Beagle-Time Features and Todo

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Here are a few of the items we’re working on adding/sorting out for Beagle-Time:
Forum Adventure Category

  • Tiled theming for the forum adventure category is up.

  • The category itself is up with a demo adventure to help view the site design.

  • Want a “next” button for the adventure tag to jump between update posts
Reader mode

  • A toggle-able mode for forum-adventures (and maybe other threads)

  • On forum adventures, make the (filter by user) option much more prominent. DONE (the advanced version of this is allowing authors to label their topics as story posts, but including all topic owner posts is the bar for now.)

  • Widen the reading area, and dim distractions (close sidebar, maybe dim non-post content)
Custom Post Formatting
Discourse’s composer runs on a text engine called markdown-it, which is largely designed to support clean text to html conversion. However, the average user doesn’t think in terms of html, and this can cause a lot of friction when formatting posts. There are ways around it, but they are not intuitive. Making post formatting more WYSIWYG is a long term goal. Current elements we’re working on include:

  • Allow for persistent whitespace. html truncates extra whitespace by default, so we are looking into ways to replace whitespace with corresponding html, or to add tags that allow whitespace to persist

  • Disable markdown autocorrections such as: limits on consecutive question marks, auto numbering numbered lists, creating a code block with four or more whitespaces.
"Site Storage

  • on site image hosting - DONE (sort of: We have limited storage (about 10 GB) but this could be expanded at extra expense to the server. Current max image upload size is 4MB, but this can be increased.)

  • regular/secure site backups - DONE (sort of: full backups are run every week, but are stored locally on the server which is subject to the same storage limitations as above and also makes the server a single point of failure. Off server cloud backups are the goal, but need to undergo a cost analysis.)
Category Formatting

  • Give Categories Shared Labels and Organize them on the Category Page. (Bonus: Make the labels collapsable)

  • Remove Tags from the sidebar - DONE

  • Subcategory display on categories - DONE

  • Custom category formatting. - DONE (sort of: needs some tweaks on different elements) Would like to have a way to customize from the admin menu that doesn’t involve writing a bunch of specific css for the page, but this may require developing a plugin for this purpose.
Replies to Topics

  • Disable ability to reply on a topic you are not currently viewing (This may cause conflicts with tag-based theming)

  • Make “X user is replying” indicator an optional feature. Currently hiding your presence is an all-or-nothing setting in the user tab. Giving the ability to opt out of one or another gives an extra layer of privacy control.

  • Disable direct replies to posts? - Currently you can directly reply to some posts, quoting a post directly also formats it as a reply. This feature seems like it could lead to branching topics and sub-discussions that become difficult to navigate. We may want to disable this.

  • Disable automatic emails when your topic/post is replied to? I don’t know if other people have found this annoying. It can be changed in user settings but maybe it should be off by default?
Topic Navigation
*We need an easy way to jump from one area of a thread to another. We might be able to use a modified Discorse TOC to accomplish something like this.

Current Features
(This is list is not exhaustive, much of the current features on the site are Discourse default, some features that may be relevant to eagle-time users are highlighted here)

Details Tag:

Details Tag
This is similar to the myBB “spoiler” tag.
You activate it with [/details] notation, or use the :gear: icon when making a post.
They can nest
And the tag text can be changed

It seems that text on the same line as [details=“The Tag”] Prevents it from working [/details] properly.

Code blocks:

code blocks are supported.
Use the </> button on your post or "```" to start/end the code block

           white space can also trigger a code block (- is this a feature?)

Light Mode/Dark Mode


The theme of the website changes depending on your browser settings. If you always work in one mode or the other, change it up to see how the site appears.

Polls


Polls are no loger relegated to the opening post of a thread. You can create a poll in any post of a thread.

  • Polls have multiple options

  • Activate with the [poll] tag

  • Or the :gear: icon

  • Hit the close button to have the poll stop receiving responses.
0 voters

Who’s online


This is similar to the mybb feature on eagle-time, however it displays icons rather than usernames.
You can opt of out this by selecting “Hide my profile and presence features” on the “Interface” tab in your user preferences.

Export Your Data


On your user preferences page, you can select “Export Your Data” Which will give you a zip file of all the records of your activity on beagle-time up to that point. (Image downloads have not been tested with this feature yet.)

Spoiler Tag


The [ spoiler] tag acts differently from the myBB spoiler in that it blurs the content of a post rather than hiding it outright (as the details tag does). Users can toggle the spoiler by clicking on it:

Here is an example!

Tag-Specific Components


This allows for unique .css and javascript to run on a topic that declares a specific tag. You can read more about this here: Tag Components - Suggestions and Discussion

Adventure Thumbnails


The first image in an adventure will be the thumbnail for that adventure in the Forum Adventure category page. You can also set a specific thumbnail by using a “|thumbnail” addon to the image markdown
Example 
![alttext|100x100](upload://aaa) <<-- first image in post
![alttext|100x100|thumbnail](upload://bbb) << this one will be the thumbnail

Search functionality


The search functionality in discourse is far more robust than myBB. You can easily perform in-thread searches without leaving the current thread you are on. You can filter posts by users, or terms contained in the post, as well as other advanced options.

Use the :mag: icon in the top right to try it out.
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Summarizing some comments from the eagle-time discord:

  • Prefer to have a clear cut hierarchical structure, with categories acting analogous to forums/subforums.

  • The sidebar feels distracting and is unhelpful for navigation

  • Dislike of infinite scrolling

  • Over-prominent presentation of “Latest” or “Unread” threads makes it harder to understand forum structure.

  • Eagle-time had distinct theming between subforums, can that be replicated here?

  • Tags aren’t very useful as organizational tools due to inconsistent application and moderating that is impractical.

  • Maybe the RPNation Forms (or another similar forum) could provide some template inspiration.
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It looks like topics in subcategories also show up in their parent category and I hate it.

This was immediately fixed.
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Congrations
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Adding this for a possible change?

Apparently you can see when someone is actively replying to a topic, which could be fun or a gateway to new levels anxiety.
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In my opinion nobody should ever know that I’m doing anything.
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Agreed on these points!
In particular, and in addition:

  • more horizontal-friendly setup (removal of sidebar, pages instead of infscroll, less intrusive markers and more sidelined user info - i.e. full vertical isolation of posts)

  • To expand on that - “full vertical isolation” I mean as “If you go up or down from post material, you should only ever encounter post material until you reach the top / bottom of the page.”

  • Some sort of threadmarking / landmarking / pin mode for stories and adventures to separate story posts or etc. from discussion or suggestion. This also ties in to…

  • Reader mode which displays only pinned / marked posts.

  • Nobody should ever know that someone is doing something.

  • Also, I’m mixed on the topic of badges. Feels like gamification (excessive)
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I’m not so worried about the sidebar at the moment. It seems like a useful tool and there is a little three bar icon in the top left that makes it disappear instantly.

Although, having made that change, it does become very apparent how narrow the post area is. Maybe MyBB didn’t have the most mobile-friendly or responsive formatting, but it could get WIDE.

As for infascroll, I don’t want to ditch it just yet. One of the developers of discourse made what struck me as a really good point: Books don’t divide up their chapters based on the number of pages. The point being that breaking up a thread/topic after every x post number is somewhat arbitrary, and not very useful for organizing the content of the topic.

But topics DO need organization. There’s a plugin called “Discourse Table of Contents” That is supposed to accompany the infascroll bar and provide clickable breakpoints for longer threads. I haven’t used it, and maybe it sucks, but figuring out an ideal way to handle very large/long threads is important.

Unorganized Scroll < Post count based Pages < ??? - We’ll need to figure out what the ??? is and that may take a bit.

I love the idea of a user selectible “Reader mode”!!!

I’d been thinking about making a generic “adventure” tag to address this but thinking about your feedback makes me realize that there needs to be a dedicated flag that the owner of a topic has for their posts, so they can easily mark a new update to the story, and then other plugins can identify that tag to help with organization.

There is a setting in the interface tab in user preferences that says “hide my profile and presence features”. This should make your actions more anonymous, but I’d like to give it some more nuance, rather than all or nothing.

Yeah this is another feature that’s kind of on the back burner. It is explicitly gamification, and I don’t care about a lot of the pre-installed badges. However it could be nice to have something that recognizes like…prominent suggesters, or new adventure creators - this could use some customization for sure.
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One question - where do more general creative projects go? Like, writing, art, etc. I remember there being such a section on ET but I don’t know if General really fits the beagle here.
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Good question!

There is now a “Gallery” Category at: The Gallery - Beagle-Time

You can post individual work or collections of work in each topic. Feel free to discuss the structure of the gallery here or in this topic: About the The Gallery category - [Read before posting]

While individual works in The Gallery may not be open for critique, The Gallery itself always is.
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To follow up: Escape characters should work to prevent emoticon replacement. Escaping any character in an emoticon’s usual sequence should prevent it from being autocompleted.
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As a (possibly temporary) fix, I have disabled the emoji autocomplete setting.

This seems to be a legacy bug with markdown-it which is the formatting tool included in discourse by default.

Newer versions of markdown have fixed this issue, but it seems elements of discourse still rely on the older version.

For fun you can play with markdown here: https://markdown-it.github.io/

The escape character autocomplete seems to work fine there.

There were some suggestions on the discourse meta forums, such as using a codeblock
" `:)` " => :) or inserting hidden html within the emoticon. “:<g>)” => :) but for our purposes I think removing the autocomplete may be the better fix for now.

Let me know if you’d like the autocomplete emoji’s to return with escape characters enabled and I can add it to the todo.
1 Like
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I’m perfectly glad with how this is. Now I can use :slightly_smiling_face: instead of :) - it gives prompts for the emote proper, thankfully.
Though it is pretty strange that you can’t escape colon-demarked emotes.
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Why can’t I make a numbered list counting down?

Additionally whenever I mark up text like using blue for a character in my forum adventure whenever I close the tags it automatically starts a new line. I’d really like to keep all that on the same line so it’s a continuous peice of text with formatting just applied where I want it to be.

Also I was definitely also irritated at how it wouldn’t let me leave two blank lines between something that I wrote.

Like there I left a bunch of empty lines and it will not display it.

Also what the fuck is up with the weird judgemental thing about what can constitute a post. It won’t let me post the alphabet. I can’t even post the character A ten times to get around the character limit because it is like ‘this isn’t a complete sentence fuck you’. It’s vitally important that people can post the alphabet one letter at a time imo.
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I have changed the minimum post length to 1 character.

A lot of the formatting concerns are related to markdown, which is a text editing format that is common in tech sectors, and was implemented by the creators of discourse.

There are plugins to correct this, and I am currently looking into custom formatting rules to fix this as well. I’ve been working on adding extra bbcode functionality as well, so this falls in line with my current site focus. It will take a little bit of time, but hopefully this will be resolved in a week.

The lack of inline

color changes

is related to the structure of the plugin we are using for bbcode, basicially it creates a < div > when we want a < span > element. (This issue is closely related to the markdown fixes)

In the meantime, (and I agree you should NOT have to do this), you can use some html formatting such as:
</br></br></br>

To produce




multiple line breaks.

For reverse numbered lists…(or any numbering orders) code blocks
4. Are
3. Ignored
2. By
1. Markdown

You can also use dashes, or non standard symbols instead of . , and in general, if markdown isn’t acting the way you like, you can add <g> in the middle of your text.

4. → 4<g>.
3. → 3<g>.
2. → 2<g>.
1. → 1<g>.

Again, these are temporary fixes, expect better functionality in the future.
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Hi it’s me again why can’t I link to gifs bigger than 4mb? I noticed that the website seems to automatically download and host images that I link to so it might be a space issue. Is there a way to just have it display the image?
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There are two options to change this. One is to increase the upload size of images from 4MB to a higher value. The other is to have it just display the image as you mentioned.

Downloading the image is preferable for style and consistency (especially if the original link goes down or changes in the future), but until we expand our storage, I’d rather not increase the upload size limit just yet.

I’d prefer the forum to download the image unless it is over a particular size, and then just embed it - that that is not an option with the default settings. (This may be something to change in the future).

As of now, linked images are no longer downloaded directly onto the server, and instead the link is embedded in the post.
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The [color][/color] tag now works inline. You can use specific hex values or general terms like [color = red] to update the colors.
1 Like
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finally I can launch a new Grand Battle.
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I just realized that you can filter any topic to only show the posts by a specific user, simply by clicking the user’s avatar and the selecting the “X posts in topic” button.

I’m going to bed now but my top goal is now to make that way more obvious for forum adventures.