Uh... what?

If there is one thing I'll side against you on, Keeper it's the use of folders. I have two folders in both my and the Archivists account, the default one and one for M:EM voting that automatically catch and segregate all "Voting Week X" pms.

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There is a sort-of group thingy already built into these forums, insofar as you can pm all members of a group at once, and... I'm not really sure what else, since I've never had to do anything to it since all the M:EMbers were added to a group shortly after arriving here.

If the group thing happen, i'd just move my pbp game there and not really deal with the rest of the site outside of the threads i've already posted in.

This might be a little unique but:

I want some sort of tag or something to let me make the actual smiley face things that normally turn into the emoticons. Like I want to be able to make : ) or : P without spaces in between, because it looks weird with spaces but without them you get and .

:P

to provide a slightly more helpful version of Mown's answer:

[code=none]:P[/code]

or :[b][/b]P

there's also a "disable smilies" option at the bottom of the post box, which is probably what Mown used, but that doesn't work if you're mixing image smilies with text smilies.

also, while typing that, I found a slight problem. it seems that the [code] tags looks for the very last [/code] tag in the post, no matter what, meaning that switching in between coded and non-coded text is impossible. like this:

[b]this is how you show bold text[/b]

this is actual bold text

[i]this is how you show italic text[/i]

this is actual italic text

now let's see if that actually has the problem I said it did...



PS: it does not! weird, wonder why it was different in the other one. maybe it's really smart and realized that I put a code tag in the middle and thus obviously wanted to show how to use that, so it waited until I closed the fake code tag before letting me close the real one. neat!

PPS: although, quick note, it seems like if you open a tag and then close it right away, like [b][/b], it doesn't actually save that as part of the text, so if you quote it or edit it it goes back to regular code.

No, I used the bold tag workaround.

Anyway, now that school is over, I'll have some free time. Given that I just got my bachelor degree in software development, I could need something to toy with during summer. So I'm curious:
Is there any feature you would like me to implement, but isn't something important enough to where it's entirely ok if I just decide that I won't bother halfway through? Meaning not something you're actively going to do, but would be nice if I decided to spend some time and make a solution for?

yeah I made my guess before I realized the open/close issue. when I quoted your post there was no other code so I assumed you hadn't written any.


teach the forums how to love.

Sounds like you want a [noparse] tag.

Hitting a few things:

A)

The Wiki "launch" is held up by me. I'm looking to get the main page built, but I've been at a Con the last 4 days (got home last night) and spent the couple days before getting ready for it. Look for it early this week.



The Wiki could be used for collaborative design works that are in process. One of it's key advantages over a series of forum threads is that anybody can edit a page, so there's no waiting on "curator" type person to make updates. (And that's also one of the downsides, sometimes, admittedly.)

I think the rules and the scope of the wiki are going to grow and change rapidly at first, to be honest.

B)

Regarding smiley codes: several methods have been posted, and each will solve the problem.

C)

Re: Semi-private workspace: I could be talked into creating a private forum and group for somebody to have space here. At the moment, I'm not sure what my acceptance criteria would be for saying yes to such a request. I know it's not quite what you're asking for, Razor, because you would need to go to a mod to get it created and also to maintain who has access. But at the moment, it's something I can offer that actually exists within the code.

If I were to say yes, I do want to point out that whether you invite them or not, mods (and maybe other staff, depending on settings that I can't recall right now) will be able to see the forum. In addition, but related, such private space would still be subject to the CoC.

Can you give me some examples of the 10 or so design spaces you used on the WotC site, so I can get a sense of what you might want them for?

D)

Re PM space: I don't see that changing any time soon. Sorry. It comes up from time to time, and I've not yet seen a compelling reason to increase it. We already allow you to store quite a few (2000, I believe?)

E)

Re summer projects: Speaking of PM stuff... Mown, here's something that I think would be awesome. Currently, the software allows people to export their PMs. But the format is ugly. So one thing that I think could be tackled as a "back burner" project would be an offline PM reader. Either design it so it reads a CSV file (the default export format), or have it read XML (another data option available). I think the XML version would be better to work with, personally.

If you were able to get it written, we could host the program and make it available to people to download and use - and give you credit, of course. My only requirement would be that such a program would need to be open source. Creative Commons license is fine, or another if you have a preference.


Did I miss anything that was brought up recently?

mostly it was private work on custom sets. being able to create and moderate my own mini-forums made it much easier to organize things where I wanted them to be, and being private let me regulate what information and work I did got released and when, so other people couldn't look at stuff before it was ready.

I also have a group set up for myself to organize details for contests I'm running, although part of the point of that was that I could write my posts and critiques in advance using the forum's rich text formatting so I wouldn't have to worry about the problems of copying text into it from another source, which is obviously not a concern here. but when I had other judges or collaborators the private area where we could all leave notes to each other was useful, although could probably be replaced by PMs.

I also used them as an organization place for teams in team contests, where PMing would've been unwieldy. similarly, could be used in mafia games for the same purpose, as a replacement for quicktopic. I'm less concerned about that use, though. it'd be nice but not necessary. the first part, the set stuff with an easily-customizable internal structure, is my primary desire. I don't think a private forum by itself would be enough for this, I would need localized mod powers to create subforums and move threads.

Tell me if I interpret this wrong:
You want an application that takes a CVS file or XML file generated by the forum's "Export PM" function", and displays it in a more user friendly format.
I must personally admit that I don't really see why I would ever want such a thing, but if there's interest, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. It does, at the very least, not sound terribly difficult. Primary concern would be a sensible user interface and text parsing for bbcode, I think.
Edit: Well, I could just use the layout of this site and generate html, I suppose.


Sure, whatever, I didn't have any intentions of charging for it or anything. It's partially so I can have something on my résumé, so making it open source isn't something I have anything against.
Unless it's just a ploy to mock me for my source code.

My complaints about the message cap would pretty much evaporate if I had an easy and lazy way of archiving them on my own system that didn't result in them coming out looking like they'd been run through a woodchipper. I mean, really the key here is how much something sucks up my time with pointless fiddling.

Speaking of sucking up my time, is there anything more you need from me RE: the wiki, Fire? I feel like I should maybe write a clearer explanation of how the Infobox metatemplate works, for example, but I'm not sure what other people/groups actually need from the system so... yeah, not sure what all I should be doing to make things easier for folks to work with the system.

I believe I'm good, at least as far as the info I need to get started. If you'd be interested in writing up a "how to" section, though, that would be fantastic. I know I have no clue how to make use of templates and such.

Well, a lot of it you can learn by just reading Mediawiki's tutorial pages on the subject. I usually have those open in other tabs/on my secondary screen when I'm working on the wiki. Linking to those would be a big help.

It might be helpful to have a link to the Infobox metatemplate someplace just so that it's easy for people to find. The whole idea behind it is that it's an easy way of formatting all the infoboxes to have a unified style, as they do on Wikipedia and other wikis. It also means that some of the weirder code features (most significantly, the parser functions that make different cells appear and disappear depending on whether they actually have content in them) don't have to be written by someone that just wants to make a new specific infobox template--it's all done by the underlying template.

All of that should probably be explained somewhere. But I suspect that we won't actually know what information people need until it actually starts being more widely used by other groups on the forum.

totally random and minor thing that I have no idea how to do and wouldn't really matter but would be kind of nice if it's easy to do:

have a symbol that shows whether you've read the most recent post in a forum. like, there's things that show you whether you've read every post in a forum, but often there's threads I ignore in any given forum I go to, and I assume others do too. actually it might be even better if it just told you whether you'd loaded the forum since the last new post so it'd also count going to look, seeing that the most recent post was in a thread you didn't care about, and leaving. but that sounds harder.

so yeah, no one break anything trying to make this happen, but if it's easy then it'd be a cool feature that would save a little time and isn't that the dream?

Once you're done reading the threads you care about you could simply hit the "Mark Topics Read" button on the upper right.

This would change the forum as a whole back to the 'No New Posts' symbol until which point someone posted in a thread there.

oh, huh, missed that button. cool, that works. still might be nice to have built in but if it's literally any more work than just clicking one box it's probably not worth the effort to set up.



PS: just did a test, looks like that button does not affect subforums, which is somewhat irksome. if I want it to not tell me I need to check YMtC I also have to dive into the BCP.

Obviously. That way if you're done reading 'YMTC' but not doing reading 'Community Sets' clicking the button doesn't wipe the record of what you haven't read in the subforum.

There is however a button at the top 'Mark Forums Read' that would clear out the unread posts of all subforums of the forum you're currently in without jumping into them individually to have to press the 'Mark Topics Read' button.

Sure you have to click two whole buttons now, but thats much easier than having it clear out the data for someone who doesnt want the subforums marked read just yet and only wants the parent forum.

Its also worthy of note that theres a button on the index page that clears all unread posts site wide. So you can very easily use it to see all content thats been added since your last visit.