@mention

Hey there, Keleth -- it'd be cool if you could have an @mention functionality that might give someone a heads up / ping in their banner that they've been mentioned in a thread. It might be an interesting way to make sure that folks who follow everything/all the games, know that they've been pinged in a game thread they may be in.

I guess it could get abused-ish, but might be nice.

I can look into it, but as a frill, I'd have to class it as mid/low importance.

I've got to bump this one and put it back to the list.

As we get more and more people and more and more games (and more and more forums) I think it can become a challenge to track when you might be needed in a game. I know, for example, that some players are active (because the GM a game I'm in) but I'm waiting on a roll for them. My rules of GMing mean that I can roll for them and move the story along, but it's a shame when I know they are active and may have just missed it.

Structurally -- this could even be more heavyweight than a simple @mention. Instead add another tag -- like the note tag -- called ping. so I could {ping}Keleth{/ping}.

I don't know your forum software, but I imagine one could keep a separate table where each thread-user tuple has a "latest post with a {ping} in it". Then when your software is determining whether to put a 'new' tag (red) it could detect the ping and make it purple, orange, bright blue, pink, blinking or whatever.

For what it's worth, this never dropped off my radar; I'm just having trouble keeping up with the workload for GP right now. Specially the Angular integration is slowing stuff down. In the end, it'll be well worth it (it already is, from the Angular based character sheets), but it's slow to add.

A large part of what's kept this feature off track is figuring out the implementation. I like the color idea, though maybe, like we have a Latest Posts page, we can have a Pinged Posts page, where you see any posts you've been pinged in, maybe over the last two weeks?

I guess technically, no one but me knows the GP forum software, as it's completely custom. I wrote it from the ground up specifically for play-by-post gaming. I have a decent idea on how the backend and the database would take pings, but how it'd work on the front end throws me.

I'm gonna put up a post by this Friday talking about what's going on, development wise, with GP, and if people want to help, what they can do. I'll probably end up also creating a thread in site discussions about how people can help, so they don't have to track down an announcement each time.

As a suggestion, how about have something similar to how the Private Messages work? You know, a Ping icon in the top right corner, next to your name, and a message that flashes on the front page that says "You have X pings", where X is the number of pings you have.

I'm not entirely certain how you could code that to make it work, but that's how I see falryx's idea going.

Also, potentially, you could have it hyperlink the name, so that when they click on it, it goes to their profile? I dunno, just throwing ideas around. You can tell me to shut up and I will :) :P