Release Notes May 5th 2022

tweak/game_menu_forums
Split games menu for accessing game details and game forum (game details is the icon).



bug/favourites
Ordering of games is improved (with the Games Tavern at the top).
The Games Tavern tankard icon is back.
Bookmarking works better on mobile devices.

bug/styling
Spoilers were not displayed correctly in game descriptions.

bug/contact_us
Contact us had incorrect label for signed in users.

Other changes
Authentication cookies are now handled differently. Urls are handled consistently on staging sites.

Me likes! Me thanks!

Oof, the game forum reordering makes me angry. Having it done alphabetically massively screws up the way I interacted with it. I would MUCH prefer to have an option there to have it the old way (age of game). I really really do not like it being alphabetically listed in the general forum listing.

Continued quantity of life improvements. Thanks for your ongoing work, development team!

Good stuff! Personally, I like the alpha sorting. Convenient that it ignores emotions! 😆

Oh, so that's why...

I've seen some complaints about the reordering of games. Maybe that deserves another public poll? I personally hated the old ordering and find alphabetically makes a ton more sense, so unlike that forums dropdown, I would actually have a strong opinion in this case.
I also personally believe that most difficulties people have are not based on the old way being better but just on having to get used to the new way, which should fix itself quickly

Ouch! We definitely weren't aiming to make anybody angry!

The problem with making every preference an option is that we end up with loads of options, loads of confusion about what they all mean, loads of routes through the code, and thereby loads of bugs.

Like BoS, I hated the old ordering (although it didn't make me angry). Time for a poll.

User choice, and I feels strongly about this.

If we don't want to add this as an option in the User Control Panel, then it could be a (remembered) toggle at the top of each list. Sort order is commonly picked at the top of a list.

If we are too concerned about the number of options we present to the users, then we can present them with another option, where they get to pick how many options they want to see. 'Advanced Options' is another common paradigm.

I'd reword the poll title to "How I'd like the game forums be ordered"

Fair enough, but I won't be the one coding that. But GP is open source, there's nothing stopping anybody else doing it.

The question on the table is whether I delete the alpha sorting code.

Polls tend to quash conversation.
What are the benefits to sorting by date? Why would people choose that?
Once the list of games get long enough to not fit on the page, having the old games that are not being played anymore as the only ones that are there seems pointless.
At least with alpha, we could, if we are the GM, add a few zzs to the name to push it down the list, but this is a bigger issue when we are not the GM (so can't Retire the game).

Neither Alpha not creation date make any sense to me.

Can we sort them by last activity?

While answering: Think about people who have many games and how things work for them.

Let's also be clear about what we are talking about. Are we referring to the Forums page? That one place I could see it making sense to sort by creation date, but recent posts is the norm for all the other forum lists. Does Alpha make much sense there?

Last activity would in my opinion be by far the worst option. Having the locations of the games shift around all the time would just make finding the one I want to click on that much harder. Alphabet is perfect for me. Creation date is bad but I've managed to work around it so far and could begrudgingly accept it if that's the consensus (though I can't see a single benefit to it except that it's the way it's been so far)
Last activity would actively make it so much worse for me.

Really? That is how all the other forums work, here and everywhere. Games Tavern for instance: sorted by last activity.

We might be talking about different things, though.

But those are forum threads. That's a completely different thing from games (both links and forums).
In forum threads, you're mostly going to be referring to the recent ones, for accessing games, theres no such thing. Just because a game was posted in recently, doesn't mean that's the one I need to open to reference.

Different parts of the site require different organizations. We dont sort the user list or the character sheet list by who last posted or what was last edited

And besides, no subforums change positions based on last post date, so it wouldn't even be consistent there. It's only threads that move up and down

We have the ability to manually move the subforums around as we desire. Being able to do so for games would solve this problem?

If we are talking about the Forums page I mentioned above, then all the other blocks there are not sorted, someone has chosen the order (I assume). Neither alpha nor date will be correct for that games list.

Yes, I was talking (not exclusively but in that quoted instance) about the forums page. And yes, all other subforums there are in the order Keleth put them in. But I don't think he can hand-tailor everyone's game feed. Yes, giving people the option to move forums around themselves would be good. Probably ideal, though with alpha sorting, I don't really find the improvement big enough to make it necessary. With the old date sorting, it would be awesome. And anything is better than having those games move around every time I access the page

Maybe those items can show up in the user's Administrative Control Panel so they can reorder them at the same time and same place where they assign order to their games' subforums?

Then everyone can have things the way they like. I don't think that 'alpha' or 'date created' are very useful orderings for these.

If the user can reorder them, then putting new games at the top would make the most sense again.

I think we're derailing this thread 😅
No.
If users can reorder games, they'll put the important ones at the top. New games should be added to the bottom so users don't have to go into reordering everything every time they join a new game.

But I don't think we're there yet