My.Skotos.Net: New Panels

[ShannonA]

Late last week, I added a very simple new panel to My.skotos:

#33. All Game Links

It's a "middle" panel under the "skotos" category.

It just contains links for the 4 Skotos games, via Play Now buttons.

Shannon

[Garrik]

I meant to ask earlier today, couldn't a link to the Welcome room be available for this??

[ShannonA]

But it throws off my whole nice, square balance ....

Sigh.

OK, you win. It's there.

Shannon

[Garrik]

*grins* It wasn't a square in my window.


Thanks Shannon *You hear yet another smooching sound from this post*

Hey Shannon, PM me?

[ShannonA]

I don't use the PMs because I don't need yet another set of correspondence to fall behind on.

Feel free to drop me a line at shannona@skotos.net if there's something I can help on.

Shannon

[Garrik]

Sure, check your email

[ShannonA]

A "skotos" righthand panel.

Shannon

[Brassy]

I successfully editted the top portion in my edit option for my portal but when I arranged the content portion, that "save" button didn't respond. No clicky, no nothing. Is there anyway that can be made to save the entire page and not just content? Does it have to save separately, top and bottom?

[ShannonA]

There should be two separate save buttons, one for the top and one for the bottom. The one on the top saves the main page info. The one on the bottom saves the content changes. Yeah, it should probably all be one form with one button, but I haven't gotten up the gumption to rewrite it yet.

If that's not what you're experiencing, mail me at ce@skotos.net with the precise problem, and what OS & browser you're using, including versions. I try to stress test on Mozilla and IE for the mac, along with Mozilla and IE for Windows, but some stuff changes from minor browser version to version.

If you were just having troubles with the two save buttons, let me know that too, as a kick in the butt to improve that particular UI.

Shannon

[Brassy]

The bottom one didn't work.

I'll email when I visit my Portal page.

[Brassy]

Neither of my browsers have been able to click that bottom button to save my changes. Good thing I can just x the panels out that I don't want but how do I get the panels in that I DO want?

I use both IE 6 and Netscape 4.ancient.

[Garrik]

My IE 6 worked fine with it.

Though I did have a problem accessing my Webmail to set it up, although that works now.

[Brassy]

Ok, the IE6 works. I can live with that. :)

[ShannonA]

This panel shows activity in the three current StoryBuilder forums (StoryBuilders, StoryTellers, Devils Cay).

[ShannonA]

This new panel, available under "Skotos" will show up to the most recent 10 PMs arrived in each of your Forum accounts that's been associated with your Skotos account.

I'm considering changing this to just "unread" messages, but am very open for feedback on what people think would be useful.

Shannon

[Garrik]

Good stuff, but I have a couple questions:

I have many forum ID's, as do most Premium account holders I assume. Can these ID's be separated so that I may put Marrach ID's in my Marrach page, Grendel ID's in my Grendel page and so on?
The "Sender" of each pm is signaled as the forum ID it was sent to and not the actual sender. i.e. a PM sent from Kenderaela appeared as being from Garrik.
Can links be made to each PM from the viewed list?


Hope I was helpful and can bring better thigs to all this.

[Catharsis]

How about the ability to specify your own urls in one panel?

Granted, most of mine would be to twiki or skotos pages (or the CM community web site), but if I could have those 'main' links on such a page, I'd use the My.Skotos.Net interface as my default home page, rather than just a place I visit.

~~ Leah

[Garrik]

I like that one too.

[Catharsis]

Bug:

None of your registered Skotos forum accounts (%forumNameIds) currently have Private Messages in their INBOXes.

Not too sure about that (%forumNameIds), but I suspect it's not coming through like it should. I had too many PMs listed, so I went through and deleted them or moved them to a Saved folder. Now I've none and that's the messages I get.

~~ Leah

[ShannonA]

I have many forum ID's, as do most Premium account holders I assume. Can these ID's be separated so that I may put Marrach ID's in my Marrach page, Grendel ID's in my Grendel page and so on?

Currently, no. At some point when I'm able to allow users to specify specific changes to a panel, yes. It'll be a while though, because that'll be a large expansion.

The "Sender" of each pm is signaled as the forum ID it was sent to and not the actual sender. i.e. a PM sent from Kenderaela appeared as being from Garrik.

Whoops. Fixed.

Can links be made to each PM from the viewed list?

I actually did that originally and learned that, due to limitations in the way that the Skotos/Forum correlation is currently done, you got an error if you tried to link to any Forum user's PMs other than the one you last logged in as. I've asked our forums guy if there's any way around this.

Shannon

[ShannonA]

Originally posted by Catharsis
How about the ability to specify your own urls in one panel?


THis expansion which I've been calling "usercontent" is currently high on my list. It's a pretty big change, but hopefully we'll be able to offer it in the next couple of months.

Shannon

[ShannonA]

Originally posted by Catharsis
Bug:

None of your registered Skotos forum accounts (%forumNameIds) currently have Private Messages in their INBOXes.


Fixed.

Shannon

[Garrik]

Thanks

[Vhretha]

I get this a lot:

Error: Module "skotos::ForumPm" was unable to load. If this is a continuing problem, please email ce@skotos.net.

Undefined subroutine &forums::LookupPmsFromForumid called at /var/www/skotos/myskotos/modules/games/skotos.pm line 68, line 6.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't - that's what I get.

[Catharsis]

Hrm. I'm getting:

Error: Module "marrach::GameForums" was unable to load. If this is a continuing problem, please email ce@skotos.net.

Undefined subroutine &forums::DrawTableHeader called at /var/www/skotos/myskotos/modules/lib/forums.pm line 236, line 4.


Sounds like something Shannon can/will fix come monday.

[ShannonA]

For increased efficiency, My.Skotos uses a program called "mod_perl".

Unfortunately, I've regretted deciding to use mod_perl ever since I put it into place, because it does inconsistant stuff exactly like you just described. In these particular cases, some of the my.skotos.net instances sound like they're using an old version of my forums library, rather than the current one, hence the errors (the missing functions are all ones I wrote on Friday).

In any case I've tried reloading the web server to see if that'll clear out the old references to my previous version of the forums library. I don't see them right now after a couple dozen loads. Let me know if they return, and if so I'll do something more ... final.

Shannon

[Seidl]

I've seen this cache behavior Shannon, and I believe its intentional. I mean, not having to load the files every time is part of the speedup improvement of mod_perl. But it does require a server restart every once in a while if you're adding new code. Using apachectl makes it fairly painless for me, but I also don't object to losing a connection to one of my users once in a while.

-=- Matt

[ShannonA]

Originally posted by Seidl
I've seen this cache behavior Shannon, and I believe its intentional. I mean, not having to load the files every time is part of the speedup improvement of mod_perl. But it does require a server restart every once in a while if you're adding new code. Using apachectl makes it fairly painless for me, but I also don't object to losing a connection to one of my users once in a while.

-=- Matt

It is intention, but even with some flags on telling it to reload libraries when they get changed, it's inconsistant. I have a suspicion it failed this time because I copied over my original "forums" file, rather than editing it, or something like that.

In any case, it's just a question of if the increased efficiency is worth the increased grief ...

Shannon

[Kassah]

I was wondering if we could make side pannels go to the middle. I mean sure they would be small, but I kinda like my panels small sometimes.

Also, could we choose to have 'no' sidebar?
Another thing I figured out, is that when I went to set http://my.skotos.net/ as my desktop, which is the first ever page I have even tried. I noticed that all I got was the login page. I know there is a way to add usernames and passwords, however I believe it uses HTTP authentication (which is insecure... bleh). Maybe a permenant cookie (or one year), would solve this problem.

Why the decision on mod_perl? I noticed much of the site is done in PHP, why not use that more exclusively. At least with PHP you've got a better manual (okay, I admit it, I'm a PHP Evangelist, I'll be quiet now)...

So there are beta games you can only discover on the forums, well once I discover them... can I add them to my.skotos.net page?

Nice start on the Premium package... oh and may I suggest a more centrel feature listing of what all Priemium accounts get, I think you'd get more people signing up for it, personally I think it would be worth the hassle of having to update it, course you could make each of the people have to add their own stuff, or you could make one guy do it. Either way, shouldn't be too hard.

[ShannonA]

I was wondering if we could make side pannels go to the middle. I mean sure they would be small, but I kinda like my panels small sometimes.

The main reason I haven't done that is for UI reasons. A way to swap panels middle and right loses some of the elegance and simplicity of the design. So, I'm not currently planning this, but will keep it in mind.

There is a way you can 'cheat': don't choose and middle panels and everything should span the page.


Also, could we choose to have 'no' sidebar?


That's on my list. That's in fact, near the top of my list next time I muck with my.skotos.net.

Another thing I figured out, is that when I went to set http://my.skotos.net/ as my desktop, which is the first ever page I have even tried. I noticed that all I got was the login page. I know there is a way to add usernames and passwords, however I believe it uses HTTP authentication (which is insecure... bleh). Maybe a permenant cookie (or one year), would solve this problem.


Right now we use a cookie that gets reset whenever you open a new window, hence the issue with using it as your desktop. There's no cookie associated with that "window", and thus you're required to login again.

We've talked on occasion about allowing a longer-term cookie, as you suggest. It does have real issues with regard to security, which is why we haven't done it yet.

Why the decision on mod_perl? I noticed much of the site is done in PHP, why not use that more exclusively. At least with PHP you've got a better manual (okay, I admit it, I'm a PHP Evangelist, I'll be quiet now)...

Frankly it's because I programmed my.skotos and I like Perl better than PHP. I've used both, and in fact am currently using PHP for some work over on RPGnet, and overall I feel like Perl has a better program flow than PHP. It feels much more like a programming language, while PHP feels much more like a display/markup language, and that comes out in the type of programs you're implicitly encouraged to write, and the programming practices each encourages.

But, your mileage may vary.

It's in mod_perl specifically because mod_perl is more efficient than perl, this was a totally new project, so it was a good opporunity to try mod_perl out. In retrospective, I feel like the costs for mod_perl are pretty high because of the debugging problems it causes.

Or, to answer you from a different direction, prior to the creation of my.skotos.net we already had both PHP & Perl on our web site, the former for our user info packages and the latter for Galactic Emperor: Hegemony. So, I got to pick a package that I thought would fit with what we used that package for already. If I'd been writing a user poll or something more closely related to the user info, I would have gone with PHP instead.

So there are beta games you can only discover on the forums, well once I discover them... can I add them to my.skotos.net page?

We'll get some proper panels for them by the time they go live.

Nice start on the Premium package... oh and may I suggest a more centrel feature listing of what all Priemium accounts get, I think you'd get more people signing up for it, personally I think it would be worth the hassle of having to update it, course you could make each of the people have to add their own stuff, or you could make one guy do it. Either way, shouldn't be too hard.

I agree. I've actually sent off specs to my web designer for this page already, but he's been hard at work creating the look-and-feel for our new games.

Shannon

[Kassah]

Right now we use a cookie that gets reset whenever you open a new window, hence the issue with using it as your desktop. There's no cookie associated with that "window", and thus you're required to login again.

We've talked on occasion about allowing a longer-term cookie, as you suggest. It does have real issues with regard to security, which is why we haven't done it yet.


Sounds like you need a system like on my network. I take you want security for the credit card system, and the changing passwords and whatnot. What I would do in this case is require a login with a short lived cookie for the billing and whatnot panel. Then have a seperate longer lived cookie for services that don't require such high security. If you only have the long lived cookie, and you try to go into the billing part or try to change your password, it will ask you for login so that you have the short lived cookie. get the idea?

What do you think?

[ShannonA]

Generally a good idea.

If we have the resources to revamp our cookies like you suggest right now, is a much more open question, but I like the design.

Shannon