Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

Is it me, or do the GM/coGM post badges look different now? To be fair, I'm on a PC at work on Internet Explorer that's older than version 9 and the whole site looks a little different so it could be that.

@Hank

Makes sense since the badges and various other bits of the UI use styling features that only work on modern browsers (less than or equal to 5 years old, I'd guess).

That's rough that you have to use IE8 at work.

Editing and hiders don't work for you because there's probably some Javascript on the Guild that IE8 doesn't support, so it's throwing an error and preventing the rest of the Javascript (editing, hiders) from executing. Might be a simple fix, but hard for me to track down without seeing the errors myself.

@Mahz: Still being logged out on browser restart.

@Shienvien

Okay, I'd simply reverted my previous "fix" since it didn't seem to do anything for you aside from making the code slightly more complex. And you just confirmed the revert didn't magically fix anything.

So my next attempt will be to set remember-me expiration for 6 months instead of 12 months in case there's an issue with too-far-ahead expiration.

While we're speaking of the Guild's style, I've noticed that posts tend to become rather large, especially when quoting another. Would it be possible to implement a system that automatically collapses quotes that can be expanded?

@LegendBegins

I figure that if it'd be an improvement for quotes to be collapsed by default, then the quoting is extraneous to begin with.

However, I think the Guild needs a way to reply to a post without quoting it. Like maybe some syntax like [@Mahz,374819] will drop into a glyph like Replying to Mahz, <Post 374819>: where the post is either a link to the post or pops up a modal window with the post's content so the reader can quickly establish context.

I would think this would eliminate some redundancy from the way people sometimes use quotes, and also keep posts physically leaner.

who is ivanka trump?

Help with Quote

@Tulpa What's actually messing up on mobile?

Is it a spacing/centering issue?

One problem I see is that you're using spaces to center something. 50 spaces might make something look centered on a screen of a certain size, but it won't be centered on a screen of any other size.

As @Ellri's link demonstrates, use the [center]...[/center] tags to center things. Center tags are the only way to center something across all devices and screen widths.

Does that solve your problem?

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ryuzaki Agreed, I still need to fix that.

@Shienvien I pushed up a mild change. Can you try logging in again with remember-me checked to see if your browser is honoring the 1 year expiration?

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins Alright, finished Task 1.

Your moved topics should now be sorted correctly on the forum they were moved to.

Agreed that the papertrail is more of a cherry on top rather than a dire necessity. Definitely seems like an easier feature to implement than it really is. If it's not worth the complexity of bringing the feature back, one compromise is to have the forum send everyone a notification when a topic is moved that they posted in or subscribed to.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins I made some progress fixing the database query. It's pretty tough.

My database queries are eating some serious incremental complexity over time as I add/change features. Gonna have to break this up into two smaller tasks and finish the first task tonight.

Task 1: I'm going to remove the whole "Topic X was moved to Forum Y" UI papertrail system (which is the source of this particular complexity). That way I can get a clean, low-risk deploy that fixes the issue tonight at the expense of losing the feature that leaves a "redirected topic" behind on the forum that a topic was moved from.

Task 2: Then I'll have to reimplement the "redirected topic" feature in the future as a new commit + deploy that adds the complexity back into my fetch-forum-topics database queries.

That way I'll be able to monitor performance changes related to each task individually and protect against regressions.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Just finished a basic version of the first task I mention in my previous post.

Moving on to my next task.

@LegendBegins Oh yeah, I'll fix that now. Jesus, thanks for the reminder.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Not to be nagging, but we're wondering what sort of feature(s) you're working on currently for the guild, @Mahz...

There's not much to do down in our thread with the collection of suggestions other than to add new ideas from people to it. It'd be wonderful to remove ideas from the list due to them being coded in too. It feels sad to only add more and more good ideas without seeing anything come of them.

@Ellri

I haven't been making much visible progress. I've been trying to tackle more "soft" issues like the fact that I have 10-15 half-finished features sitting on my local computer.

For example, a couple months ago in this thread I announced the imminent release of the "local-save" post feature when I was 90% finished... but I ran out of time on Sunday night before I could finish the final 10%. Instead of blowing my load in this thread I should've just spent that time on actually completing it.

In general, I've been trying to clean things up on my local computer and remember just where the heck I left off on all these features.

It's like trying to finish an essay you started a year ago even though you just have to finish that final paragraph — to even write that final paragraph a year later, you have to re-read the whole thing multiple times to reverse-engineer your game plan and credentialize in your unfinished work which you aren't even that happy with since it's so unpolished/unrefined. And you spend half the time wondering if it would be faster just to start over from scratch.

My first task today is to improve the ContestMod kit so that @mdk and @Terminal can finally edit the "Current Contest" in the sidebar, so that's what I'll be working on. It physically pains me when I carve out a chunk of Guild-time only to realize (like right now) that I'm 7 days late on updating the sidebar, and it undoubtedly prevents contest participation from being what it could be. So I'm super amped to get this done finally, and I think it will be a boon for the contest system.

My second task is to try to fix @Shienvien's cookie issue.

A while back, @Hank pointed out how unusable the chat is on mobile and it's been sitting in my priority list. I took a look at what I'd need to do to resolve this and I need to just rewrite it to address these issues from scratch which escalates the task into it's-gonna-take-a-full-Saturday territory, so I have no ETA on that. Felt like Hank and anyone else struggling with chat on mobile or a slow computer deserved an update on that.

As usual, I'll keep this thread updated with any other development that I happen to tackle. Ideally my third task will be to finish off one of the unfinished features I've been organizing on my computer.

@Mahz: Just in case you changed anything with the login cookies as you mentioned you might - browser restarts still log me out.

@Shienvien

It's weird because I checked the code and I haven't touched it since I last "fixed" it months ago. As I mention above in this post, I'll implement my hotfix idea today and then query you later on to see if it resolves your issue.

@Mahz

Could you please fix that URL parser of yours?
Its making it impossible to use `code` tags to help people fix stuff like their sigs... It overrules disabled BBcode and eats ending tags like `img`.

@Ellri

Hmm, okay. I'll see if there's a simple solution. What makes it hard is that the BBCode pipeline looks like:

thePost -> processBBCode -> autolinkUrls -> html

The `autolinkUrls` step just doesn't have access to the `processBBCode` metadata to make decisions like "okay, ignore stuff between these tags" which is why I haven't though of a trivial fix. But I'll take a look at it after the work I've provisioned for myself earlier in this post.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins Yeah, it sustains its server costs.

I just wish it sustained its Mahz-labor costs.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@LegendBegins It's just not worth it.

I learned this the hard way last year. When I first wrote the Guild from scratch in January 2014 right after Guildfall, I tried running my own servers/operations. Thought I was being smart/frugal. As the year went on and the Guild got busier and busier, I was spending more and more time dealing with operations instead of writing code. I made some wrong operations decisions and didn't have time to refactor the code, and that led to stagnant features and performance issues towards mid-/late-2014. I was just stretched too thin.

When I rewrote the Guild again in January 2015, I focused on outsourcing the operations so that I could focus on code. Now I can devote pretty much all my Guild-time to code which is why I've been able to make much better progress this year.

My process is really streamlined now which I realize is the most important thing to optimize for. When I write a patch or new feature, I can have it deployed to multiple servers within 60 seconds, and I can scale up/down the server count by click-and-dragging a slider.