Dev News Stream

[Eric]

The Game Advertisements system is now live for testing.

The advertisements page itself shows any games where the GM has set the Advertising date in the future.

 

As with OGMW, there is a filter sidebar that can be used to narrow down the results to a specific game system.

For GMs, all you need to do to advertise your game is select Manage Game > Edit Game Settings, and put the end date in the Advertising field. Doing so automatically sets your game's privacy status to Public, allowing applicants to post without joining.

The privacy status will automatically change to Closed when the Advertising date passes; you can then send join invitations and, as desired, use the Edit Game Settings panel to change it to Private or Read-Only.

 

[Eric]

The delivery of the game advertisements capabilities means we have passed our next major milestone!

 

Dice Tower	Games System	Sheets Integration	Privacy Features	Full Operating Capability
Complete - 10/3/2022	Complete - 10/31/2022	In Queue - 11/2022	Pending - 12/2022	Pending - 1Q23

 

 

[Eric]

Today's big-deal announcement: Private Topics and Private Posts are live!

 

When you create or edit a Topic, you'll have the option to specify members who can or can't see that Topic. The options are at the bottom of the form:

 

 

 

(Labeling is still a work in progress. The out-of-the-box behavior for Invision Community is to hide empty Member picker fields and their labels behind the Choose Member(S) [sic] button. Show for comes ahead of Hide from.)

 

Similarly, you have the option for selecting users to see (or not see) an individual post on that form, whether creating or editing.

 

The resulting output looks like so:

 

 

 

---

Private Threads and Private Posts are automatically respected in all views, including lists, threads, and streams, regardless of whether it's in a game or not. The following people always can see the item regardless of the values picked:

• The author themselves
• Within a game, any game masters or co-GMs
• Site staff, unless the content is within a game in which they are a player

 

Important note about priority: Show for takes priority over Hide from. In my example post above, the content would be shown for Lockerby and hidden from everyone else, including Colin (if it's in a game where he is a player, of course).

 

 

As always please report any issues in Site Feedback!

[Eric]

Minor updates today with a bigger payoff.

• Fixed a bug with private posts where posts that you weren't supposed to see would be loaded to the page after you create a new post.
• Fixed a bug where the dice roller inputs would not be correctly cleaned up after rolling dice, leading to a proliferation of input fields.
• Fixed a bug where the game status of an advertising game would not correctly be set to Closed after the advertising period expired.

With this set of bug fixes, we've achieved the next major milestone for Baldr ahead of schedule, albeit in a different order than I was previously planning:

 

Dice Tower	Games System	Privacy Features	Sheets Integration	Full Operating Capability
Complete - 10/3/2022	Complete - 10/31/2022	Complete - 11/7/2022	In Queue - 12/2022	Pending - 1Q23

 

 

 

[Eric]

Special minor update to draw your attention to the new "Clone" button next to the "Quote" button at the end of each post. "Clone" allows you to copy the contents of an existing post into the quick reply editor without the quote box around it, making it easier for you to reuse previous posts, e.g., as templates. Enjoy, and as always, report bugs in Site Feetback!

[Eric]

9 hours ago, Colin said:

A note: We’re aware of slightly longer load times that have been occurring, and will be looking into it before we get to Baldr initial release. 

Update on this topic:

The cause is related to the private topic/post features implemented last month. I've been able to reduce the issue by about 50% and have a plan for how to make it right going forward. Please keep using the private features, and I'll provide an update when I'm able to get things to an acceptable state.

[Eric]

OK, I've made some headway in disentangling my prior work of private topics from the private posts. With only private topics enabled, the site is showing nominal performance (initial load <1s, full load <2s), so it's clearly private posts that are the issue. This is, to be honest, what I expected. Since there are already mechanisms for restricting access to a topic, adding one more is pretty simple; however, as there is no mechanism to do the same for a post, the complexity of creating that mechanism is vastly larger. Hiding a post selectively means having to dispense with the normal caching mechanisms for read/unread, last update time, last poster, etc., and adds further intricacy to the notification system that already has a lot of tentacles. The upshot to all of these is substantial processing and database overhead.

 

I haven't given up entirely on private posts, but the evidence suggests it's not going to be a simple lift. I will be spending the next couple of dev days reconsidering the possibility of private text within posts. Stay tuned!

 

N.B.: There have been 14 private posts made since the feature was rolled out. To those who were trying out this feature, thank you; however, since private posts are currently disabled this means those posts are now visible. You may wish to take action to hide the content in another way until I have the next iteration ready for test.

[Eric]

Private (and private-from) blocks are now available for your testing. So far, I have not seen any performance impacts from this approach (which meets the common-sense test, as it does not require any additional database calls to process). These blocks can be added using the new toolbar buttons , and those of you who go source-mode can look at the code behind and copy-paste as you wish.

Private blocks can be seen by:

• The post author
• Anyone else with edit rights to the post (Game leaders, staff)
• Anyone whose username is fully spelled out in the Shown for: block. You can separate multiple users with commas. White space around names is ignored, but white space within names has to be respected.

Private-from blocks are the same except they exclude anyone whose name is fully spelled out in the Hidden from: block.

The content of both private and private-from blocks are specifically removed from the search index contents and email notification contents, regardless of whether the person doing the searching or receiving the email would normally be able to see the contents of the private/private-from block. This is because both search and email do not have a user-specific context; for example, the same email body is generated once and mailed to all users who are following the content.

Both private and private-form blocks should allow any type of formatted content within the block.

I look forward to your feedback on this new approach!

 

@Butchern - for the guide

[Eric]

After all of the heavy lifts of the past couple months, I spent the evening combing through all of your submitted feedback items to make sure they were resolved or on the board to be addressed. There were almost 150 topics--great work, everyone! Approximately 20 remain open and are tagged either "added to tracker" (bugs) or "added to feature requests". The resolved items are now in a sub-forum Closed Feedback Items.

We had our dev team kick-off meeting for sheets integration on Tuesday, and with end-of-year vacation arriving, I look forward to delivering some holiday presents to all of you soon!

Keep those feedback items coming... 🐞🦶

[Eric]

As requested by users (notably Scarecrow71), everyone now has additional web-safe fonts for their styling use. Enjoy!

[Eric]

Game tabs now have unread indicators so you know where to go to see what that highlighted game icon has in store for you! The OOC tab in the image below is the example.

 

 

Also, a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements have been delivered:

• Added the ability to unfollow a game that you previously followed but are no longer a member of
• Removed the extraneous members list sidebar from various game views
• Fixed the games list filtering mechanism so the filters are visible even if the filter criteria return no result
• Fixed a self-inflicted issue where images were not loading correctly except for staff and game leaders

[Eric]

After evaluating all the feedback regarding the site's layout, comparing with similar sites, and testing on Baldr itself, we're rolling out a few updates across all themes:

• Narrowing the overall layout to better align with benchmarks (OGMW, Reddit, StackOverflow, MSDN, CNN, and Washington Post, in case you're wondering)
• Setting a fixed line height for consistency among browsers (some of which had really tight line spacing)
• Increasing spacing between paragraphs to show separation without requiring an extra empty paragraph (note this will make posts with those extra paragraphs look a bit grotesque--edit away!)

Thanks to @bwatford for providing the theme muscle, as well as everyone who chimed in on Baldr and Discord to help guide our thinking.

[Eric]

There's been a lot of stuff moving in the background as Rodrigo and I gear up for sheet integration, but I do have a few enhancements to draw your attention to:

• The "Leave Game" button in the game header has been moved into a nested menu "Manage Game". This will make it less likely to click on it, which will in turn make it less likely to accidentally leave a game when you didn't mean to. Game leaders could already see this menu; the button is now at the bottom. [Feedback from @Rumrunner and many others]
• The Dice Tower now correctly prevents the use of the colon (:) delimiter within roll labels in the CLI mode. Previously, the Tower would allow the roll to be submitted only to return an invalid format error. [Feedback from @Ryku]
• Dice Tower detailed results are now correctly shown when multiple rolls are submitted (GUI "Add a Roll" / CLI semicolon syntax). [Feedback from @iantruesilver and others]

And the big one: the "Copy Rolls" interface! Now you can click on the label of any roll to copy its roll string to the clipboard for reuse (i.e., paste into the CLI). If you click on the die icon 🎲 at the top of the set of dice, it will copy the entire set. Thanks to @jokomaisu and @Neopopulas for their insight, and everyone else who participated in the poll/discussion.

 

[Eric]

Minor improvements for your Super Bowl weekend:

• Made it so authors can see their own hidden content without having to be a GM. [Feedback from @Fiffin and group]
• Fixed Clone Post so it doesn't leave OOC boxes stuck in an open state. [Feedback from @Past Imperfect]
• Added an in-form explanation for GMs that setting the Advertising date in their game will force the game's privacy state to Public during the advertising period. [Feedback from @Colin]
• Made some back-end changes to how posting dice works, in preparation for the next big thing.

[Eric]

Not quite yet ready for prime time, but here's a sneak peek at what I'm working on while Rodrigo is chugging away on the sheets integration: