Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'll try to fix the clutter issue right now so that the timestamp collapses onto its own line.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@JBRam2002 My attempt at fixing the issue was to group ghosts together if they were online within 12 hours (within "ghost range"):



Once 13+ hours have elapsed since their last-online timestamp, they aren't shown as ghosts anymore.

Mahz's Dev Journal

What does it even mean when people press that they "Like" a post?

@Ellri

It certainly ranges from "I like this" to "I approve of this" yet sometimes means little more than "I acknowledge this". So I'm unlikely to put a finer point on it.

It's about as meaningless as "+1", just a generic token of positivity.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@0Z It's a good idea and certainly something I want to do.

I think I'd have to make it asynchronous. Like you click "Download Archive" on a topic/convo, and the forum notifies you when the archive has been created with a download link.

It's something I want to revisit after I crunch through the popular feedback issues/requests.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri "Like" and "Approve" mean different things, no?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Update: Nerfed ghost-mode

Ghost-mode no longer displays "Invisible".

Instead, it simply says if you've been on within the past 12 hours.



If it's been more than 12 hours since you were last online, then ghost-mode doesn't apply anymore and the forum shows an accurate timestamp.

Also, the friends list now correctly checks if your friend has ghost-mode enabled.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Ellri Maybe I need to rethink the UI in general.

Right now, /subscriptions contains all things that you have bookmarked for various potential reasons:

1. Topics/roleplays that you are actively posting in and want to know when there's new activity. Updates in these topics are basically what people are waiting for when they refresh /subscriptions multiple times per day.
2. Then there's stuff you just pointed out: topics/roleplays that are more "points of interest" of some sort. You don't necessarily care if people post, or they may be old/dead and will never have anybody post in them.

I think your proposal has some legs: maybe everything starts off as a subscription. At the very least, you get an on-site notification for it. And you can opt-in to receiving email-notifications for those as well.

Then you can "Archive" each subscription. Archived subscriptions moves them to a separate tab (/subscriptions/archive) and you'll get no notifications for those.

Of course, to make this bearable, I'd have to increase the sub limit from 200 to 1000. And I'd want to give the /subscriptions page some mass-moderation tools like a checkbox on each subscription and the ability to mass-archive and the ability to update the notification settings for multiples subs at once.

This seems doable to me without being too confusing, and it cleans up the /subscriptions page to contain only the topics/roleplays that will create a notification.

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Updates

1. Post Autosaving: Posts (not PMs or topics, yet) now autosave to your browser every five seconds as you write them.



If you submit the form and the forum successfully saves your post, then the draft is cleared from your browser.

Otherwise, visiting the topic/roleplay again will repopulate the reply form with your draft so that you can recover it or try to submit it.

Autosaved drafts only save for six hours right now since the purpose is for you to be able to recover your post from things like server errors and connectivity errors.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Thanks for all the quality feedback that yall've been submitting so far. It's really helped me out and made it obvious what I need to be working on over the next couple weeks!

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@JBRam2002 Well, I guess people should be able to choose if they get on-site notifications and/or email notifications for a given topic or roleplay, so that would be two checkboxes.

Maybe instead of checkboxes, there's a drop-down box next to each topic/roleplay where you can choose:

1. No notifications (default)
2. On-site notifications
3. Email notifications (+ on-site notifications)

Of course, visiting a topic/roleplay should automatically clear all notifications for that topic/roleplay so that you don't have to delete stale notifications yourself.

How does that sound?

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Updates:

1. Post deletion: You can now delete your own posts within 10 minutes after creation. The 10 minute limit for now just lets you delete your own double-posts or wrong-tab posts. What's a more reasonable limit that prevents people from vandalizing a roleplay by deleting all of their posts?

2. FAQ: I just started stubbing out an FAQ page linked from the navbar:



All staff members can edit that page, so we'll be filling it with more stuff soon. It's pretty empty right now.

Mahz's Dev Journal

@Altered Tundra No, I think that there's a difference between topics you just want to 'bookmark' vs topics you also want to receive notifications for (whether you are happy with just the on-site notifications or if you want emails when they are updated).

I think communicating that while making it easy to manage this difference via the UI is the hardest part.