Guilds - Info & Questions

[loren]

Apologies if I sounded grumpy on my last reply

not at all; no apologies necessary! thank you for addressing everything i've brought up so quickly. i apologize for being a little dramatic in my last reply. i've never been in charge of a webring before, so i had a bit of a moment where i was like "omg how do i make this thing work " but i think i should probably chill out a bit. there's no rush.

again, thank you for all the work you've put into this! i hope you're able to take a break and enjoy what you've created!

[loren]

another report from natureguild!
(my apologies again; i know i just said that you deserve a break)

the list of sites on the guild page's webring tab only shows the first few from the widget's variable script, and it would be nice if it showed everyone. also, the site list in the script is missing at least one member. they were one of the earlier members to join, and i checked to make sure that their site appears on the surf club page (it does!), so i'm not sure why their site is being skipped over.


in other news, i wrote a quick guide to styling guild ring widgets on the wiki!

[Melooon]

i know i just said that you deserve a break

Someday I will be sitting in an old folks home ranting about homepages to a nurse-robot that ran out of battery three hours earlier, that will be the day I have a break

list of sites on the guild page's webring tab only shows the first few from the widget's variable script

Ok this one is now fixed, I found a sneaky limiter on the member data being loaded in - to work around this I lifted the limit, but I also moved the normal members list to a new page so its not slowing down the guild page if there are lots of members!

ed to make sure that their site appears on the surf club page (it does!)

Ooph this one was my mistake, apparently in a recent security audit I locked the SurfClub out of doing database updates, so it was not reporting to the forum who was in the club anymore. I fixed this so hopefully during the next index (every 6 hours these days) it will accurately report who's in the club! We'll have to wait and see if this sorts itself out

i wrote a quick guide to styling guild ring widgets on the wiki

Nice work! One other tip is that if you want to chnage the "guild home" and "excuse me?" text, they are just variables you can overwrite by adding a script after your variables link:

Code

melonGuild[#].homeTxt = "Guild Home";
melonGuild[#].infoTxt = "Excuse me?";

Variables follow the same guild index numbering system, so if you have multiple guild widgets on a single page they can all be different and they wont clash

[loren]

We'll have to wait and see if this sorts itself out

it worked! thank you so much!!

variables you can overwrite by adding a script

ooooh this is a great tip! i like how they are now ("excuse me?" makes me laugh ), but i will think about potential other ways to word things


i noticed one more thing! i did all my webring.css style troubleshooting on the guild's everyone site, where it works just as intended, but it doesn't look like the stylesheet is being applied to anyone else's sites. i tried slapping some !importants on things, and i looked at the widget with the browser devtools, but i can't figure it out.

[Melooon]

devtools, but i can't figure it out

I thinkkk it's because the everyone site was sending the css file as a plaintext file, some sites have stricter rules than others about files being labeled correctly. I was getting weird errors when I tried to test it in CodePen. I updated the everyone site so that it tries to send the css with the proper css header data - you'll prob need to clear browser cache to see if it worked!

[loren]

clear browser cache to see if it worked!

it worked!!    thank you again!!

[Metropolis]

wait so how do we create a new guild??

[MediocreMetastasis]

wait so how do we create a new guild??

You need to be a full member.

[darkdark7]

Hi Melon, I love guilds, and I wanted to ask if the plugin you used for the SMF forum to create guilds was available. I'd like to know more about it and, if possible, where to download/purchase it, because it's fantastic.

Thanks and have a wonderful day.

[Melooon]

if the plugin you used for the SMF forum to create guilds was available

The majority of forum features are either based on SMFPacks or SMFHacks plugins ^^ SMFHacks is run by a really helpful fellow and I very much recommend picking his plugins wherever possible. SMFPacks is run by the most jaded unhelpful money grubber I've ever had the displeasure of working with, and you should avoid at all costs.

All that said; Guilds are based on SMFPacks Social Groups - with about two solid weeks of modding by me layered on top of the original plugin. I think for all these plugins, you really need to be willing to PHP mod them because they are all buggy and badly designed, but with a bit of TLC you can gel them quite well 

[larvapuppy]

I have been working on my Pixel Artists Guild a little, but it's still pretty inactive (other than me updating the Everyone site page each time a new member joins).

I'd like to suggest a couple things that I think would make the Notes feature a lot better, and hopefully increase activity in the Guilds:

• Alerts (via the bell) that get sent to all members each time someone posts a new Note. Right now Notes are barely being used in all of the Guilds I'm in. I think this is partly because no one is manually checking the Guilds after they initially sign up.
• Notes are currently in reverse chronological order, like a social media feed.  I would much prefer the messages to be ordered the opposite way, like the threads on the forum.

If Alerts for new Notes is a no-go, maybe add some kind of other Alert / announcement that only the Guild managers are able to send? Anything to prompt some participation would be great, honestly.

I also think the Events feature in Guilds is kind of useless at the moment. I created an Event for us to make pixel art of ourselves, but as far as I know, no one was notified about the Event either when I created it or on the date of the Event. I'd love to create Events for editing the Everyone page together, pixel art trades/battles, etc., but it is hard to do this when Events only consist of a date and a name and are hidden away in a tab of the Guild page. Even adding a description field to the Events creation form would help a lot.  An option for a new thread (like the Notes space) for each Event would also be great and liven things up considerably, because then we'd have a separate place for our Event chatter and our general chatter (which I assume will take place in Notes).

[Melooon]

Thanks for the feedback, I'll reply to each one below although I agree with most. The guilds system still needs a lot of work to finish it out, please be patient with getting fixes done, they may take time but they will come

someone posts a new Note. Right now Notes are barely being used in all of the Guilds I'm in

Yep this should be done! I also wanted notes to appear in a sub feed on the recent posts page, I'm still tryna figure that out.

Notes are currently in reverse chronological order

So this one was deliberate - if you display them chronologically, then the first few notes in any guild will be the first thing everyone will see for the entire guilds history, every time you want to check for new notes you'd need to find the last page link and then click it - It seemed more natural for it to be a half-way live chat, more like profile comments.

Events feature in Guilds is kind of useless at the moment

Agreed with this - Events are totally unfinished at the moment; the plan is to aggregate all events into a community wide feed and alert people about it have via the forums news headers!

For threads - The issue would be archiving - for example; if someone discusses Bob the Builder in an event thread, is that thread saved? How does it tie into the search system? What if someone searching Bob the Builder wants to find that info in 10 years? - Those are complex jobs and Im reluctant to fragment discussions like that; but Im open to suggestions!

[loren]

it will accurately report who's in the club!

BUG REPORT! this was working perfectly for a while, but a few days ago i noticed that two guild members' sites have mysteriously vanished from the webring list. i waited for a few SurfClub refresh cycles, but they are still gone. can we get them back?

[Melooon]

i noticed that two guild members' sites have mysteriously vanished

This would only happen in a few situations ~ 1. Their site is offline when the indexer tries to visit, 2. Their site is blocking the indexer, 3. Their site depends entirely on JavaScript and cannot be loaded by the indexer. Check to make sure it's none of those and report back!

[loren]

Check to make sure it's none of those and report back

the two sites are thefrugalgamer.net and corruptedunicorn.neocities.org, which are both appearing in the main SurfClub ring list, so i think they are being indexed okay!