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Shole's List
New WYSIWYG editor..? »

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #15, on June 2nd, 2012, 11:36 PM »
Quote from Arantor on June 2nd, 2012, 04:07 PM
Actually, what he's thinking of is not the same thing you were - in his (and my) view, thread prefixes are a way of selecting a prefix from a dropdown, e.g. what I did on whatsthatgame.co.uk in particular in http://whatsthatgame.co.uk/index.php?forums/aralander-discussion/
Hmm... That's... Pretty much a tag system, isn't it...?

Anyway, it's online here, what do you think? Do you like it or not?
Just check the (private) WIP Plugin topic from Dragooon to see what I mean. Also, all permalinks to posts are rewritten to have the prefixes before the link, and have the "Re: " positioned at the beginning of the link. Which leads me to ask -- what is it with that slightly fucked up $txt['response_prefix'] system... In French, there's a half-space before any colon, which is hard to do (impossible?) in HTML, so I used to have (since I also made the French version of SMF2) 'Re : ' as the prefix. Then for Wedge, for some reason I don't remember, I had to come back to a breakable space, so it's just 'Re : '... However, if you post in French on a multilingual forum, everyone will see "Re : " even if they're not using French. It would make a LOT more sense to have a meta prefix like {re} at the beginning, and have Wedge automatically convert it to $txt['response_prefix'] at runtime... What do you think?

Once again, though, it'd mean going through the database to replace all entries with {re}...
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A posting template system can take two forms, either it can be for having one or more predefined blocks of content that can be easily inserted into posts, or it can take the form of being an outright form that users have to fill in to generate a post out of it, e.g. for application forms for certain things.
Oh, I see... tumblr-like, right? Or the latest WP... (Which was inspired by tumblr, IIRC.)
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That's half way towards what he's talking about, incidentally.
Well, it's easy enough to have the NEW icon, but I'm not so sure about how best to implement board icons... For instance, Noisen.com does it by going through a special folder and looking for "123.jpg" or "123.png" for board #123. Which makes a lot of sense when you create the boards yourself, but not when you don't have FTP access at all...
Although we could simply use AeMe for that. I say "simply", but it'd probably be simpler to use attachments for that... :lol:
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Then it needs to have less content in it if it's going to be done without tables; right now a table is the correct semantic item for it because it's tabular data.
I was thinking more about doing something like the item lists in the media area. i.e. you'd get just the thumbnail and user name, and have to hover the name to get more details, but OTOH one could argue that you may want to be able to see the additional details immediately. Maybe with a click of a button somewhere...

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #16, on June 3rd, 2012, 12:44 AM »
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Hmm... That's... Pretty much a tag system, isn't it...?
Different kind of meta information, but yes, I suppose. Compared to general tags, we're talking about (probably) one tag applicable per topic from a set list, and it will be displayed in the message index, where tags would not normally be listed.
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Anyway, it's online here, what do you think? Do you like it or not?
Oh, I like it. I'm just thinking that I'd probably provide proper prefixes as discussed here as a full plugin.
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Also, all permalinks to posts are rewritten to have the prefixes before the link, and have the "Re: " positioned at the beginning of the link.
That's the thing about using full-on prefixes is that you never have to battle with the response-prefix in the subject because it's entirely separate.
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Which leads me to ask -- what is it with that slightly fucked up $txt['response_prefix'] system...
I'm not sure what the logic was supposed to be, something to do with making sure you got the right one based on something else's language or something >_>
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It would make a LOT more sense to have a meta prefix like {re} at the beginning, and have Wedge automatically convert it to $txt['response_prefix'] at runtime... What do you think?
Actually, a better solution would not be to worry about it at all. If we were to juggle things so we didn't actually have the title sorted expressly every post, we could just use response-prefix as necessary. There's a lot to do but I think it'd be worth it not to store every single subject every post.
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Oh, I see... tumblr-like, right? Or the latest WP... (Which was inspired by tumblr, IIRC.)
Neither, really. On the one hand, you have the ability to create what amounts to a form, asking users for content, validating it and then dumping it into a post. Some roleplay forums use this to handle 'clan entry application forms', for example.

On the other hand, you have the ability to insert pre-defined blocks of content. I did something similar in SimpleDesk as 'canned replies' where the admin could create a bunch of templates of content that could be inserted into the post in a few clicks, which is useful in a support context as it were. But both have other uses too. Just neither of them are things I personally want in the core, especially as the dev effort for creating them as a plugin is virtually identical.
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Well, it's easy enough to have the NEW icon, but I'm not so sure about how best to implement board icons... For instance, Noisen.com does it by going through a special folder and looking for "123.jpg" or "123.png" for board #123. Which makes a lot of sense when you create the boards yourself, but not when you don't have FTP access at all...
Although we could simply use AeMe for that. I say "simply", but it'd probably be simpler to use attachments for that...
Which brings me back to the answer I originally gave; that is one very good reason why none of the major forums have implemented this feature in the core. I'm not entirely sure we actually *need* it, I was far happier implementing this as a plugin personally, but we could probably make it a core feature - yes it would have to be handled through the attachments system because that's the only way I'm remotely happy of allowing it at this stage.
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I was thinking more about doing something like the item lists in the media area. i.e. you'd get just the thumbnail and user name, and have to hover the name to get more details, but OTOH one could argue that you may want to be able to see the additional details immediately. Maybe with a click of a button somewhere...
Here's the problem, on the one hand you have people who want lots and lots of details and on the other, you'll have people who want very little.
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Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #17, on June 3rd, 2012, 02:42 PM »
Quick suggestion (need to answer the rest): have titles like this...

The usual subject {re}

Would mean

Re: The usual subject

Solves sorting issues!
Also, a reply could have an empty title by default. If left empty, we save it as the Re: to the post being replied to. Might encourage users to fill in a new title.

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #18, on June 3rd, 2012, 03:15 PM »
Hmm. Would it really be so bad not to have the subject every post? I find the concept of juggling {re} around a bit much. If there's no title, we assume {re} Topic title, or just not display anything unless a title was actually set...

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #19, on June 3rd, 2012, 07:40 PM »
That's actually how Noisen does it... because I totally wanted to save the db space. And it took a lot of work to have it handle titles when shown outside a topic page. i.e. see the stats page, you'd have to rewrite the query for the most liked posts...

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #20, on June 3rd, 2012, 07:44 PM »
*nods* Yes, we would. But wouldn't it be better in the long run?

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #21, on June 3rd, 2012, 08:09 PM »
Quote from Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 12:44 AM
Different kind of meta information, but yes, I suppose. Compared to general tags, we're talking about (probably) one tag applicable per topic from a set list, and it will be displayed in the message index, where tags would not normally be listed.
We can have tag types. Tags that are created by admins, tags that are created by users. Etc. No problem...
Quote from Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 12:44 AM
Which brings me back to the answer I originally gave; that is one very good reason why none of the major forums have implemented this feature in the core. I'm not entirely sure we actually *need* it, I was far happier implementing this as a plugin personally, but we could probably make it a core feature - yes it would have to be handled through the attachments system because that's the only way I'm remotely happy of allowing it at this stage.
Why not AeMe?
Quote from Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 12:44 AM
who want very little.
Which is why it should be an option at runtime.

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #22, on June 3rd, 2012, 08:29 PM »
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We can have tag types. Tags that are created by admins, tags that are created by users. Etc. No problem...
Would you be displaying that tag everywhere the title would normally be? That's really what we're getting at: tags that are as prominent as the topic's title.
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Why not AeMe?
I still consider AeMe and attachments to be the same thing, really. Yes, that's doable, provided that it's done like avatars and not actually served through action=media or action=dlattach.
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Which is why it should be an option at runtime.
There is such a thing as having too many choices in the core ;)

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #23, on June 3rd, 2012, 10:58 PM »
Quote from Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 08:29 PM
Would you be displaying that tag everywhere the title would normally be? That's really what we're getting at: tags that are as prominent as the topic's title.
Hmm... I don't know, I had in mind the idea that these topic tags could 'simply' be put into the topic title as a regular prefix... i.e. the admin decides whether new prefixes can be added manually (with brackets), or whether people are forced to use the valid ones.
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I still consider AeMe and attachments to be the same thing, really. Yes, that's doable, provided that it's done like avatars and not actually served through action=media or action=dlattach.
I said that because AeMe already has 'album icons', which, come to think of it, could be used exactly the same way with boards... Since an album is a board now, we (okay, I) could "simply" move the album icon code to a more general board icon code block.
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There is such a thing as having too many choices in the core ;)
Sure...

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #24, on June 3rd, 2012, 11:04 PM »
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Hmm... I don't know, I had in mind the idea that these topic tags could 'simply' be put into the topic title as a regular prefix... i.e. the admin decides whether new prefixes can be added manually (with brackets), or whether people are forced to use the valid ones.
The problem with doing that is our old friend performance. Doing tags like that implies that we have to do querying every message-index, as opposed to making prefixes an explicit plugin.
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I said that because AeMe already has 'album icons', which, come to think of it, could be used exactly the same way with boards... Since an album is a board now, we (okay, I) could "simply" move the album icon code to a more general board icon code block.
*nods*

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #25, on June 3rd, 2012, 11:18 PM »
Quote from Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 11:04 PM
The problem with doing that is our old friend performance. Doing tags like that implies that we have to do querying every message-index, as opposed to making prefixes an explicit plugin.
Hmm... I don't know what you mean by querying on message index. Surely we can simply be happy with showing the prefixes as they are, right now...?
Or did you mean actually showing it in the weird way you pointed to on that other forum, with badge-like styling...?
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*nods*
It's just that it's more work for me... :lol:

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #26, on June 3rd, 2012, 11:56 PM »
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Hmm... I don't know what you mean by querying on message index. Surely we can simply be happy with showing the prefixes as they are, right now...?
Or did you mean actually showing it in the weird way you pointed to on that other forum, with badge-like styling...?
Yes, I did. Or as per http://www.smfpacks.com/page/sa=atp_screenshots indicates (badly) - something a lot more complicated, and very distinctly separate to the subject as currently stored.

I would note I've been asked about this before, and specifically saying that they would like it modelled based on the custom field/prefix setup that SimpleDesk had.
Posted: June 3rd, 2012, 11:24 PM

Also note that it can be extremely useful to be able to filter by prefix, something that is a massive amount of work when done by juggling the subject field.

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #27, on June 4th, 2012, 12:24 AM »
Hmm...
But why not do it with tags, really?

From what I can see on these screenshots, prefixes are added manually by the admin, then the user can choose in a dropdown with multiple words surrounded by brackets. For all I know, it's stored as text content in the title, and then automatically turned into a prefix icon at runtime. Which can be done with a single query (or cache lookup), if you simply choose to retrieve all prefix HTML in one go, and then replace any [prefix] inside URLs with the matching HTML, then move them outside of the links, and instead attribute them a link to other topics with the same prefix.
(Basically, that's exactly what a tag does... :P)

Arantor

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #28, on June 4th, 2012, 12:31 AM »
If it's stored as text in the subject, you're fucked if you ever hope to efficiently filter on it (something that you can actually do with prefixes). I mean, take the example in the private board that has [WIP] and [Plugin] as effective prefixes. Now do a filter on just WIP, or just Plugin - you either can't do it, or you end up doing WHERE subject LIKE '%[WIP]%' which is nice and efficient.

There are two points to doing it outside the title; partly you get the ability to define new titles and remove existing ones without touching any of the actual subject data, and mostly that you get to filter on it efficiently.

I honestly don't know how many more ways I can explain that there are three different concepts here that all vaguely overlap but that what I'm talking about is not something I want in the core.

Nao

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Re: Shole's List
« Reply #29, on June 4th, 2012, 12:54 AM »
Quote from Arantor on June 4th, 2012, 12:31 AM
If it's stored as text in the subject, you're fucked if you ever hope to efficiently filter on it (something that you can actually do with prefixes). I mean, take the example in the private board that has [WIP] and [Plugin] as effective prefixes. Now do a filter on just WIP, or just Plugin - you either can't do it, or you end up doing WHERE subject LIKE '%[WIP]%' which is nice and efficient.
No, no... That was easy in my head because I mentioned doing it 'like regular tags'.
What I meant was that the topic titles would get the text version of prefixes, while the tags themselves would be recorded in the (yet to come) tag-to-topic association table. Basically, doing it in that order: user sends topic (adding prefixes either through a dropdown or manually), Wedge checks that it has prefixes, if it does, validate them against any 'valid' prefixes, delete the rest from the title, and save all valid prefixes into the tag-to-topic table.
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There are two points to doing it outside the title; partly you get the ability to define new titles and remove existing ones without touching any of the actual subject data, and mostly that you get to filter on it efficiently.
Not having it in the URL effectively forces us to add some extra magic queries whenever we want to show prefixes in the topic title. Would probably mean that plenty of places forget to do that in Wedge...
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