Mahz's Dev Journal

[Mahz]

I have zero issues with obscenity and the Guild is unrestricted by our personal limits as staff. I'm not even sure I have any. My goal for the Guild is for people to do as they please and to set boundaries that are optimal for the most amount of people.

I only care about a few things:

1. The Guild won't violate Adsense guidelines. I will rigorously re-examine those guidelines when the mature/adult system is actually the next feature in my queue (I still haven't even finished pondering what that system will be), but as @HeySeuss mentioned, and according to the guidelines last time I examined them, Adsense's restrictions only apply to each page the ads are on.
2. The Guild won't violate American federal law. This is another thing I will re-examine, but last I checked, there is no precedent for obscenity enforcement winning against written erotica. And for good reason. Imagine there was a fictional story that involves acts that would be illegal in real life, and imagine that it was illegal to write about such acts. But wait, the story ends with: "Note: All characters in this story are an alien race thousands of years old that only look like humans.". I'm not going to sit here and guess in advance what kind of content an adult system will fill up with. I just have to see how it goes and react accordingly.
3. Users must set their birth date and opt-in to see adult content. "Sensitive" content should be limited on the public Guild, and it should be tucked away behind an opt-in process.
4. People should be given the tools to manage multiple accounts. The Guild doesn't care about multiple accounts, as anything bad you can do with multiple accounts is already against the rules. People are going to make multiple accounts no matter what, and it's trivial to circumvent a system that prohibits them (for this reason I also don't bother with IP bans). Instead, I embrace them and would like to allow people to link their multiple accounts together so that they can quickly switch between them. For example, imagine a drop-down button next to your username in the top navbar that lets you switch between them.

Since the Guild's birth, its PM system has been filled with smut. People are going to do as they please. I'd rather at least offer the tools for these people to find each other in a way that doesn't impact the current system.

I haven't pondered the entire solution yet since I'm working on some other features. Maybe all it will be is an opt-in system that lets you tag and see checks with a set of adult tags and the content still takes place over PM. Not sure yet. Maybe that's the start and we'll go on from there.

[Captain Jordan]

I have zero issues with obscenity and the Guild is unrestricted by our personal limits as staff. I'm not even sure I have any. My goal for the Guild is for people to do as they please and to set boundaries that are optimal for the most amount of people.

@Mahz

As long as it keeps you safe and the Guild running, I'm in favor. I like most of these ideas.

<Snipped quote by Lillian Thorne>

Don't you know? People here love discussing to death features that have barely made it to the drawing board, let alone to the coding stage...

@Ellri

*giggles like a schoolgirl* It's funny 'cause it's true.

[LegendBegins]

I have zero issues with obscenity and the Guild is unrestricted by our personal limits as staff. I'm not even sure I have any. My goal for the Guild is for people to do as they please and to set boundaries that are optimal for the most amount of people.

I only care about a few things:

1. The Guild won't violate Adsense guidelines. I will rigorously re-examine those guidelines when the mature/adult system is actually the next feature in my queue (I still haven't even finished pondering what that system will be), but as @HeySeuss mentioned, and according to the guidelines last time I examined them, Adsense's restrictions only apply to each page the ads are on.
2. The Guild won't violate American federal law. This is another thing I will re-examine, but last I checked, there is no precedent for obscenity enforcement winning against written erotica. And for good reason. Imagine there was a fictional story that involves acts that would be illegal in real life, and imagine that it was illegal to write about such acts. But wait, the story ends with: "Note: All characters in this story are an alien race thousands of years old that only look like humans.". I'm not going to sit here and guess in advance what kind of content an adult system will fill up with. I just have to see how it goes and react accordingly.
3. Users must set their birth date and opt-in to see adult content. "Sensitive" content should be limited on the public Guild, and it should be tucked away behind an opt-in process.
4. People should be given the tools to manage multiple accounts. The Guild doesn't care about multiple accounts, as anything bad you can do with multiple accounts is already against the rules. People are going to make multiple accounts no matter what, and it's trivial to circumvent a system that prohibits them (for this reason I also don't bother with IP bans). Instead, I embrace them and would like to allow people to link their multiple accounts together so that they can quickly switch between them. For example, imagine a drop-down button next to your username in the top navbar that lets you switch between them.

Since the Guild's birth, its PM system has been filled with smut. People are going to do as they please. I'd rather at least offer the tools for these people to find each other in a way that doesn't impact the current system.

I haven't pondered the entire solution yet since I'm working on some other features. Maybe all it will be is an opt-in system that lets you tag and see checks with a set of adult tags and the content still takes place over PM. Not sure yet. Maybe that's the start and we'll go on from there.

@Mahz

Can I just say that you are the biggest blessing of an administrator I have ever had the pleasure of working/dealing with? You are one of the most reasonable forum owners I know (especially regarding the multiple accounts acceptance), and are always working for the convenience of the users.

[HeySeuss]

Well, if we're going to have adult RP's more prominently hosted here, more functionality for alts is a good thing in that people don't necessarily want to associate their "vanilla" account/persona with what they might be doing in the adult section. There are a bunch of other reasons to run alts; hell, the Mods have it for RPGN and Guild Mods.

It's also for a good way for someone to turn over a new leaf in here, if they haven't broken the rules but do have baggage for one reason or another (such as a reputation in off-topic that gets people feeling suspicious about their RP motivations -- @mdk mentioned this once.)

I remember telling a guy to just start fresh after a really ugly thread in RP Discussion and a mod at the time was like, "ALTS ARE VERBOTEN!" and I was like, "That sucks for him." Fun times. ;)

[Captain Jordan]

I remember telling a guy to just start fresh after a really ugly thread in RP Discussion and a mod at the time was like, "ALTS ARE VERBOTEN!" and I was like, "That sucks for him." Fun times. ;)

@HeySeuss

Yeah, hard to really police when free emails and dynamic IPs exist, not to mention VPNs. Might as well just let people have their anonymity so long as they're not rabblerousing or violating rules.

[mdk]

It's also for a good way for someone to turn over a new leaf in here, if they haven't broken the rules but do have baggage for one reason or another (such as a reputation in off-topic that gets people feeling suspicious about their RP motivations -- @mdk mentioned this once.)

@HeySeuss

Not that I've done it, but yeah, I know firsthand that off-topic antics can generate a certain amount of attitude that simply doesn't need to be carried into RP. But not just off-topic -- let's say you're in an RP with like eight other people and something comes up that you kind of wanna talk about in RP Discussion -- you can't do it without pissing off everyone in your thread. Now if you were able to make an alt who was also talking about a general issue that just so happened to apply to your RP friends, well, nobody's pointing fingers and everyone's better off for it.

Or maybe everyone points fingers at everyone. *shrug* But yeah, I support alts.

[HeySeuss]

Yeah, hard to really police when free emails and dynamic IPs exist, not to mention VPNs. Might as well just let people have their anonymity so long as they're not rabblerousing or violating rules.

@Captain Jordan

Pretty much the view here. Privacy can be granted while still handling the problems you brought up. Anyway, we don't get an awful lot of those problems. Most of what the mods have to do around here (thank you, Guild) is police the occasional furniture or kitchen bot. And once the CIA takes out Vance Miller in a drone strike, let's all hope it comes soon, we'll have a lot less of that.

Not that I've done it, but yeah, I know firsthand that off-topic antics can generate a certain amount of attitude that simply doesn't need to be carried into RP. But not just off-topic -- let's say you're in an RP with like eight other people and something comes up that you kind of wanna talk about in RP Discussion -- you can't do it without pissing off everyone in your thread. Now if you were able to make an alt who was also talking about a general issue that just so happened to apply to your RP friends, well, nobody's pointing fingers and everyone's better off for it.

Or maybe everyone points fingers at everyone. *shrug* But yeah, I support alts.

@mdk

Well, the point was that in an example like the one you gave, an alt is a handy solution for people trying to turn over a new leaf. Of course, it involves a degree of sacrifice, so it's probably better to take the original advice you gave -- and just don't get overly involved in the off-topic (mostly political) stuff to the point where you pick up that baggage.

It's a general rule of RP Discussions not to point fingers or name names anyway. It's not classy and it's flame-bait-y. But if someone is worried about blowback for describing a situation, yeah, sure they can get on an alt and describe it in general terms.

I'm sure we'll have to deal with nonsense down the road about that, but it's not a really big deal, and here's the thing -- they can do that right now and we aren't dealing with that, so I'm guessing we're good here.

[Rilla]

If mine was Allir would anyone notice? lol.

Question. Do I really need both PM and Notification to tell me I have a new message?

[Tatsua Aiisen]

This thread got extremely lewd while I wasn't looking.

Regarding the "Adult Section", the Guild used to have a group system right? Couldn't lewd things be in their own little box, like how those worked?

[HeySeuss]

This thread got extremely lewd while I wasn't looking.

Regarding the "Adult Section", the Guild used to have a group system right? Couldn't lewd things be in their own little box, like how those worked?

@Tatsua Aiisen

Like mahz said, we're still working out how to integrate adult RP and the opt-in system. We'll have more later.

[BBeast]

If mine was Allir would anyone notice? lol.

Question. Do I really need both PM and Notification to tell me I have a new message?

@Rilla

From what I gather, at the moment the two systems share the same notification system, and Mahz is yet to code a distinction.

[Mahz]

If mine was Allir would anyone notice? lol.

Question. Do I really need both PM and Notification to tell me I have a new message?

@Rilla

The "bell" button shows your total notification count. Your PM button only shows your PM notifications.

When I added the bell button, my original idea was to make it the one-stop shop for notifications somehow and then remove the PM button once I obsolete it with something better. Like maybe when you click the button, it expands a small menu that breaks down your notifications or something. Don't even know anymore.

But then the weekend ended. And I figured that as long as I'm still displaying the PM button, I might as well display the PM notification count on it. So here we are, in limbo.

---

Latest push:

- Introduced a super-basic "trophy" system. I'll finish and polish the UI and other unfinished bits once the contest ends and I need to award the various winners, but I wanted to at least get a demo working.
- @TheMaster99 has been awarded the Guild's first trophy! You can see it on his profile here: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/users/themaster99#trophies.



The UI isn't done, but you can visit the trophy's page here: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/trophies/1.

---

Gonna leave it like that for now and try to get some other features done tonight/tomorrow.

[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 brackets essentially keep the parser super simple, so I think you're right: A good middleground would be for an auto-suggestion box to appear once you've typed an "@" symbol and then one character, and then choosing a name from its drop-down will inject the bracketed version for you.

This makes it nicer to mention people, prevents typos, yet keeps the parser simple (unchanged). Though the few methods I can think of for making an auto-suggestion box appear while you're writing a post are still complex enough for me to put this kind of polish on ice til I tackle some richer features.

It'd be helpful if post updates could send new notifications (up until a threshold is hit), but I haven't put much thought into how to constrain it from resending notifications. I know what I'll do: I'll change the notifications system so that notifications aren't deleted from the database, just "seen". That way I know how many notifications each post has generated (threshold detection), which users have already been notified, and a nice side-effect is that I can add a "See old notifications" button to the notifications page which can sometimes be useful.

[Ellri]

quick thought:
Will the trophy system be primarily for the contests like RPGC, or will it cover other things too?

[Syben]

@Ellri I think trophies should be for contests.

Nobody ever handed me a trophy unless I competed for something.

Even then it was one of those crappy, 2 inch "everybody is a winner" trophy. Pfh, charlatans.

[Ellri]

While we think they shouldn't just be for contests, we also don't think they should be handed out lightly. They should only be handed out to people for achieving something worth great notice.

[Syben]

@Ellri If you make a SPAM Award, then all hope is truly lost :P

[Ellri]

Spam, while its not bad in itself, doesn't really need rewards.

[Mahz]

quick thought:
Will the trophy system be primarily for the contests like RPGC, or will it cover other things too?

@Ellri

Though the contests compelled me to build it, I generalized the trophy system so that it can be used for anything. @TheMaster99 was awarded a trophy that had nothing to do with contests, for example.

I like the idea of using trophies to celebrate hard/unlikely/rare/competitive feats. I don't like "achievement unlocked" systems where you get almost every achievement just by playing through the game on normal-difficulty.

Either way, trophies are going to vary in difficulty/rarity no matter what, so I decided to go a bit further and make trophies expose their own difficulty. In the screenshot, you can see that the trophy reveals that @TheMaster99 was the 1st person to receive the award, and the trophy has been awarded once.

Once the trophy system matures and trophies accumulate, it will be possible to calculate the rarity of each trophy based on their age and award frequency. You should be able to sort all trophies by rarity to see who owns the most coveted ones.

Another idea that I mentioned before is to allow you to "Activate" any trophy in your trophy box, and you can only have one activated at a time. Maybe an activated trophy turns on the trophy's unique effect if it has one. For example, maybe some trophy's unique effect is to give you a special, colored title beneath your username (like the the award for contests on Oldguild). And maybe rarer or more special trophies have more creative/interesting effects when active.

- Just some random thoughts before I get back to finishing a basic version of the status system.

[NuttsnBolts]

I like the idea of using trophies to celebrate hard/unlikely/rare/competitive feats. I don't like "achievement unlocked" systems where you get almost every achievement just by playing through the game on normal-difficulty.

@Mahz

I know it's off topic, but not if we are talking about Fallout New Vegas (They're just plain evil)...

I only have 77% of the achievements unlocked from that game and 350+ hours of game play across 4 save files with one save file, the 109hr one that included all the DLC, glitching and not allowing me to complete the Caesar's Legion arc to obtain the "Veni, Vidi, Vici" achievement.

Veni, Vidi, Vici...
Translation: I came, I saw, I conquered (Lies!)...

_{Achievements are the bane of my existence}