Mahz's Dev Journal

[Blue Demon]

A "ghost" or BCC would only be nice if you had to option to send it to a Mod.

[Rilla]

I don't see a need for any of it really. Aside from all the possible crap to come from ghosting, why go through the process of adding in the other options?

In a PM I want responses, so why limit them to what they can and can't comment on? If I don't want Jack, John, Jimmy, or Martha to comment, it'd be easy to just message the preferred commenter.

And edits are easy as mentioning the needed edit and where it should to, or copy/pasting and making the edit that way.

[Captain Jordan]

A "ghost" or BCC would only be nice if you had to option to send it to a Mod.

@Blue Demon

I'd rather have "Report PM."

[Blue Demon]

True enough. Go with that.

[Mahz]

Warmed up today with a silly but simple feature.

Latest Push:

- You can now like statuses (from the sidebar)



Currently can only like statuses and see like count on the sidebar. I'll fill the rest in some other time so this silly feature doesn't take up most of the day.

Gonna see if I can tackle a hard task with the remainder of my weekend or not.

[Mahz]

Latest push:

- Replaced the dumb "bio" graphic with a button.
- Inlined the bio and status buttons on the userbit.
- The status button now displays/dismisses on hover and click. Should be more convenient to quickly glance at someone's status now.
- Temporarily disabled the "Latest Topics" tab on the user profile. It was pretty buggy. I'll soon replace it with a link to the search page that searches for topics created by the user (once I implement that type of search).

[The Harbinger of Ferocity]

Latest push:

- Replaced the dumb "bio" graphic with a button.
- Inlined the bio and status buttons on the userbit.
- The status button now displays/dismisses on hover and click. Should be more convenient to quickly glance at someone's status now.
- Temporarily disabled the "Latest Topics" tab on the user profile. It was pretty buggy. I'll soon replace it with a link to the search page that searches for topics created by the user (once I implement that type of search).

@Mahz

Thank you for both of the updates, @Mahz.

Although I will miss the novel glow of the old "Bio" portion, hah.

[Shienvien]

Ghosting will only result in a loss of what the PM was meant to be: A place to trust that messages may be sent to other members without fear of anyone else seeing them.

@LegendBegins

This. If a person starts a PM conversation with me that they're sharing with someone else without me even knowing it, then chances are something rotten is going on. There is always the option of said someone just pasting the text or screenshotting otherwise, but why support questionable behavior by in-built site features?

[LegendBegins]

Latest push:

- Replaced the dumb "bio" graphic with a button.
- Inlined the bio and status buttons on the userbit.
- The status button now displays/dismisses on hover and click. Should be more convenient to quickly glance at someone's status now.
- Temporarily disabled the "Latest Topics" tab on the user profile. It was pretty buggy. I'll soon replace it with a link to the search page that searches for topics created by the user (once I implement that type of search).

@Mahz

New mobile issue: The status box cannot be closed at all unless you tap another element with user interaction capability (ie pictures, replies, another user's status). Not even clicking the status button again will close it.

[Mahz]

Decided to implement a hard feature this weekend: the unread-posts tracking system.

Here's what I've got working so far:



Those "Unread" buttons will appear on each tab that has new posts, and clicking one will take you to the first unread post of that tab.

The tracker is backed by the database, so it'll remember your unread posts across computers/devices.

New mobile issue: The status box cannot be closed at all unless you tap another element with user interaction capability (ie pictures, replies, another user's status). Not even clicking the status button again will close it.

@LegendBegins

Thanks, I'll try to fix it right now. (Edit: Think I fixed it, I'll deploy the fix later tonight)

[Captain Jordan]

Decided to implement a hard feature this weekend: the unread-posts tracking system.

Here's what I've got working so far:



Those "Unread" buttons will appear on each tab that has new posts, and clicking one will take you to the first unread post of that tab.

The tracker is backed by the database, so it'll remember your unread posts across computers/devices.

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>

Thanks, I'll try to fix it right now. (Edit: Think I fixed it, I'll deploy the fix later tonight)

@Mahz

WHOA! Interface needs work, but WHOA!

Hope to get a Mark Read/Unread feature, too, at some point.

[Mahz]

WHOA! Interface needs work, but WHOA!

Hope to get a Mark Read/Unread feature, too, at some point.

@Captain Jordan

Not sure where else to but these buttons, but here it is with the padding fixed:



Gonna launch it soon with minimal features (no mark-as-read) so I can ensure it doesn't introduce a large performance regression.

Also, I'll recreate the /subscriptions page layout on the topics-list of each roleplaying forum (i.e. make it so you see the latest IC, OOC, and CHAR post for each roleplay).

Finally, the "Latest" button for each topic/roleplay is going to be swapped out with the go-to-first-unread logic.

[Shienvien]

Why the continued light-grey on medium-grey on all buttons, though? Still not exactly the most comfortable color scheme for reading text. o.õ

Else, good work. Go to last read is indeed a rather important addition, especially regarding fast-moving threads.

[Mahz]

Why the continued light-grey on medium-grey on all buttons, though? Still not exactly the most comfortable color scheme for reading text. o.õ

Else, good work. Go to last read is indeed a rather important addition, especially regarding fast-moving threads.

@Shienvien

Alright, I've updated the grey-button CSS class to have a font-color that's almost white. I'll deploy the update to the server later tonight.

[Shienvien]

I personally would perhaps prefer if the buttons were black or near-black and the text color kept the same (as I think I've suggested a couple of times in the past - on lighter screens with minimal brightness the background is a bit lighter than would be optimal even for white text, and darker overall look is nicer, no?), but maybe it'll work out this way, too.

[Mahz]

@Shienvien Good idea, I'll have to play with darker backgrounds. Made an issue so I don't forget.

[Captain Jordan]

@Shienvien Good idea, I'll have to play with darker backgrounds. Made an issue so I don't forget.

@Mahz

Honestly, they look fine to me. At some point I'd like to see a high contrast theme made to separate this out a bit. No offense to @Shienvien, but the higher contrast buttons and colors often get too glaring.

And, @Mahz, is it absolutely necessary to have one-click access to both the OP and Latest Unread Post? I'd be curious how many clicks to the OP you're going to get once the Unread feature goes live. As much as I sometimes detest it elsewhere, I'm wondering how awful it would be to just default those tabs to the Latest Unread Post.

[Shienvien]

Honestly, they look fine to me. At some point I'd like to see a high contrast theme made to separate this out a bit. No offense to @Shienvien, but the higher contrast buttons and colors often get too glaring.

Given that I have heightened contrast/hue sensitivity, I'd probably be the first person to point it out if the buttons went too far in the other direction... This is also why I'd advocate not going for white text for adjustment, and opting for gray-on-black (not white-on-black!) instead. The proposed button color-scheme, in my mind, would be no more contrast than the text on the general background.
- I do *not* want a high contrast theme, and in fact might be unable to use one. I just want the text on the buttons to be somewhat comfortably readable on "light" screens when the brightness and contrast have been turned down.

And, @Mahz, is it absolutely necessary to have one-click access to both the OP and Latest Unread Post?

Presently I find myself going between the OP and last page often enough. I am inclined to believe both are fairly useful, at least to some users.

[Captain Jordan]

Fair points, @Shienvien. I'll give you the theme.

About the buttons, I put some more thought into it. What changing the tab read counts to display UNREAD posts, similar to how the PM counts were changed from total to unread. Then the numbers could take one to the newest post, while the IC/OOC/CHAR title can take one to the OP.

Goes to OP --> [IC (#unread count)] <-- Goes to first unread post

[Mahz]

And, @Mahz, is it absolutely necessary to have one-click access to both the OP and Latest Unread Post? I'd be curious how many clicks to the OP you're going to get once the Unread feature goes live. As much as I sometimes detest it elsewhere, I'm wondering how awful it would be to just default those tabs to the Latest Unread Post.

@Captain Jordan

That's a good question. I default to forum convention when I can, but I would like to use analytics to experiment with other possibilities. I'm using Google Analytics, so maybe I already have the data I need to measure that kind of stuff. As it stands, the first page of a topic is important for the original context. But for a roleplay, it's a bit more open ended.

Similarly, I often wonder what the best "OP" for a roleplay is. For instance, if I link you to my roleplay /topics/142, it currently redirects to the first page of the IC tab which kinda makes sense since the OOC and Character tabs are supporting behind-the-curtain tabs for the main production: the IC tab.

...But it's kinda weird when you look at it from the perspective of Google search results. Do I tell Google to index the IC, OOC, and Characters tabs of each roleplay? Then, if someone searches Google for a roleplay title, what is the most relevant result? I'm also splitting the relevance between three pages (page 1 of each tab) instead of representing a roleplay as a single page to google.

Maybe it makes sense to have a "dashboard" or "hub" page for each roleplay. A high level overview of the roleplay of some sort that also acts as a landing page. I don't know. I think the right solution will emerge as I continue to make incremental, uncontroversial changes to the Guild. I'm already stressing the forum metaphor as it is. The codebase is already littered with "if roleplay, do this, if regular topic, do that" branch logic. I can't wait until the topic and roleplay systems naturally separate from each other in time.

That said, I still have plenty of work to do just catching up to what people expect of a forum.