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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m perfectly glad with how this is. Now I can use instead of :) - it gives prompts for the emote proper, thankfully.
Though it is pretty strange that you can’t escape colon-demarked emotes.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I’ve updated the TODO and Features list at the top post.
Regarding markdown formatting:
I’ve started working with the folks at RPNation.com to develop a more advanced version of the bbcode tag plugin that we use on the site. The layout of the new plugin is more robust and should solve the issue regarding truncating whitespace.
In the meantime, you can use the pointers found in Beagle-Time Features and Todo - #16 by admin ← this post to add extra whitespace, you can also write (non-breaking-space) to add extra spaces to your posts that html won’t truncate.
instead of :) - it gives prompts for the emote proper, thankfully.