Wedge

Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:02 AM

Title: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:02 AM
Well here are few of my suggestion that i think will be useful for the software :)

1) Thread Prefixes
I am not sure if this was suggested but it would be good to see this as an feature build in the software so that no mod installation is requested. Thread prefixes are used more and more those days and I consider this as very important thing to have.

2) Point system
A point system is used for every promotion forum there is, a lot of gaming forums use it to giveaway games for a certain amount of points and other forum niches started using them for the same reasons. So i guess this has been suggested by now but well had to say it again :D

3)Chat Room
This is more of a not really important suggestion but I think a chat room would be good a simple one not to complicated that can be turned on or off depending on the admins desire.

4)Better profile homepage
I dont like the dull look of the profile, I think you should consider and make a profile homepage that looks really amazing i know this is probably hard work and i think my suggestions can be a bit to specific but this could be a positive thing as  the looks are important in the web industry.

5)Posting Template Mod
This is one more specific for the promotion niche but it can do good for any other niche as well

6)The timer
Is it really needed for the thing that lets you stay logged in for an amount of time (120 min or how much it is defoult) instead of just letting the user loggout himself ?

7) A popup
Or something to announce that you recived a new message.

8)Easy board icons changer
This one of the things i never seen on a software a build-in option that allows you to change the board icons.

9)Member List
A member list with avatars who show if the user is online or not (transparent avatars offline not transparent online) instead of the standard online image.

10)The Inbox
I think a conversation looking pm system would do good with the awesome look of the rest :D

I hope you like my suggestions and I hope they help a bit :)
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:15 AM
Some interesting ideas, there, thanks for sharing!

Let me explain one thing up front about our plugin system. It is designed with two things in mind: 1) No file edits, at all, are possible with the plugin system. 2) It's designed less about specific versions and more about features, meaning that plugins should be able to work across versions by detecting what facilities are available. Certainly that's been true for the last 6 months since we implemented it.


1. I'm not sure thread prefixes are really necessary in the core, to be honest. While I've seen it as a core feature in XenForo, and I've even made use of it there, it isn't something I've seen on most forums. However, it would make a great plugin, and I've certainly thought about it for here in the past. What it might be worth doing is implementing it as a plugin and seeing how much use it gets there.

2. It might be used in every promotion forum, but I guarantee you that's a tiny fraction of the forums out there. Certainly a points plugin is on my to-do list because I'm just not convinced it needs to be there by default for every forum. Remember: it's not just promotion forums out there, there are many, many, many kinds of forum, and remember that everything that's in the core has to be maintained by us and it does mean it makes it slower for everyone that doesn't need it.[1]

3. I really can't see this being in the core. Knowing as I do how many people have trouble with these on shared hosting, I'd avoid it for the most part. There *is* a sort of chat facility of sorts with the 'Thoughts' system as evidenced here (this is not a plugin) but it's not auto-refreshing, which is where it clashes with shared hosting. Live chat is also very often good at *discouraging* posts.

4. What does 'look amazing' mean? That's the problem we have to deal with - I've never really seen a 'great' profile page, very often it's pretty bare and the people who do want it to be more 'pretty' are those who want to clutter it up with stuff. Generally I find that complex profile pages discourage people from actually posting if they're spending a lot of time in the profile area instead of posting... but it invariably ends up being a high-demand low-real-use thing.

5. As you say yourself it's a niche facility. But it's certainly one we can put as a plugin.

6. Yes, yes it is needed. How often do people leave themselves logged into the likes of Facebook? There are also performance aspects to it, too.

7. That's built in. It's just off by default because it's really annoying. I did look at rewriting it a while ago, just never finished it.

8. There's a good reason you've never seen it as a built in option. In fact, there's several reasons why you've never seen it built in, and to sum those up, we have performance, security and ease of use, which are all affected by having it a core feature. Great plugin material however.

9. Well, a member's list is built in, even if I once wanted to rip it out entirely. Making it look prettier to include avatars is no big deal, though.

10. That's built in. I just don't think it's the default. Try it from your PM area.
 1. This is the sort of thing we have to consider when we're doing things.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:21 AM
Great reply if i come up with more suggestions i will post them :) and as for the member list goes you could rip it off...I mean i thin there is option of not showing the member list at all...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:22 AM
Well, I originally wanted to remove it and make it a plugin but others disagreed with me, haha. My view on such things is that things being made plugins means I can work on them and develop them individually without having to worry about waiting for another main-line release date. I already removed SMF's calendar and made it a plugin.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:28 AM
Quote from Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:22 AM
Well, I originally wanted to remove it and make it a plugin but others disagreed with me, haha. My view on such things is that things being made plugins means I can work on them and develop them individually without having to worry about waiting for another main-line release date. I already removed SMF's calendar and made it a plugin.
I consider the calendar a really useless ting never ever have i used it lol
Beside that i got another idea for profile like an avatar where you can get him cloths and items and such (this is more fore a plugin) would be a fun thing for some people :D
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:33 AM
That's also a massive task to actually perform in terms of art assets (having looked at it before), again it's plugin material, though I know exactly how I'd do it if I had the art assets handy.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:41 AM
Yup i said its a plugin porbably something for the future after the first stable version is released and everything :thanks:
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:43 AM
The one thing I do need to remind people is that it's all wonderful coming up with fantastic ideas but that someone ultimately has to make them, and I guarantee it takes a lot more time and effort to make it than it does to come up with the idea ;)

Just implementing this list is probably several weeks' worth of work.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:47 AM
Yeah i know a lot of things have to be done from 0 and such I know the feeling :D same goes for writing you have a nice idea of a story but you just cant write it to be long enough for a book.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:52 AM
Oh, I know that feeling too, having actually written a novel in the past, heh. But yes, it's certainly true and you'd be surprised how many people don't actually realise that's the case.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Shole on June 1st, 2012, 02:15 AM
I know its sad people think you can do it in five minutes if you know php and all that but in reality its really totaly different .
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 02:18 AM
*nods* Take the feature I'm working on: making the anti-spam questions support multiple languages and multiple answers per question instead of one language, one answer per question... so far I'm up to about 10 hours and counting for what is theoretically a tiny feature.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: godboko71 on June 1st, 2012, 02:20 AM
Quote from Arantor on June 1st, 2012, 01:22 AM
Well, I originally wanted to remove it and make it a plugin but others disagreed with me, haha. My view on such things is that things being made plugins means I can work on them and develop them individually without having to worry about waiting for another main-line release date. I already removed SMF's calendar and made it a plugin.
I wish it where a plug in, not only because there are sites I would not install it, but not being core would make it easier to make improvements well like you said haha. No need for me to repeat. Weird iPad keeps changing need to Ed.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao on June 2nd, 2012, 12:10 PM
Quote from Shole on June 1st, 2012, 01:02 AM
1) Thread Prefixes
I am not sure if this was suggested but it would be good to see this as an feature build in the software so that no mod installation is requested. Thread prefixes are used more and more those days and I consider this as very important thing to have.
Except that you don't say what thread prefixes are supposed to do... It's not a feature, it's a concept.
In Noisen.com (which is pretty much my prototype for Wedge), before "thread prefixes" even had a name, I had some custom code to unlink them from topic links. i.e. if a topic was named "[Off-topic] Hello world", the resulting name in the topic list would be "[Off-topic] Hello world".
That's all I can think of... And, interestingly, this can easily be implemented on the fly in Wedge -- in fact it would be fun to do. But what else..?

:edit: Okay, I implemented it... It should work everywhere in wedge.org. Have fun! The process is not executed if the topic name only has a prefix in it (or several, or whatever.) Which makes it much better than my noisen.com implementation, ah ah.
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2) Point system
A point system is used for every promotion forum there is, a lot of gaming forums use it to giveaway games for a certain amount of points and other forum niches started using them for the same reasons. So i guess this has been suggested by now but well had to say it again :D
Forums aren't always a game...
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3)Chat Room
This is more of a not really important suggestion but I think a chat room would be good a simple one not to complicated that can be turned on or off depending on the admins desire.
Plugin stuff IMO.
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4)Better profile homepage
I dont like the dull look of the profile, I think you should consider and make a profile homepage that looks really amazing i know this is probably hard work and i think my suggestions can be a bit to specific but this could be a positive thing as  the looks are important in the web industry.
The profile layout is one of the things I'm going to do after our alpha is released, I think.
I never liked the simple SMF layouts for this, and as you can see on noisen.com, I'm using UltimateProfile over there, which is much better. Since I can't use that in Wedge, I'll rewrite it myself, and try to put everything into the same page, including a snippet of one's latest posts. The 'about me' box should be easy to reproduce too, either through a custom profile field, or the data field in the member table.
Also, the idea is to have it across two responsive columns, just like the Credits link at the bottom of this page. (Or the Stats page. Stats page is cool in Wedge, too.)
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5)Posting Template Mod
This is one more specific for the promotion niche but it can do good for any other niche as well
What is that?
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6)The timer
Is it really needed for the thing that lets you stay logged in for an amount of time (120 min or how much it is defoult) instead of just letting the user loggout himself ?
Maybe just a warning at the top of the page when you have less than 5mn left...
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7) A popup
Or something to announce that you recived a new message.
See Pete's reply.
Also, we have a notification system in progress (thanks to Dragooon for the offloading!), and I'm thinking jQuery will be nice enough to show them... (See an example in your profile area, anytime you find a "?" icon, click it... It's an example of a 'big' popup à la Wedge.)
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8)Easy board icons changer
This one of the things i never seen on a software a build-in option that allows you to change the board icons.
If it were just up to me, I'd remove board icons the way they're done now, and replace them with an 'avatar' or something, and show only a "NEW" icon next to the board name, just like sub-boards do. (Well, first we'll have to fix the bug that makes it show only on a handful of sub-boards...)
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9)Member List
A member list with avatars who show if the user is online or not (transparent avatars offline not transparent online) instead of the standard online image.
Final Wedge will show avatars, like Noisen does, but in a reduced height (probably like the Wireless skin here.) I don't want to break too much of it... Also, I'm hoping to do it in a tableless way, but it warrants for a longer and more complicated rewrite and I don't really have the time.
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10)The Inbox
I think a conversation looking pm system would do good with the awesome look of the rest :D
See Pete's reply.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 2nd, 2012, 04:07 PM
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Except that you don't say what thread prefixes are supposed to do... It's not a feature, it's a concept.
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/
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What is that?
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.

Both would be good to have as plugins, but I'd argue they should be done separately as plugins.
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Maybe just a warning at the top of the page when you have less than 5mn left...
That might be useful. But there are good reasons to leave it in.
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If it were just up to me, I'd remove board icons the way they're done now, and replace them with an 'avatar' or something, and show only a "NEW" icon next to the board name, just like sub-boards do. (Well, first we'll have to fix the bug that makes it show only on a handful of sub-boards...)
That's half way towards what he's talking about, incidentally.
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Final Wedge will show avatars, like Noisen does, but in a reduced height (probably like the Wireless skin here.) I don't want to break too much of it... Also, I'm hoping to do it in a tableless way, but it warrants for a longer and more complicated rewrite and I don't really have the time.
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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor 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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor 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...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 3rd, 2012, 07:44 PM
*nods* Yes, we would. But wouldn't it be better in the long run?
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor 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 ;)
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor 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*
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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:
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor 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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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)
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: 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.

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.
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Nao 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...
Title: Re: Shole's List
Post by: Arantor on June 4th, 2012, 01:05 AM
Why would you store the same thing twice in different forms, though? If ever you update one of them (e.g. fixing capitalisation) you'd have to fix all the textual forms too.

Also, same question as before; would you fetch all the tags wherever you show a topic name? You might do that with full on topic prefixes but you probably wouldn't with tags (at least, other systems that do topic tags do not do that)

And really, having it outside the title as I've been saying just simplifies the whole procedure anyway, surely?