Operation Audacious Phoenix

I'm pinning this topic so I can post progress reports here

Stuff that's already different about the rebuild:

• 8 ) and B ) will no longer automatically trigger the big eyes and sunglasses dude emoji, respectively. These are rarely used emoticons, whereas the use of these character combinations in lists is much more common.
• When choosing what character to post as, in addition from just selecting off the dropdown as before, now you can actually type in a search. This should be super helpful for our members who have 30+ characters!
• You can hotlink to a specific forum post by clicking the date on it.
• You can now post as yourself (as a user) in IC forum topics, not just as characters. All such posts will be automatically marked as being OOC.
• "report" button has been renamed to "Request mod" in an effort to make it less daunting to ask for other kinds of help from the mods.
• It is now possible to comment directly on most help articles. My hope is that this allows clarifications or requests for advice to take place publicly, for the benefit of all.
• If you're logged in but you can't reply to a topic for any reason (banned, blocked, site closed for maintenance, etc.), the "reply" button simply will not appear, saving you the hassle of a wasted click or writing a message only to be told it can't be posted.

Over the last few days I've been working on rewriting the private messaging system. So far, I've just got the basics in, but the lag problem in the inbox is SO. MUCH. BETTER. It's got me in a fantastic mood to work on it and enjoy smoothly navigating around the inbox without huge delays

This afternoon I rebuilt inbox folders, and in the process, made them nestable -- meaning you can put folders inside of folders.

I'm not sure how wide-spread the use of this will be, but as an extremely heavy user of folders to make my inbox half-manageable, I look forward to making use of it.

PHEW, 7 hours of grinding out the re-creation of private messages today. Still a way to go, but lots of progress made.

Recreated:
Viewing inventory items
Activating various item types, including epic giving items, character slot giving items, page slot giving items, "greeting cards" (flowers, leaves, mushrooms, etc.), random items, walruses, swappers (such as changing a walrus into a costume)
Item descriptions
Item histories
Wrapping items
Unwrapping items
Displaying items
Removing items from display
Re-ordering the item display case

Added:
Filtering inventory by item type or keyword
Added support for re-ordering display case items using up/down buttons in addition to drag/drop
Page no longer needs to refresh between basic object uses
Items now ordered by the last time something was done with them, rather than by ID number, so items you recently received but have low ID numbers, or items you fuss with a lot are consistently at the top of the inventory

Changed:
Base number of items/accolades shown on profile changed from 25 to 24
"Loot shelving" now adds 6 extra slots for display case items on a user profile instead of 5
Both of the above changes may change back or change again, depending on how space needs shake out
Inventory display case preview moved to sidebar rather than to bottom of page

That is pretty cool! I love your dedication Kim!

Thanks for all do for us kim.

Grinding away again on recreating various features for Private Messages again for a chunk of today... Still more days to go on this.

Then took a break from that and rebuilt the welcomer accoladers, welcomer hints for which intro topics are still eligible for attention, limits on how often a person can introduce themselves on the intro forums, welcomer tips at the top of the forum, and the ability to skip the tutorial prompt to introduce yourself.

Spent some time staring into the middle distance with an increasingly haunted expression as I once again considered strategies for rebuilding the character profile interfaces.

I've re-created kudos, along with a few completely new features for kudos.

New feature #1: You can give kudos anonymously. WOOT!

New feature #2: In addition to writing a text comment, there's also a list of qualities you can choose as among someone's best.

The mods have noticed that a lot of people don't really have much practice at writing a recommendation, and we spend a lot of time asking people to explain otherwise friendly comments like "She is the best!" That is genuinely super great that you feel that way, but the best at what? Why? Please please write something that explains why someone else should heed this recommendation? My hope is that being able to check a box or two will immediately repair these types of kudos, making them easier to give and easier to moderate. Also possibly searchable to find someone with the quality you want, such as being really good at long posts or concise posts.

List of qualities that can be checked off is as follows:

• Kind and understanding
• Helpful
• Great sense of humor
• Creative ideas
• Wonderful writer
• Drives the plot forward
• Long posts
• Concise posts
• Fast responses
• Long-term partner

Anon kudos! Awesome!

Loving this! Thanks Kim!

Is this list comprehensive, or are you planning on adding to it? ("Good sense of humor" comes to mind.)

Should there be a limit on how many boxes can be checked, just to prevent overenthusiastic people from checking every one?

With moderators like you and an admin like Kim running the show... I think most (if not all!) the checkboxes apply

It could be added to, for sure.

The limit is 2 per kudos to try and force prioritizing the absolute top qualities you are trying to recommend for that person.

Edit: Great sense of humor added.

You know, I did a bunch of stuff before ever starting this thread. Let me see what I can remember about what I rebuilt earlier in the year:

• Viewing news posts
• Commenting on news posts
• For me: creating, editing, scheduling and deleting news posts
• The BBCode parser that outputs your prettified text, and nearly all the bbcode tags that you already know and love
• Backwards compatibility for old-style of dice rolls (there's a new dice roll system on the way!)
• Major conversion of the User model to work with this new version. This probably doesn't mean anything to almost anyone, but it was a big, beautiful deal.
• Handling for deleted users
• Handling for deleted characters
• Login
• Logout
• Display of public forums
• Display of public topics
• Starting new topics
• Replying to topics
• Bump filter for forum topic replies
• Requiring and taking the forum pledge for public forums
• Show/hide the LFRPAO forum and its topics as appropriate
• Editing posts
• Hotlinking to specific posts
• Detecting which "entity" was last used to post in a particular thread, and auto-selecting that character for further responses to a topic
• For mods: locking/unlocking topics, stickying topics, the mod center where we track cases and many of its attendant tools. This is like... a crapton of stuff and represents a few weeks of work on its own, and we still have more to go.
• Subscribing and unsubscribing to topics
• Set up the shiniest, newest version of the text editor the RPR uses (the buttons for bold, italic, text-size, lists, etc.) for easier text editing and a goodbye to many of the bugs we're dealing with in the older version the current site uses
• Letting users block each other, view who they've blocked and why, and unblock
• The help center, its various articles, and how I create/edit them
• Help article subject tags that enhance searching for help articles
• Help center search
• A LOT of work on settings pages for user accounts, trying to make it easier and less overwhelming without removing controls
• The ultra-super basics of characters like name, gender, and who owns them
• Most of the current features of user profiles (not counting epic member recoloring)

And of course... huge, excessive amounts of staring out of windows grimly considering the rebuild of character/group profile creation interfaces and all its attendant obstacles and glories.

Oh god. It's going to be so good. Or it's going to kill me and steal my soul in the attempt. It's a Targaryen coin toss.

More stuff I've done!

Recreated:

• The code that I use to make it possible for news posts to automatically list event topics, such as open trick or treat topics during October or Meet cute topics during february.
• The ability to preview your BBCode before posting it
• The little notices next to inbox folders that tell you how many unread messages are in a particular folder
• The "New messages in..." prompt at the top of the inbox for mobile users, so they don't have to scroll down to see the folders underneath the inbox
• The inbox alert that appears in the header with the number of unread messages
• The ability to compose a new message to a specific person or character
• Bug report submission
• Creating a copy of bug report as a private message
• My bug report review and management system

Added:

• The "New messages in..." prompt at the top of the inbox for non-mobile users, too, just for added convenience
• A little visual "pulse" to the "Add Participants" button when composing a new PM. It stops pulsing when you've got at least one recipient specified.
• Additional fields when submitting a bug report, including: "What page were you on when the problem happened? What were you doing?", "What were you expecting to happen?", and "What actually happened? Did you see any error messages? If so, what did they say?"
• Some lovely new convenience features for me for responding to support requests/bug reports faster

Changed:

• Process to reset your password. We now do it properly by sending out a time-limited link you can use to change your password to something of your choosing, rather than just automatically resetting the password and sending you the new one. I've hated this system for years, can't tell you what a relief it is to update.

Progress from the last couple of weeks...

Recreated:

• A ton of the features that the moderators use to keep an eye on and enforce the site. As with everything, there's still a long way to go there, but the progress is invigorating.
• Nearly everything to do with the Find RP search tool as it exists now.
• All the prompts and tips for OPs of LFRP topics, such as the "close" and "reopen" buttons, and also the "renew" button which allows you to "bump" how long your topic will appear in Find RP search results without needing to actually post anything new.

Added:

• Some new tools to make life easier for mods, for example an easier interface for them to help folks change their account birthdate.
• In the Find RP search tool: a ROMANCE genre definition slider, to go with the magic, tech and combat sliders
• In the Find RP search tool: an "only my age group" filter to the Find RP search
• In the Find RP search tool: "require sexual themes/allow sexual themes/disallow sexual themes" filters. If you combine this with the romance slider, you can probably indicate a smut-only RP or a partial plot/partial smut RP and etc.
• Added a range of disability-friendly features to how genre sliders are set and explained, so that vision impaired users can better interact with and understand them too.
• The ability to hide ALL RP ideas from a particular user from your Find RP search results. I know some users have historically had to block people to remove all their RPs from their search results, because their RP tastes just weren't compatible. Now you'll be able to unblock them and still not get a bunch of irrelevant RP Finder results.
• An interface to see all the people whose RP ideas you've muted on RP Finder results, and unmute them if you want.
• Old LFRP topics will automatically have (closed) added to their titles after a couple weeks of no interaction from the OP.

Changed:

• I tweaked the layout for the Find RP interfaces and search results.
• Retired the various icons used to indicate different range combinations. The new layout does a better job of explaining itself, I think.
• The site now remembers your last selection on the "only my age group" and sexual themes filter for about a month since your last Find RP search, so you don't need to keep re-setting those to get RPs that match your preference.

As I rebuild, I keep stumbling across features I had completely forgot we had. Gawd this site is huge. Re-writing the help docs (and doing a series of feature spotlights in the news!) is going to be a major project all on its own.

I realized that "Announcements" might actually be a better, more obvious fit for all this info, and migrated these updates over there. Apologies for the notification spam you may have gotten as a result