Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Speaking of drafts, it just so happens that last night I had a dream about making a RP post on here. The server disconnected, but I was relieved to find it was still there when the page reloaded. I saw this grey message box with black text and border saying something like "Reloading your post...". Coincidence? Is the intention to have a floating grey message box? Because if so... like wow.

@SilverRain

It's not implemented on the server yet. Not sure what you saw.

However, the browser is often good about remembering text form data. For instance, I clicked a link while writing this post, clicked the Back button, and my unfinished post was still sitting here. So if you ever land on an error page or if your internet is down when you submit, you have a good chance of recovering your post by navigating back.

RPGN ver 7.27.15

Didn't even notice the date until I clicked in to the thread and read yall's posts.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Shienvien: github.com/danneu/guild/commit/8818fd8..

Mahz's Dev Journal

Another thought: On the RPGN: how about a new field in the front page display about RPGN that says who posted last? Maybe that'll get it more attention?

Also, would it be feasible to give it a bit of an image the way the RPGC stuff gets small images? The RPGN project used to be far more obvious before and deserves to be so again.

@Ellri

Good suggestions. I'll play with that right now.

Update: Alright, hacked something slightly better together:

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins

It should. But ensure that you have some version of Postgres 9.4 installed.

Also, how did you manage to double-post? Your posts are two minutes apart. What happened? Did you click "Post Reply", nothing seemed to happen for two minutes, so you clicked "Post Reply" again? Trying to figure out how to gracefully prevent double-posts.

Mahz's Dev Journal

The Github issues are mostly for me. I don't expect anyone to visit them or feel like they must check them before making a suggestion.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri Thanks, there's even an open issue for that: github.com/danneu/guild/issues/40

Though I just fleshed out a nice solution and tacked it on to the issue, so there's that. Progress.

Email Notifications

@Milla Maxwell Agreed, this is one of the essential features that I'm working towards right now.

You can read more about what's currently on my plate right here: roleplayerguild.com/posts/2870798

I'm very close to being able to create something like this on your settings page:

Receive an email whenever:

[ ] Someone rates your post
[X] Someone PMs you
[X] Someone posts in a subscribed topic

Request to Move Thread

@LegendBegins Interesting. You just helped uncover a fundamental bug.

Found it on page 4 of the Casual Roleplay forum:



And this is how it displays in the Free Roleplay forum:



(Thinking out loud) Looking at the code, it sorts topics by:

ORDER BY (t.moved_at OR t.latest_post_at) DESCENDING

But that's wrong. That logic will prevent a moved topic from ever getting bumped to the top.

It should instead be:

ORDER BY MAX(t.moved_at, t.latest_post_at) DESCENDING

That way the forum takes the most recent of the two timestamps.

#willfix - Created an issue: github.com/danneu/guild/issues/71

Apparently this has been broken since I built the move-topic system months ago.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I ran out of time this weekend before I could finish any of the other things I wanted to get done.

Finished:

• Visitor Message System (beta)
  As I announced a few pages ago, I did finish and deploy the very basic start of a Visitor Message system.
  
  You can find a "Visitor Messages" tab on everyone's user profile and they'll receive a notification every time they receive a new message or when someone adds a reply to a VM on their page.
  
  However, the system doesn't currently send notifications when someone replies to your VMs on other walls, nor does it notify you when someone replies to a VM that you've replied to, so right now it only helps you stay on top of VM convos that may be happening on your own profile. Once I address some of these basic limitations, I'll make it the basic tab on the user profile.

Unfinished progress:

• Subscription Notifications
  On my development server, I've created a new notification type that notifies you whenever one of your subscribed topics receives new posts. If you already have a notification for a topic/roleplay, then the existing notification just updates to say "This subscribed topic 42 unread replies".
  
  I got that working, but I ran out of time thinking about how to automatically and performantly discard that notification once you read the thread instead of forcing your to manually delete that notification. I really want to avoid "notification blindness", and the crux of it involves making the system delete notifications for you.
  
  However, this feature is 90% finished and I hope to finish it next weekend. This is the feature that I'm going to build email-notifications on top of so you'll be able to opt-in to receive emails when subscriptions have unread messages.
• Mobile-friendliness for chat
  I spent all my time trying to figure out a good way to test my local development site from my iPhone. Sorry @Hank. I have some ideas of how I can address the issues, but I didn't have time to validate them.
• Saving drafts of posts
  This is a feature I got to 90% completion *last* weekend but totally forgot about until last night. Along with subscription notifications, finishing this feature is my goal for this coming weekend. Once finished, I think it will be an amazing experience for people to submit a post, encounter an error (internet dead, server rebooting, etc), visit the thread a few hours later, and find that their post is 100% intact ready to be resubmitted.
• Tracking post edit-history
  I spent an hour on Saturday building a quick system that saved all of a post's edits in the database along with who made the edit and when.
  
  There are a lot of good features I can build on top of this feature, but once I vetted my approach, I abandoned my progress to go back to working on other features.
  
  One feature that derives from this one is the feature that allows GMs and co-GMs to edit a special shared post in each roleplay tab. Being able to browse the post's revision history will make everyone accountable for their edits and allow the GMs/mods to rollback a post after a vandalizing edit is made.

So those are my plans for next weekend. I'm looking forward to these upcoming features!