Gamers' Plane Chrome Extension

I like GP. I spend a lot of time on it. But there are things I find myself a little annoyed about. Rather than curse the darkness, I lit a candle by writing a Chrome extension.

This is what it does:
Homepage

It tidies the homepage by shrinking the announcements (you can still click on the header to get at the full announcement), and removes the "My Games" black box on the right. I never used it.
It removes the Partners box with the broken link and puts the contents of the Games Forums there instead.

The Tools menu at the bottom
Yeah. Never use it. Replaced with a forums menu. (Hat tip to BoS for this idea).
I also changed the styling of the Characters menu.


Snippets menu (buggy)
This has become buggy - so I need to look at this. This is what it sometimes does.

Choose manage.


Add some snippets (keep adding them and it'll create new boxes)


(need to reload the page to get the new snippets to show up - this is annoying - but you only have to do it once)
Add your frequent snippets to posts.


Online indicator
There's no good reason for this to exist. It puts a green dot against people who are online.


Search
Search a thread. It's client side. Your computer is loading the pages and reading them - so it's not fast - but that's all I can do client side.


Shows the results on the same page.

The source code is on GitHub. There are instructions for installing it as a beta (or working on it yourself - it's just javascript and css - you don't need a headband of coding).

I really made it for me - but if you find it useful then I hope you enjoy it.

You should be REALLY careful about installing extensions from random strangers on the internet. That's why this is open source. Read the code (or ask a coder you trust to read the code) and check that it isn't doing anything nefarious.

really nice!

This is really interesting. I'll play with it a bit and give feedback in a few days.

If literally the only thing this extension provided was the ability to search a thread, it would be worth it. I want to weep with joy. Thank you!

Pretty neat! You actually captured a lot of the things I'm hoping to get in at some point, so I'm glad you put it together. It gives me good reason to create a better site.

Thank you all for the positive feedback. There's an update which finds YouTube links and expands them into embeds at the bottom of the post as footnotes.

Dark mode added for CaveJohnson.

Toggle it with the hotkey Alt+N. It will give a brief flash of unstyled content on page load (there again, the rest of the site does this too).



It'll do its best to change the contrast when the poster has specified a colour within a post (e.g. the green in the screenshot) - but if it doesn't work, meh - it tried. Press Alt+N to switch back.

I'm kinda stuck with the graphics, so I've left the header alone.

:+1:

So far, I've been finding it to be a neat extension. The dark mode is a bit odd though, with some of the elements standing out (mostly elements of the reply box).

I could do something about the pink box, but I’m stuck with the toolbar icons and they need a light background. There’s only so much I can do client side.

PMs are unreadable in dark mode. But send me screenshots of bugs in discord and I’ll see what I can do. The colours are based on a technology called css - which is dead easy to change.

I'm liking it, it takes a second to get used to but for a 5 minute change i'm enjoying it. I don't spaz every time i swap back and forth now!

Just happy to see our game made a cameo ;)

I've been using this extension for a few days now, and I've already found the search function to be incredibly helpful. I'm running a game with over 6600 posts over about ten chapters of gameplay. There are a ton of subplots and I frequently need to refer back to something that happened before. Now that I have the ability to run a search, I've spent a lot less time reading through entire gameplay threads to find the tiny detail I needed to write a current post.

I would have paid money for this functionality

Don't give Adam ideas xD

This IS Awesome!

Thank you everybody for the kind words.

I've just checked in an experimental feature.

Character sheet/dice roller integration
In the dice roller you now have tabs for characters (if you're the DM you get a tab for each of the party members).
Click a tab for abilities, weapons and skills.


Click a box (A for advantage, D for disadvantage) and it'll automatically add the dice rolls.



If you're the DM it'll prefix the roll with the player's name from the selected tab.

If you have expertise or JoaT then it'll look at the skill name to see if it can rip a number out of that rather than use the calculated bonus.

e.g.


Downers
It's DnD 5e only
It's not psychic - if you're doing something weird like a Cha+History skill check then add it manually.
It won't fix the GP dice algebra (1d8+2d6+4 will still fail - so break break that sneak attack damage into a separate field)
It hasn't had much testing, because it'll look weird if I just started adding lots of rolls to my games.

Adam, what a number of us have started doing is running a game for one, ourselves, where we essentially just use this blank game as a testing zone. In mine, I also use it to draft complex posts for games where I'm a player, and to put together resources for games I'm running or planning to run.

That setup would be perfect for your testing.

How do you get to be a player and GM in the same game?

Well, I created a second account (Crawllock) and invited it.
If you use an incognito tab for one, you can log into both at the same time.

Yeah. I'll do that. I'm sure Keleth will forgive me for this special circumstance.

I mean, you're doing the work people want from this site, so I can't really fault you for the work you do.

This is probably a great time to mention how much I love GP and that my effusive gratitude to Adam for his search function in no way reflects an overall criticism of the main site...

+1

One suggestion for the search function. A jump to post link on search results might be helpful, where you can go to that particular post's page instead of having it be isolated from its original context.

You can if you click on the title of that specific post :)

This. If I didn’t love GP then I wouldn’t have written an extension for it.

If GP has prepared a beautiful and bountiful feast of PbP for us, then I’ve brought a small dessert over to say thank you (I wanted to get a pun in there about cookies, but the tech part of my brain rebelled - the extension doesn’t use cookies, it uses sync storage).

The latest version has an Imgur upload button.
Click it. Select a graphic. It'll upload the graphic to Imgur and add the link to your post.

Imgur only(?!) allows 1250 uploads per day from that button. I think we'll be fine.

Other changes:
The forums on the RHS of the homepage are alpha sorted with the tavern at the bottom.
I separated dmg from the attack roll on the DnD character sheet integration.

AWESOME!

It's brilliant. Not sure if I can get it to work on my phone, too, but I'll try to figure that out.

Is it possible to expand the Search function to include user names? I recently found myself wanting to know when the last time a missing user posted in a game, and it didn't pick up their name unless I'd tagged them in a note.

No problem. Updated.

For those of you who aren't interested in messing about with GitHub to download the latest version - this is now in the Chrome Web Store. I know it says "store" - obviously it's free. GitHub will always be the best place to go for the latest code, but it's probably easier to install from the link below.


Link to extension


If you already have it installed from GitHub, then don't bother with the google version - it's the same code.

Fantastic tool, thanks for creating this!

You're welcome. I'm glad that people find it useful.

I should probably post the link the Firefox version too.

---

You can install the Chrome extension directly from here.

You can install the Firefox extension directly from here.

I managed to get the Chrome extension working on my Galaxy S10. Needed to use the Kiwi browser in developer mode, but so worth it. Thanks again, Adam.

You're welcome. (Adam wrote as he gave his iPhone a dirty look - Y U NO RUN EXTENSIONS!).

You did? Yay! Never heard of the Kiwi browser though.

I finally got around to installing this, wanted to stop by and say thanks! It works wonderfully in my 'Fox. :D

I tried it too and it's an awesome QoL improvement! Thanks!

Thanks, everybody.

A new feature should appear soon.

Character sheet and game styling

You can now add a bit of styling to your character sheets and game forums.

Game styling


To add styling to your game forum, edit the game description (example) and add a style tag (more on that later)

Character sheets


Avatars now appear on the sheet. The feat notes have been replaced with toggle arrows.
Character sheets support styling by adding styling to the notes (see below).

How to add styling

If you just want a big graphical background that'll be stretched over the screen then add this:

{"background":{"image":"https://i.pinimg.com/originals/00/74/76/007476fe88b1f0326e66239818796ce2.jpg"}}

....to the game description or character notes (change the image URL for your own).


But that'll look pants for some images because they don't look right in the middle and stretched.



So you might want a little more control,

{"background":{"image":"https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/753548750064058442/776405977657638962/Ditchwater_Kenku_Rogue.jpg",
"position":"left top",
"color":"white",
"size":"contain"
}}

image: is the image URL
position: is where to put the image
color: (yes, US English spelling - you win this round...) is the colour where the image doesn't cover
size: either "cover" (which covers the screen) or "contain" which makes sure the whole image fits on the screen

...any bugs, log them here or ping me on the GP discord server.

I don't know when the Chrome extension will update, so if this isn't working for you then maybe wait a day or two.

This looks fantastic Adam! Thanks for all your hard work.

I manually updated the extension on my phone and at least the avatar preview works, which is great, thank you!

Edit: and feat/ability toggles look great in the D&D5 sheet, too

Not a bug just an FYI, the avatars seem to be cropped to fit a square, so if you have any rectangular avatars they might be beheaded. A few of mine are now headless. xD

Lol, thanks - that's a bug. I'll get it fixed.

I've wanted character pictures on sheets for so long! The rest is great too lol.

The background image does not seem to work on custom character sheets
Avatar does work :)

You may have to type it out on the custom sheet

I've done that instead of using the bold buttons to bold/color things on the custom sheet.

Is there a place to find more options for the style tags/a how-to guide? I'm specifically wondering if there's a way to set more than one "background" image, say one on the left and one on the right. Not a big deal if it's not possible.

I've been trying to get the background for forums working and nada. Complicated because I can almost never edit the details of an existing game and get the changes to Save.

I've had a quick look. You're right, custom character sheets aren't supported. It's not just that they don't have a notes section, it's also because they're loaded via angular.

I used the description of your game: https://gamersplane.com/games/2700/ and added it to https://gamersplane.com/games/2728/

And now my forums look like:


I also short-circuited my code to force it to load game 2700 and it seemed to work. I'm not sure what's going on.

Not at the moment.

Is there a ballpark image size range that we need to stay within for the background to work?

If you use cover (the default) then bear in mind it'll be stretched - so you'll want a decent width (1200px+) or it'll look like ZX Spectrum graphics.

But you should also check out the filesize. The browser caches, but even so, nobody wants a 5mb image background.

Some sites have strategies to prevent "leeching" by sending smaller images when they're requested from different sites. I found that the forgotten realms wiki sends only thumbnails when requesting the main image.

Saving might convert newlines to BR tags - which would screw up the json format. Try eliminating newlines in the [style] section.

No BR tags or newlines anywhere now, and still doesn't do anything.

Update: The background style works on my laptop (in Chrome and Firefox) but not my phone (although the other functions for your extension work just fine on the phone).

Hmm... I've updated the extension on Chrome, and waited a few days -- but I still cannot see the character portraits in the character preview... any ideas?

I could see them immediately after forcing the update.

A small change request:
You have the One Page feature, which will show all treads in one viewing. It is useful for searching, but combersume if there are many (+20) pages. So but I would like a "Show last 2 pages".
I have several times gone to respond to new posts, and see that the latest page only have one post, while my fellow player's post are on the previous page.

Each page holds 20 posts. Let's say that my last post was post #76. When I log back in, the latest post is #82. The latest page contains only #81 and #82, while the previous page contains #60 to #80. I would like an option to see post #60 to #82

Does this make sense?

That makes a lot of sense. I often lose the plot when we skip over a multiple of twenty posts.

I am terrible for asking but will do it anyway.
Any chance that your extension will be available on the brave browser? We talked about the browser at work today, and my prime reason not to switch is losing your extension in my firefox browser.

No idea. They say Chrome extensions work in it.

It’s just css and js, and there’s very little browser specific code in it, but *shrug*. Try it, and let us know.

so fare it looks good. (and grimm for my firefox)

There's now a "Backfill" button at the top of thread pages.

I've updated the homepage with the last five game posts. I've re-added the "Your Games" bit at BoS's request.

It warns you if you're about to leave a page where you've been writing a post.

Question: The Latest Game Post button... Is it possible to extend the list beyond 20? There are a few of us* that are in a lot of games, and when they all update, some get lost, rolled off the bottom of the list like stampeding bison over a cliff. 30 games would be a good start.

* few = at least 1

PAGINATE_PER_PAGE is set at 20 server-side. There's nothing the extension can do about this.

Thanks for checking. There used to be a Page 1, Page 2 at the bottom of the post list, but that's gone away. Guess I'll need to just manually check every game.

Sometimes, the page 2 link appears there for me but it's not always there. Not sure what prompts it to show up

I suspect it's this:

AND lp.datePosted > NOW() - INTERVAL 1 WEEK

How is that used? It only shows page 2 if is more than a week old? Because if I'm busy at work I routinely need page 2 for posts on the same day

Dunno. It's server code and I still haven't got docker working.

The code is the documentation:
https://github.com/rohitsodhia/gamersplane.v1/blob/master/includes/forums/ForumSearch.class.php#L39

My reading is that it should return a count of threads:
* with a game ID
* in forums you can access
* where there has been posting in the last week

But it's not the extension, so I don't really know.

Is there any way I can suppress that feature in the meantime short of removing the extension or refraining from using YouTube links? I'm on an older laptop and with as few as two YT links on a page it's slowing Chrome down to a crash.

Thanks!

It's probably best to remove it then. Most of the functionality is slowly moving into the main site anyway, and I think I'll be deprecating it entirely soon.

Ok cool. Thanks for your help!