Mahz

Mahz's Dev Journal

@nodogs Can you give me more info about how tables broke (re: your status).

Mahz's Dev Journal

Hey everyone.

After almost ten years in Mexico, I've finally moved back to the States .

New city, new Mahz.

Last night, I started the process of dusting off the Guild's cobwebs after about three hours of emotional evasion.

@LegendBegins has been trying to contribute to the Guild's code for years. Much like the Guild, years of neglect wasn't enough to completely lose him, so I've finally merged some of his fixes into the software. But seriously, I'm thankful and frankly in awe.

Some things I've started working on for the next few days:

- Clean up the Guild. Hide dead forums like Persistent World. Hide dead features like the Arena leaderboard. Like, why is there still a message from 22 May 2017 above the reply box announcing the autosave feature?
- Update the server. Both the database and the forum's platform are out of date. It makes the system harder to work on. This will probably result in some downtime.
- Fix the Discord link and other assorted bugs that have cropped up over the last year.

I've also wanted to put some time into thinking about the Guild's future. What's next for the Guild? A slow death? Just the same ugly taxi cab yellow clashing into the same nauseating gray over and over again until there's nobody left for it to offend?

Is it too late to do something better? How much gas is left in the tank? etc.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I'll be taking the forum down this weekend to upgrade the database and syncing the server up with the code.

New Bean to The Pod

A new bean to the pod? Well that's cute.

Hope you find your pod.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Just wanted to write an update here to remind everyone I'm still alive.

I'm working on an update. It's a bunch of smaller, not so consequential improvements in the code that I've accumulated over a six month period. Some random bug fixes you might notice as well. I want to thank @LegendBegins for pointing out a security bug that will be fixed in this update.

In other news, I want to have a quick memorial for my cat that I had to put asleep on my birthday Sept 13th a couple weeks ago. She's seen in the first test pic of the Guild's image hosting system:



It's heart-breaking that such an innocent, sweet cosita has to suffer at all. :( But she's not suffering anymore.

I hope everyone is doing well.

General Stories. Seeking Players (Updated)

clever way to bump your thread although somewhat questionable

@Dr Sue

Bumping interest checks is perfectly fine and expected.

Mahz's Dev Journal

I heard I might have come across strongly with regard to PW in my last post or people might have been reacting to it.

To clarify, the PW concept has been part of the Guild since Day One.

Here it's seen in archive.org's first ever snapshot of the Guild from April 2007: web.archive.org/web/20070421113235/ht…



It will always be "doomed" to a relatively small group of people by its very nature, the same reason a roleplay rarely scales beyond a few people. It's just fun and part of Guild tradition.

But I'd rather talk about other things in this thread than PW's placement on the homepage.

@Vec Building my own editor quickly proved to be a horrific amount of work, so I did drop that ball.

Lately I've been looking into getting something like CKEditor working on the Guild. There there are plenty of challenges there as well.

Working on the Guild quickly made me aware how much full time engineering muscle platforms like vBulletin/Xenforo put into their editor.

Mahz's Dev Journal

It's hard to reply to every point made in this thread. Just know that I regularly mine ideas from this thread when I have some spare time, especially to remember what I was last working on. It also cuts into my Guild work time to clarify my thoughts on every suggestion and serves as a channel for procrastination.

I want to resume work this weekend.

@Lady Amalthea Good ideas. I definitely like higher level tags like "Magic" and "Character Death". Especially the latter since it's a fundamental game mechanic distinction.

@Kuro Yeah, that's a good point -- isolating mature RPs from the rest so that you're not having to sift through one when you're only looking for the other. Even the roleplayerguild.com/roleplays view doesn't give you the option to blacklist tags, unfortunately.

@Calle I think I wrote a post within the last 5 pages that responded to the sidebar chat concern, but I have two ideas that should declutter the sidebar: only your first status message per X minutes appears in the sidebar, and a "Reply" button that lets you reply to a status without writing your own status -- as if it were a tiny forum topic.

@LegendBegins @Shienvien Good points. The PW is already doomed by its intrinsic lack of mass appeal since it's essentially a single roleplay. It's at the top as a trade-off that was supposed to be temporary. And by the time I got around to work on the Guild again since PW was created, the PW system was reset with a new theme which I thought would've been an unfair time to move it. I will move it soon.

It's a good point that it also may make the forum look like a Star Wars fanfic forum to new visitors.

Mahz's Dev Journal

There was some downtime within the last hour. Not sure why. Looking into it.

Mahz's Dev Journal

It's funny, we've had this feature a few times but I would turn it off after encountering a bug or abuse.

roleplayerguild.com/search?topic_id=7…

I'll do some research to see why I turned it off the last time and if it's still an issue.