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

I can see and understand the "if you have a lot of games and stay in closed/dead games then creation date ends up leaving you with mainly those filling the screen" argument. And if I'm being very honest with myself a portion of my feelings on the feature are 100% because it's a change from what it was. Perhaps "angry" was too strong a word, but it was definitely a frustration that hasn't diminished with the (albeit short) amount of time that's elapsed.

For me, the game age ordering just worked for my head and I'm struggling to come up with the words to explain why it does. Part of it is I like seeing the "journey" of games that I've been in/am in and having them in creation order did that. Sure, if I backfilled into a game I would suddenly get a game higher up in the list, but it still hit my head in a way like "ah yes, this is a legacy game that's been around a bit, very good." Beyond that, I now have dead games that I chose to stay in for some reason or the other peppered throughout my list rather than grouped together in one predictable place. Additionally, alphabetically sorting the list I dislike because it ends up leading to people doing weird things with names to impact the positioning of games (I've seen this all to often with other community lists where alphabetical sorts are a thing).

Given that, I like the suggestion vagueGM had about allowing players to reorder if they like (and I also understand the commentary on too many custom settings/options being there but I disagree fundamentally with the confusion side. Being locked out of customization of my experience is worlds more frustrating to me personally than the potential for someone else to be confused). If I could do the coding design of it, I would in a heartbeat. Unfortunately web dev isn't my area of knowledge so any attempt I'd make at it would be bloated and definitely not optimized in the slightest.

That is a good point.

I think I will place my vote for 'not alpha' though I fear this will be read as an endorsement of 'creation date'.

Hm, okay, I can see that. It's nothing I ever considered or find personally important. But interesting
I never had those grouped together anyway. Newer games died while older ones were still ongoing.
This is a solid argument against alpha-sorting that I never even considered.
Some people already started using emojis in game or thread titles to highlight them which I absolutely hate. I guess it's a danger that people will also game the sorting system by finding early-alphabet titles for their games...

---

I still find alphabet sorting much more practical than sort-by-creation-date, but at least now I understand the other position 😄 Thanks!

That's a solid argument.

I prefer alpha sorting, but I can always write a script just for me. I'll change my vote to abstain.

Personally, the new game order has thrown me for a loop. I'd prefer how it was before, but only because I was used to it and we're creature of habits. I'll get used to it eventually, at least I hope so...

I liked sorting by date much more, for about the same reasons as Dramasailor. It gave me a fuzzy feeling to see old games which are still ongoing, and the list was like a visual representation of my time on this site, as cheesy as this sounds. :D It was also fun to join a game, see it atop the list and thus discover that it's way older than I expected.

That said, the only option I feel strongly about is to make sorting order a user choice - but that's not on the table unless a willing volunteer web developer comes along, so alas. I also wish we could at least sort bookmarked games, but I imagine that will be the same issue of no one to code it.

In the grand scheme of things it is a personal preference; if people voting date sorting are in minority, so be it. I can always just make a hyperlink list for myself, and sort it as I please. :P

These are the results:



A majority of the people who voted preferred alphabetical ordering, but nobody felt strongly about alphabetical ordering.

I do worry about the tyranny of the majority, so I don't know what to do now!

Thoughts?

While I did not feel strongly enough about it to vote, I do think there are more downsides to alpha than to creation date.

Neither make that page particularly useful to me, so I don't use it, so I don't have a real opinion.

I still vastly prefer alphabetical and the one downside I see to it (gaming the system) won't annoy me half as much as emojis do 😄

But I'll survive if we decide to go for creation date. I find that a really bad way of sorting and was happy about that change, but I've managed so far.

I am not used to it but probably will. I will not like alpha for this ever. If there is no desire to code in some kind of customization option so players interested in having a sort that works best for them, then I am kind of stuck with the community vote. I'd even support alpha by default with the option to make it how I want.

If I had the skillset to make it what vague had described earlier (allow players to set the order, even as a "buried" custom option for those driven enough to want it) I would in a heartbeat.

I would be interested to see the results of a poll for fixed sort vs ability to custom sort, because while the arguments against options are there, forum sorting isn't totally foreign as options.

I suspect everyone would agree that letting the user choose is the best option, but someone has to do the work to enable that. We can not expect others to do it for us.

Can you run the tampermonkey extension for Chrome?