It was more that when I go to the history, I have to scroll down from the top past the list of times it was changed and past the current source and then click another button to open the diff before I can scroll down through that to find the actual changes. It’d be easier if-- hm. There’s a ‘jump to bottom’ on wiki pages; maybe the history pages could have a ‘jump to diff’ up at the top, and clicking it would both open the diff up and scroll you down to where it starts? That would still be two clicks to get to the diff, but it would cut out having to scroll through the source first at least.
But I would actually love a link to the source/history page right from ‘Recent Changes’, especially if it went directly to the diff. I would use the heck out of that – on mediawikis I usually do use the link that does that directly from RC.
I would really love a way to have more than one alt usable on the portal at once (without an incognito window). Like, if I could just pick which character I was joining a scene as, and/or if I could deal with scenes from multiple alts in /scenes-play and just be the appropriate alt for the scene (i.e., the one that’s in it) when I posed from there.
I know this would require some serious UX thought as far as implementation, but with so many of us playing more than one (some people have four or more!) character on a game, it’d be really handy. Even using an incognito window in Chrome one can only do two before one’d need to start using Firefox as well.
So, there’s relationships/order to let you order your list of categories on the client, but no way I can find to do that from the portal except tweaking the category names until they hit the right order alphabetically.
And you can arrange your relationships within a category non-alphabetically using the Order field on the portal, but on the client, they still come up in alphabetical order.
It’d be cool if categories could be ordered on the portal, and if the client honoured the portal’s relationship-order!
@ren - The relationships was just an oversight. Thanks for pointing it out.
As far as multiple alts on the portal - I definitely agree with you that it would be nice to have, but unfortunately the code implications make it impractical.
Because the MU client is still one-character-per-connection, the entire Ares architecture is limited-to/based-around that idea. When you ask “give me my scenes” - it’s that character’s scenes. When you say “show me my mail” - it’s that character’s mail. When you check access to a web page, or figure out who to notify when a new message comes in, it’s by character.
Early on I explored the possibility of making everything based around player accounts (like some MUDs do, or Storium, or other platforms). But that would have made things too disruptive for folks who still wanted to use MU clients, where handles are optional and the workflow starts with connecting to a character, not a player account.
It would just be a massive undertaking to switch horses now, and not something I’m willing to undertake at this point. Sorry!
I should clarify that I do anticipate making certain specific things more accessible to alts, like in the way you can currently edit your alt’s profile page from any other alt. Like if two of your alts are in a scene (not uncommon with staffers running NPCs), picking which one to pose from so you don’t have to have two windows open. That kind of thing. It’s just not going to be widespread for the architectural reasons mentioned.
Back in the dark days, when I had no proper free time to MUSH, I played a few forum places that used JCink. It had a little drop-down menu option where, if you had multiple linked accounts, you could quick-switch your logins.
I had two things I don’t know if they are supported, but wanted to at least ask:
Alt management/connection- so you can see at least counts of in-game mail for all alts from any one, etc; one desire here is not to use @handles, because players wouldn’t necessarily want the cross-connections to be public knowledge.
Categories support on pages in the wiki and semantic-wiki ability to specify within wiki pages to derive a list of all pages of a given category, specifying how to order them, and how to present them (ordered list alpha, ordered list numeric, unordered list, comma-separated list, or template [useful for table presentations])
Re: 1 - See the thread beginning a few posts up for details. Alt Discussion
Re: 2 - The wiki has basic support for tag lists (of wiki pages, characters or scenes) and category lists (of wiki pages).
Right now there’s only a single format for the lists, which you can change with custom code on the back-end if you need to.
Building a super-flexible “Semantic Wiki” extension is not going to happen any time in the forseeable future. It’s not even baked into MediaWiki, which is a much more robust wiki than Ares has. Semantic MW is a separate extension with an entire team supporting it.
That said, if there’s something specific you’d like to do with the page list on your game that you can’t do currently, I would be happy to take that down as a potential future feature.
Thanks everybody for the feedback! I do love getting ideas for stuff to add to the web portal.
Now that the portal is considerably more fleshed out than it was last October (when this thread started), I’m closing this thread.
You’re still more than welcome to create specific threads for features you would like to see added to the game. Making them separate threads will help me keep track of them and also keep ideas/responses to an idea tied to that idea.
