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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Posts
In this forum there's two kinds of bans generally. The first is the obvious one, the punishment version where someone did a bad and was shown the door on a temporary or permanent basis. But - especially during high-stress times or during especially anxiety-inducing world events - we get people who are struggling with something going on in the forums, and want or need to separate themselves from it for their own wellbeing until they can settle themselves or until the event blows over. When that happens the mods get a PM asking for a temporary tempban, which we'll generally grant.
The thing is, while the latter type of ban is absolutely not punitive in any way, they still appear in the forum as the dreaded crossed-out-dude-on-red-background icon, just like the miscreants do, and short of keeping an eye on the various infraction/ban threads it all looks the same to non-mod posters.
In Xenforo, is it possible to somehow disambiguate these? I'd love if there was some way to communicate "this poster didn't do something wrong, but rather requested a break," both because it feels fairer to them and because it would eliminate a source of confusion for everyone else.
I believe Xenoforo let's you setup multiple roles with different privileges, which would definitely seem to allow a 'On A Break' role in those cases.
Something even that would potentially allow that user to log in and PM mods/ mod forum but not access anything else and request that their account be unbanned or put back in a normal user role. This could even be something uses as a 'time-out' for when someone is spiraling but maybe still discussion between mods if they need a temp / permanent or an appeal is pending. It feels like several people have escalated situations in the past where just setting them aside for a few hours or days where they can cool down and get a nights sleep might have resolved the problem.
Edit - and the 'in time out' role could be different than the 'on a break' role.
Relatedly - if some roles (eg mods) gain access to additional boards based on Role, can the opposite also be done? Have a Role that makes it so you can log in but can't see any forums
If you log in, you would see the option to come back.
It takes the mods out of the equation altogether and empowers people to set their status should they need it.
Yes. Roles have a permission structure for forum visibility of
Inherit - whatever the parent permission is for the section or board above
Yes - you can see it so long as one of your roles has it.
No - if all of your roles have no, you can't see it.
Never - If ANY of your roles has this, you can't see it.
That's one possibility. That said, that option feels like it's the equivalent of "simply walk away from the keyboard." Most people can do that well enough, but a lot of the requested bans we get are from people in a position where they don't trust themselves to do that unassisted, or are worrying that they're spiralling in a way where they're risking eating infractions or actual bans if the stick around.
Basically I'd like to find a way to accommodate people in that kind of circumstance, while also protecting them reputationally. That might sound like a weird edge case, but I wouldn't be surprised if half our tempban requests weren't that kind of "I can't be here right now, not even passively, please help" situation.
Yeah, I was thinking of a role that, using the Never structure in the above post, would hide the entire forum from them. The header would have a button that would remove the role and let them see stuff again.
But, that said, we could also do a timed ban self-service that doesn't look like a ban if that reduces load on the mods and provides a better experience for end users.
Maybe there's a way to just ban yourself for 7 days. Once you hit the button you can't see or do anything for 7 days without direct moderator intervention.
No one has to see or know - you're just not active during that time to everyone else but to you the forums just don't work for 7 days. You can even let people set their own timers.
I feel like there's a solution that shouldn't require mods to have to do the thing themselves. It feels like a lot of, for lack of a better term, housekeeping.
PSN: jrrl_absent
1. Jump back to my last post in this thread. Yeah, yeah, but you guys all do it too I’m sure of it. Bonus points if you can keep clicking it and jump back through all of your posts.
2. Recent events jump back. Basically posting tends to come in waves. If you’re keeping up with a thread often enough, then you’re missing reactions/edits. Sometimes I like to go back to when the most recent wave kicked off. This would be based on time between posts. Look at recent posts and get an average(ish) time between posts, and then go back to the most recent post that had a much longer than that average time between posts.
3. Similar to 2 but in the opposite direction. Skip recent activity. Instead of just going all the way to the end and marking all as read, look through unread posts and see if post rate slows down at some point and skip to that point. Alternative look for change in people posting and skip to that point. Great for skipping topics I’m not interested in, without potentially missing the topic change.
4. Back to mod post. I know the team is working on making the mod posts show up on the post editor, but I usually like to go back to the actual post to see the surrounding posts for context.
I might think about more but those were the main ones.
Instead of typing it all up, and then having the thread owner manually updating the first post with new stuff as the thread goes on, maybe have a snippet that can be "linked", like a html tag? Then on a separate section of the forum, the thread creator (and anyone they can add) can make / edit these snippet. So when a new thread needs to be created, they can just quickly link the existing snippet to reduce toil. Confluence has something like that.
Not sure if this is the only use case for such a macro, or if there's already an existing solution for this.
If it's not it's probably something possible.
Also probably can block tags too? Like if you never want to see [politics] you can just put it on an ignore list?
Just an idea!
Absolutely high on my personal list, yes!
there's already paid plugins for xenforo to block tags so yep it's possible
Using tagging systems in addition to subforums is that it gives a lot more granular control to users without much back end work.
For example, if somebody doesn't care about Star Wars but loves Star Trek, then they can just hide threads with the [Star Wars] tag.
(Steam is a good real world example of how this could work.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Mod Decrees are just a class applied to a post. What it looks like is up to the theme to determine. All I have to do is set a value on each post. This will be a good way to learn the very basics of xenforo's template and editing services
I was a fool!
Turns out I picked basically one of the hardest things to do, and I'm six crawls up this system's ass just logging everything to a file trying to figure out what the fuck is happening in here
I am genuinely excited to get elbow deep in the xenoforo stuff.
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
I wouldn't give up entirely on the mod decree being a little more than a theming exercise, as I would like to hang an event off of whenever a mod decree happens.
So that a listener sees it, and sends the event to any subscribers (logged-in people with their browser open on the thread).
The number of times I have seen someone make a massive effortpost, only for the person they were effortposting towards getting thread kicked ten minutes earlier? A modal that pops up and says that person has been kicked from the thread, or saying "this topic is no longer being discussed, move on" saves people from accidentally relighting the fire or needing to quickly go back and edit it out.
Theming reminds me a LOT of twig, by the way.
Not completely, but mostly in how you can bring values forward into the template.
Below is an example of one template, a login form.
<xf:js src="xf/login_signup.js" min="1" /> <xf:js src="xf/webauthn.js" min="1" /> <xf:title>{{ phrase('log_in') }}</xf:title> <xf:head option="robots"><meta name="robots" content="noindex" /></xf:head> <xf:if is="$xf.session.preRegActionKey"> <div class="blockMessage blockMessage--highlight"> {{ phrase('pre_reg_action_notice_login') }}<br /> <br /> {{ phrase('dont_have_account_question') }} <xf:button class="button--link" href="{{ link('register', null, {'_xfRedirect': $redirect}) }}" data-xf-click="overlay" >{{ phrase('register') }}</xf:button> </div> </xf:if> <xf:if contentcheck="true"> <div class="blockMessage blockMessage--error blockMessage--iconic"> <xf:contentcheck>{$error}</xf:contentcheck> </div> </xf:if> <div class="blocks"> <xf:form action="{{ link('login/login') }}" class="block"> <div class="block-container"> <div class="block-body"> <xf:textboxrow name="login" value="{$login}" autofocus="autofocus" autocomplete="username" label="{{ phrase('your_name_or_email_address') }}" /> <xf:passwordboxrow name="password" autocomplete="current-password" label="{{ phrase('password') }}"> <xf:html> <a href="{{ link('lost-password') }}" data-xf-click="overlay">{{ phrase('forgot_your_password') }}</a> </xf:html> </xf:passwordboxrow> <xf:if is="$captcha"> <xf:captcharow label="{{ phrase('verification') }}" force="true" force-visible="true" context="xf_login" /> </xf:if> <xf:checkboxrow> <xf:option name="remember" selected="true">{{ phrase('stay_logged_in') }}</xf:option> </xf:checkboxrow> <xf:hiddenval name="_xfRedirect">{$redirect}</xf:hiddenval> </div> <xf:submitrow icon="login" /> </div> <xf:if is="$xf.options.registrationSetup.enabled"> <div class="block-outer block-outer--after"> <div class="block-outer-middle"> {{ phrase('dont_have_account_question') }} <xf:button href="{{ link('register') }}">{{ phrase('register_now') }}</xf:button> </div> </div> </xf:if> </xf:form> <div class="blocks-textJoiner"><span></span><em>{{ phrase('or_separator') }}</em><span></span></div> <div class="block"> <div class="block-container"> <div class="block-body"> <xf:formrow rowtype="button" label="{{ phrase('log_in_using') }}"> <ul class="listHeap"> <li> <xf:form action="{{ link('login/login') }}" data-xf-init="webauthn" data-type="get" data-autotrigger="false" data-autosubmit="true" data-verifying="{{ phrase('verifying...') }}"> <xf:button class="button--provider button--provider--passkey js-webauthnStart"> {{ passkey_icon() }} {{ phrase('passkey') }} </xf:button> <xf:hiddenval name="webauthn_payload" /> <xf:hiddenval name="webauthn_challenge">{{ $passkey ? $passkey.getChallenge() : '' }}</xf:hiddenval> </xf:form> </li> <xf:foreach loop="$providers" value="$provider" if="$providers is not empty"> <li> <xf:macro id="connected_account_macros::button" arg-provider="{$provider}" /> </li> </xf:foreach> </ul> </xf:formrow> </div> </div> </div> </div>So, there are a number of new html tags they have created to handle various placement and process functions, like xf:js to include scripts appropriately, xf:form* to bind form functions, validations and layouts to their api...
but then you have the fun {{ }} stuff where you can take the context of the data provided to this template and either drop a value in directly, or use some provided functions to modify or use that value to render something different. A good example is phrase() where you can let xenforo's translations function handle delivering the correct string to the current end user.
All of the templates live in the database, but can be exported into your module as part of the development process and get installed when a module is installed on platform.
This gets really obnoxious when it happens to the point where if I'm working on an effort post I'll type it in Notepad++ then copy it over when I'm done if I think a thread might be locked soon.
It's still syntax colouring for me here.
This implies that it's only sometimes broken, The very best kind of broken.
I just get a big ol yellow blob with black text no matter how many times I refresh.
Chrome vs firefox difference maybe? Mobile vs desktop?
Edit: oh it's adblock related, rip me
I am decidedly not a programmer but these are questions I think are useful to establish upfront so that there are no misconceptions
I think the general consensus was to open source any module "we" (being whoever works on this stuff) do make.
It'd help the xenforo community having more open source modules and folks in our community can participate easily perhaps?
I think it was in that "oh god everything's ending" thread at the start of this. Maybe.
We will have private repos for things that have no real purpose going open source. Things like our local dev environment starter, and a set of addons that will be differently namespaced that do things very specific to this forum. Think the PA User Import module.
But, as we build fun stuff that facilitate games/phallas, or better mod announcements, etc? Those can and will be open source projects and we will make them available on the xenforo addon marketplace. It will make external contributions easier and it creates an avenue for other programmers who like forums to find us and keep growing the community.
I mean, the gimp hasn't murdered photoshop, and mariadb hasn't killed off mysql though I often struggle to figure out why that hasn't happened yet.
We can coexist. Probably.
😈
Maria is doing a real good job with mysql though.
The others are... quality I think. Much less applicable to modules doing things like dice rolls I'd hope. But who knows.
I will find it endlessly hilarious if we do make at least one enemy because of a phalla module or something.
mariadb is because mysql is still in a million php tutorials
gimp is 99% the dumb fucking name
10% the name 89% the godawful UI
maybe gimp is fine if you started with it but if you're coming from photoshop be prepared for hours of pain for the simplest tasks
oh yeah the UI is terrible but i'm never telling people to go download the gimp
i just direct them to paint.net since it's powerful enough to do what they need to, doesn't set their eyeballs on fire with a terrible UI and isn't named the gimp
The UI is like trying to sort garbage that's on fire.
There are so many better options today (photopea and paint.net even).