording, TheMaster99, is exactly how we wanted to word it ourselves.

by the way, @Mahz... Will you bring back the [img=url] code for images, or will people have to stick to [img]url[/img]? There are a few places we've come across with pre-newguild entries breaking code because of using the old and shortform image code.

EDIT: Noticed a funny thing about the code brackets now... they add a space after. If you see the question mark above, in the raw code there's no space between that and the ]

EDIT#2: Someone informed us that using images as link objects doesn't seem to work. not verified completely, but initial test confirmed that.

@Ellri

I removed the sweet [img=...] shorthand because the BBCode parser was treating it like an img tag with no closing tag.

But now that my hacked parser has matured, I think I can implement the shorthand form by processing the shorthand tags into images before feeding the markup into the parser. When re-writing the Guild early this year, I was reluctant to reintroduce BBCode that broke the BBCode "specification" of open/close tags, but now I regularly break the spec and I'm comfortable with my custom parser. See: hr and @Mahz.

The [code] tag isn't adding spaces but rather it just pads the content with a few pixels.

It makes more sense when you realize the code tag used to look like this: (Notice the pink background)

But I modified it to have a transparent background which makes the padding seem redundant. I may experiment with some different backgrounds, so I'll keep the padding in for now.

Finally, it is possible to link images:

← should be a linked image

Finally, I still haven't caught up in this thread since I'm too easily distracted. I need to devote my limited time to finishing the search feature prototype.

[Captain Jordan]

<Snipped quote by Ellri>

I removed the sweet [img=...] shorthand because the BBCode parser was treating it like an img tag with no closing tag.

But now that my hacked parser has matured, I think I can implement the shorthand form by processing the shorthand tags into images before feeding the markup into the parser. When re-writing the Guild early this year, I was reluctant to reintroduce BBCode that broke the BBCode "specification" of open/close tags, but now I regularly break the spec and I'm comfortable with my custom parser. See: hr and @Mahz.

The [code] tag isn't adding spaces but rather it just pads the content with a few pixels.

It makes more sense when you realize the code tag used to look like this: (Notice the pink background)

But I modified it to have a transparent background which makes the padding seem redundant. I may experiment with some different backgrounds, so I'll keep the padding in for now.

Finally, it is possible to link images:

← should be a linked image

Finally, I still haven't caught up in this thread since I'm too easily distracted. I need to devote my limited time to finishing the search feature prototype.

@Mahz

As an experiment, you should try dropping the brackets on @mention, at least for simple usernames. It'll probably require the username-feeding system or brackets for more complex usernames (with fancy characters like space or '), but for for a mention like @Mahz.

[vancexentan]

Just wanted to stop by to thank Mahz for all the work he's put into the site along side anyone else who has helped. I didn't have confidence in this site following the debacle towards the end of 2014 with the site constantly crashing and what not but the new improvements are impressive even if they aren't completely finished.

[LegendBegins]

<Snipped quote by Mahz>

As an experiment, you should try dropping the brackets on @mention, at least for simple usernames. It'll probably require the username-feeding system or brackets for more complex usernames (with fancy characters like space or '), but for for a mention like @Mahz.

@Captain Jordan

The advantage of brackets are to differentiate code from text.

[Mahz]

Just wanted to stop by to thank Mahz for all the work he's put into the site along side anyone else who has helped. I didn't have confidence in this site following the debacle towards the end of 2014 with the site constantly crashing and what not but the new improvements are impressive even if they aren't completely finished.

@vancexentan

Yeah, I feel that. The deletion of the Guild in Dec 2013 kinda forced my hand at the worst possible time in my life.

I had the choice to either restart the Guild on forum software like vBulletin or Xenforo again. But I also had been wanting to run the Guild on my own software for a while. I thought taking two months off from work would've been enough to write a skeleton forum that I could slowly enhance, but it wasn't enough time. I created some software that just couldn't scale with the load. I was also burning progressively more and more time on fixes that weren't really helping.

The Guild's towards the end of last year generated a lot of ill will towards me and the forum which was frustrating, so I took what I learned, bought some stability in my life, and rewrote the Guild again.

All things said and done, I think 2014 was somewhat necessary in a way despite the timing and the failure. If I had decided to just reboot the Guild on a fresh Xenforo/vBulletin installation, we'd probably still be running on it today. Too hard to switch away. Just another clone. But since my failure to scale the forum planted the responsibility firmly in my hands and ended up causing me a lot of stress, by the time I was in a position to stabilize my life, I had (and still have) the energy/fuel necessary to build.

The current forum still trails other forums on some basic features that come for free when using Xenforo. I'm still building a search system. Pagination still sucks. Still can't delete/archive convos. Have to manually refresh the /subscriptions page to see if new posts were made in the topics/roleplays/checks that you care about.

But the upside is that I'll catch these features up within the next couple months. I kinda interleave these boring features with cooler features. And once I catch up, 100% of my time will be spent working on cool features instead of just 50% of my time.

[The Harbinger of Ferocity]

@Mahz, I do believe that given your story presented that you did indeed make the best out of the hand dealt; the fact you largely program and create your own material versus a carbon copy site with some input here and there shows a greater level of dedication and interest in all aspects.

It comes across as more professional and complete, even if it is comparatively behind. However, as constantly updated the site is, I do not exactly fear a scenario where no progress will be made - quite contrary, or so I am persuaded.