Mahz

Drop Acid, draw Self

Meanwhile it takes me 20 minutes of intense focus just to type out "I'm tripping balls".

The Twelve Labours: General Discussion

I've finally awarded the trophies to the winners of TTL #3: roleplayerguild.com/trophy-groups/5.

I know those trophy pages are pretty ugly. They were supposed to be just temporarily ugly.

The winners of the Antlers of the Ceryneian Hind trophy can activate it for its special effect, a custom user-title.

"Your score beats or equals 99.72% of all."

92 wpm. Can't out-honk the @Hank

Mahz's Dev Journal

Okay, I'm back again.

Will be catching up on my backlog of responsibilities this week starting with the contest/trophies. @Hank also let me know via Facebook that we've had a bit of an adbot problem, so I'll also be introducing his preventative measure idea of requiring new users to create a new topic in the Introduce Yourself forum before they can do anything else. I also have other ideas in mind if that's insufficient.

People often ask me why I leave for long durations of time, and it's because when I shift focus to the Guild, since it's so close to what I do for a living (web development), I've noticed a pattern where my focus on the Guild often comes at the expense of neglecting my work. So that the Guild doesn't interfere with my work, I tend to wait until tackling critical objectives at work before allocating time to the Guild.

Wish I could find a moderate middleground, but I've been trying to do that since 2007. Thankfully the Guild's staff is always so consistent that they make up for lulls in my burst-fire, and one of my main goals for the remainder of the year is to continue improving their tools so that I'm not the bottleneck of things like contests/trophies.

Mahz's Dev Journal

snip

This isn't a recommendation for improvements on the site's settings but an observation that I'd like to share in hopes that it will be acknowledged and taken into consideration.

Before I came across Roleplayer Guild years ago -- and yeah, I'll admit that this is an alt account -- I noticed one recurrent theme here and it's its lack of community.

During a hiatus I unexpectedly took a few weeks ago, I discovered another site on it and I love it for what it is but Roleplayer Guild was the first official forum I'd come across (since the ones my friends from high school made just died from lack of activity and scheduling) and it became like a second home. It's not difficult to see that the vast majority of its users are very divided and haughty. I don't know why that is but I don't feel like I'm the only one. I see a lot of people attacking one another and that's so common on here and very off-putting. Not to mention, it's really pathetic. Yeah, it's the internet, petty fights happen and because of so many users, we're bound to clash but come on. Aside from that, I see a lot of users get away with tons of things namely speaking on NSFW (not just looking at the 1X1 department) and it being out in the open, ignorant to the fact that there are underage users on here; I'm not a minor myself but how visible it is, is just disappointing for me and I'm sure for the rest of us who are not on about that. I'm sure there's more to that but that's the first one that came to mind.

I see a lot of potential for Roleplayer Guild but a huge part of me wishes it had another Guildfall, to be brutally honest.

There's a lot of improvements that could be made starting off with establishing (updating as well) and putting forth-front the rules and giving this place a facelift that has a welcoming feel to it and not a barren one (this place is awesome, come on! :)). With all due respect to the staff and with their personal lives in mind: Where are you guys? Where are you when you need to oversee what's going on and what can be improved? I know applications for staff members are open but regardless.

The least important thing to work on are the site's additional settings and new features but rather what keeps it running (yes, money) but your site's members cooperation, authority, and unity.

Please don't take this as an attack to Roleplayer Guild but for what it is: a humble plea.

@Iliana

The guild lost a lot from guildfall. Lots of people simply never came back or never moved past it. Seven years is a lot of time and community to suddenly vanish, and it takes time for a sense of incumbency to re-emerge. After all, the guild suffered a hard reset and then endured a year on a shaky platform that I then rebuilt this year. Now things are coming together.

As far as rules go, I created the guild to be a place with few of them. It's the crux of my ethos and the laissez faire spirit of the guild.

Maybe there's an above-average level of in-fighting going on lately. I don't know, you're the first to point it out. I think that a "Report Post" button that lowers the barrier for users to summon help will address some of this which will in turn help me get a better reading of the kind of interpersonal problems people are having on the guild.

I appreciate the feedback. You say that you don't have any answers, but neither do I. The guild is always growing over time and tends to work things out on its own. Some people don't like it, but more do, thus net growth.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Mahz

Hey Mahz, I have a question that has been nagging at me for a bit so thought I would ask. Will there ever be a way for a GM to delete things that aren't theirs in the character tab only? The reason I ask this is that I have found that the character tab builds up in group RPs when people abandon it or never even join in or just make a post in a wrong place. I have one what it says I have 22 characters or players but most of them aren't there anymore and it makes it hard to view the ones that are. I'm sure yo will say no because this might cause issues or an over power thing but it is a pain when you try to ask people to do something like edit it. They can't even delete the post or anything.

Maybe will there be a way to delete your own posts? It might help that issue without having to worry about to much issues. I don't know, just thought I might ask. Also sorry if this has already been asked and or answered

@Akayaofthemoon

I'm generally reluctant to use deletion as a solution, but you expose a problem: there's no real system to actually manage the characters tab. And there's probably a good solution that doesn't involve outright deletion.

For example, it would be interesting to have an actual character system of some sort. From there would extend features like selecting the character you're posting as, giving GMs a place to annotate each character (particularly for table-top games), marking characters as active vs inactive (which would address your problem), etc.

There's probably some lightweight system that provides integration/structure when people want it and stays out of the way when they don't. In the meantime, I'm not sure what I can do to help. Maybe the upcoming shared GM space on each tab will provide a decent place to maintain a list of active chars until I can think of something better.

There have been issues with players deliberately griefing things (including by nuking their own posts) even in RPs I've been in, so I won't support it. And then there are the 'I didn't do anything' deleter folks, which became abundant enough for us to have to implement storing of previous post versions.
Besides, I'd not be happy if a CS I worked hard on, but for some reason forgot to archive, were to be arbitrarily eradicated (besides, people who read back in IC would often still want to see the old characters).
Eventually, there would be more convenient way to summon mods, though.

@Shienvien

Speaking of, historical post vandalism is a growing concern that I'll be able to address with my almost-finished post-history system. Imagine going back to a roleplay you poured many months into just to find out that one of the key characters simply vanished because they vandalized their posts.

At least with a post-history system, if someone vandalizes their posts, I can trivially execute a query like "revert all of foobar's edits made after 15 min ago".

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins Oh yeah, you have to first run the task that builds the database tables/schema.

By default, the guild tries to connect to a local Postgres database named "guild". You'll have to create that first. (Postgres seems to be the hardest part of all this because it installs slightly different on every OS and might need some permissions tweaking.)

createdb guild

Then run the task that sets up the database from the guild directory:

node --harmony ./server/reset_db

And now you should be able to launch the server:

node --harmony ./server

You can add me on Skype (dan_neu) if you want quicker/better help.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins

Fortunately those aren't big issues.

You can ignore WARNs. That example is just whining that the guild doesn't have a license defined.

The "env" error is simply because Windows doesn't have that command.

Open up package.json and change line 7:

"start-dev": "env $(cat .env | xargs) nodemon --harmony --expose-gc ./server | bunyan"

to this:

"start-dev": "nodemon --harmony ./server"

Now the command npm run-script start-dev might successfully get you to the next error.