Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Just a few little suggestions!

I've not been part of the community too long, but I thought I'd share some ideas!

I'd like to see more notifications about friend activities. I personally would like to know when an edit is made to a page so I can go look and see if it's an important update. It could be something simple that reads "______ has made an edit to __________ page" or "________ updated _________"

I know not everyone would like that, but if there was an option to turn it on or off that would be pretty spiffy.

The BBcode is... weird. I can't do tags within tags like I can with HTML. For example, if I'm doing a bulleted list but I want to bold something inside of that list, it stops doing the list after the bolded text. This is really annoying. Could there be an HTML option... or just better BBC? I've used BBC before and I've never had so much trouble as I have with it here lol I think HTML would open up a few more options, too.

And then... more themes for free users!

Thats all I have to add

Yay suggestions!! We love them.

I do believe this was suggested before and Kim mentioned that this'd be hard to do. Sometimes people save a widget 300 times while writing a detailed story, or they edit it a lot to weed out typos and the like. Not only would it flood people unnecessarily with updates, but when does the code decide players should be notified of these changes? How efficient will it be? How useful is it in the end? Even if users can turn it on or off on their end, it will probably still generate a lot of processing to track every single click when editing a widget, so if I recall right I believe Kim turned down this suggestion before for similar reasons.

I've no particular preference for this myself. If I want to let my friends know of important updates, I could use the Journal widget. Whenever a character's journal gets a new entry, it is displayed in the notifications! Maybe that's more efficient than listing widget updates? It is certainly a worthy and working alternative.

HTML will never be an option, unfortunately. The reason is simply that it's too easy to misuse and break the page or even cause harm to the site with malicious coding as a whole. That's why we have BBCode in the first place! It's a way of allowing you to do a whole ton of things HTML can do without using actual HTML. Plus, BBCode is much simpler to use for people who don't know HTML, and ultimately we want even 13 year olds to be able to use the site properly without it being too confusing!

The reason you're probably having more trouble with BBCode on RPR is that Kim doesn't use existing software that has ironed out BBCode features. She writes it all from scratch! I noticed the issue with the list as well though, as I believe it qualifies as a bug. You should be able to markup your text in a list as well. Why not send in a bug report about it to Kim?

Are there any other BBCodes in particular you're having issues with? Usually it's because people utilize the codes wrong, but as above it can be a bug as well. Maybe we can help you get it figured out.

All themes are free for all users! Kim doesn't have anybody who is paid to make themes, so a whole lot of them are volunteer submissions from users or made by Kim herself when she has the time for it. Members who have an epic membership can make their own custom themes by being able to write their own CSS, but that's the extend of themes for paid members.

If you would like to see more themes, you'd probably have to bother some of our members to see if they'd be willing to invest some time into creating new ones.


Lastly, I don't speak for Kim so I can't tell you for sure what her response will be to these suggestions. Her word is law after all. I'm just guessing and going by what has been said before, so please do take that into consideration.

Sanne, you are a posting NINJA!
Er, regard or disregard the below then! Dang she's fast.

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I believe such a suggestion was made a while back, but it was unable to be implemented because it was too dang complicated, coding wise, and would overwhelm the notifications system with every little edit made (and for someone like me, I tend to tweak pages constantly in insignificant ways no one really cares about). If you give me a few, I can go hunting around the RPR to see if I can find that topic again-- if you're thinking what I'm thinking, of course.

As for your coding issue, lemmie help you out there! When you put up the tags for lists and bolded words, you need to place the bold tags inside the list. Er, like so:

Ex:

• Text here please This is not the bolded stuff.

As for HTML instead of BBC, we use BBC around here because it is actually safer from a security standpoint for things as simple as forum posts, formatting text, and composing character profiles. If you're an Epic Member, you can go a step further and use CSS coding to design custom profile templates for you and other Epic Members. Not sure what sort of issues you've been having or how our BBC is different from any other place that uses it, but I hope my above example helped you out!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll see if I can find the topic that I believe shares your idea about edit-notifications.

• Hi there. I'm bold. How do you do?
• And I'm not bold at all.

This doesn't seem to break on the forums. But I believe it does break on a character page.

Edit: Huh. Well, never mind. It seems to work. What code are you using that's breaking?

Do you mean something like This?
<<Further down the page is some naughty language-- try not to wander beyond the first section even though I have a warning there as well, thank you!>>
*motions towards Beard of Evil* It seems to work, and I even had doubts for a second that it would within URL tags.

Or did I just get lucky in my testing? *head scratch*

Edit: Oh well nevermind then!

EditII: I think I found the topic! Told you I'd find it eventually! Didn't I? Ohoho-- *gets back on track* Click Here!

I see how it would be complicated updating something like that. Instead of updating each time a widget is edited, how about just a page in general? Instead of making a new notification, it could just keep condensing it - somewhat like it does with journal entries and uploading pictures. When you add picture after picture, it doesn't add a new notification for each individual one, it does the whole "so and so has uploaded 7 new pictures" - couldn't editing pages be similar to that? I understand if it's too complicated, then it's just too complicated. It's not a huge deal, just something I thought might be neat

This is my issue:

line
line
line

line
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Anything after the bolded text is no longer listed. So maybe I'm doing it wrong. With HTML for a list like that there has to be the <li> before each list item - is there something like that in BBC that I'm missing? It's just such a pain to have to make each individual line a separate list.

Hmm, maybe it is a bug - but if you add bullet points in there it lines up perfectly c:

Hmm... I guess I'll just try that then xD

It's not so much the manner in which it's displayed in the notifications as it is the code behind all that to make it work. The workload on the server will be HUGE if a widget has to record that it was saved every single time it's clicked... for everybody on the site, always. Like I said, some people save their work dozens or hundreds of times in a short period of time. The amount of work involved and the strain of the server outweighs the pros of this feature. Images are only displayed when uploaded, which is an entirely different process by itself. It's a rather small gain but a huge load to deal with.

Thanks for answering this question so fast Sanne! You are correct that I am currently uninterested in adding page/widget updates to an already overburdened notification system.

One correction though!

This is not actually true! We run with NBBC. We used to use another parser but it was much buggier and I kicked it to the curb in favor of this one. I have implemented some custom tags not normally supported by NBBC however.

Probably the reason you were having trouble is that I have it set up to be incredibly strict. It is entirely unforgiving of incorrect markup. I know it's annoying and it'd be nice if it were super flexible, but there are some browsers out there that can crash when confronted with HTML that isn't up to spec. I consider it a matter of courtesy that we not crash older computers. And before anyone says this never happens, it happened a lot before I made it strict! You were running into that over protectiveness when you tried making a list without specifying where the bullet points were meant to go.

I was just thinking something like this would be nice, but maybe on a 'click to share' basis, that way it wouldn't overload the system?

The issue is more that notifications aren't functioning effectively right now. Power users (people who have over 5000 notifications a week or month... Not entirely sure which one it was, but I think a month!) are already running into a lot of issues wherein notifications don't display right and require to frequently empty the cache. If an ability was added to share widget updates the notifications system would have to handle even more, and we can expect only more issues up until the notifications are more efficient.

That said, I can picture a lot of users would turn this feature on by default and still tick the box to notify friends of updates when they update their widget a hundred times in a few hours. The journal is still a more efficient way of updating your friends, although it's problematic if you use it for your character.

Maybe at some point, a journal-like update system would be nicer, more efficient and notifications friendlier. (I'm not sure by how much, though)

I'm shocked!! But that does make sense.

There's two ways in which notifications can start to cause overwhelm:

1. Sheer number of notifications in the database
2. The number of criteria to find relevant notifications

Simplifying the criteria is the major issue I'm working on now to stabilize notifications. Adding criteria, even if in the end there are no results for that criteria to find, works against this goal.

Shoring up notifications is VERY high on my list of things to do, and I'm spending a lot of time doing research into efficiency. Notifications don't just cause problems for power users when they get overwhelmed -- even if you're seeing no bugs, you've probably noticed that the site is often laggy. And more often than not that lag is injected into everyone's experience by notifications requiring so much brain power.

So I seriously can't add anything else to notifications right now. Not until the system is reformed (once again). It's causing far reaching problems for everyone.

I do want to repeat, however: I understand that it's frustrating and it would be a really good thing if your friends were somehow told when you'd done a lot of work on your characters! It's definitely an idea I'll re-examine in the future, when notifications aren't experiencing constant states of emergency.

I think I was misunderstood. I didn't mean an auto-share type thing.

Say you just updated your character, you've faffed about with it for a few hours and you're totally pleased with it and want people to know you've updated it. There could be a button, perhaps next to the names on your character list where you go to edit them on the dashboard that would send an alert. That way people wouldn't automatically update on accident, it wouldn't overload the feed (unless it was being abused, I guess) and people would know that a profile has been updated.

I understood! I think it's a good idea, and would address point #1 I made above. I was trying to explain point #2, that adding a type of notification to search for is the actual sort of overwhelm I'm concerned about. It's invisible to people and wouldn't visually clutter up your notifications stream. BUT we can all experience it anyway, in that the more the server has to search for (regardless of how many results are returned) the more lag we'll all see on the site. I realize that's confusing, I'm not sure how else to explain it.

The more people that want to go on the roller coaster, the longer the wait is before you actually get to have fun on the ride? *lame'd*