The Glowfic Constellation

[pedromvilar]

A toggle is a simple enough compromise, no reason why we can't have our cake and eat it.

[Throne3d]

There was a brief time when the logic of the javascript was wholly inverted from what was intended and so if you were too far from the "#unread" marker it would scroll you all the way to it, including when you reload the page. This was fixed I think more than a month ago. Reloading on &page=unread#unread does no longer scroll you to the unread marker unless you were within 50px of it when the page loaded and the reflow of the page screwed some things up. (This is to fix a weird Firefox issue.) So it should only move you when there is in fact another unread page to go to.

This is possibly related to Ezra's bug? Also could be a limited part of why people hate reloading that page so much. And should now be gone.

I'll make a bug for the toggle, anyway. I'd prefer default off so behavior stays as much the same as present as possible, but I feel like people might be failing to look in the account settings for options, on account of some recent confusion over themeing the site. There are also other bits of the site that are apparently obscure to people who have never used it before. Maybe we should prioritize the help menu.

[Unbitwise]

Also you do in fact need additional queries because a given reply's number isn't a function of how many posts a thread has, it's a unique universal number across all replies of all threads.

You can stick two different ids in the HTML (not on the same element, of course), one of which is "global reply number" and one of which is "nth on the current page". And just so I'm not a hypocrite for complaining about non-canonical URLs: then use replaceState in JS to update the fragment to the global number (so no server-side cost for that).

This is a bunch of additional complexity so I'd like to reiterate that I don't feel very strongly about this — I just don't want “this is insufficiently justified complexity” mixed up with “this would necessarily slow things down”.

[Throne3d]

Seeing as the read objects store just the timestamp you've read up to, I'm not sure how it'd go about calculating this without another query. It'd need to figure out the particular reply you've read up to, which means it has to fetch this read timestamp and then the relevant reply?

[Unbitwise]

The unread page already has # of replies and # of unread replies. Subtract the latter from the former (if you don't already have that number) to get positional-number-of-first-unread. Divide that by the default page size; the quotient is the page number and the remainder is the position-in-page number you put in the fragment.

[Kappa]

Completely unrelated idle thought: It would be neat if there was some way to tell access-locked posts from non-access-locked posts at a glance.

[Moriwen]

I have no strong opinions on unread behavior, but I very much agree with the idea of prioritizing the help menu.

After I wrote that one tumblr post about the Constellation, I got a message from someone saying they hadn't been joining glowfic because they were overwhelmed by the Constellation and not knowing how it worked, and now it had been explained enough for them to feel comfortable with it. And I feel like if I've heard from one person saying it explicitly, there are probably at least a few others who are in the same position but not speaking up about it.

[pedromvilar]

I'ma start project Help Menu. What does it need?

- what is glowfic
- how to character
- how to thread
- account settings

What else or what instead?

[Kaylin]

Include a link to the forums or something, because I found the constellation first (from tumblr) and it took me ages to find out there were forums, which I did accidentally by googling Nuime to see if it was based on a canon. The forums in themselves aren't absolutely essential for a new glowficcer - they could just as easily connect through IRC or Discord - but there's really no way within the constellation itself to find the secret code, which means people who want to glowfic risk being locked out.

[Moriwen]

Seems like some key parts might be:

- what is glowfic? (short answer: "a certain genre of roleplay"; longer answer has been worked on intermittently, I think)

- how to get started at reading glowfic (including both "here are some recommendations for places to start reading" and something along the lines of the "how to read Effulgence" guide)

- how to use the Constellation (for readers)

- how to get involved with the community, logistically (where are the forums; what's up with the whole discord/IRC thing; maybe a How To Get On IRC For Clueless People guide (I would have found that quite helpful, being Clueless, "click on this mibbit link" is fairly straightforward but setting up a proper client is kind of complicated), maybe a list of glowfic tumblr tags (#glowfic, #casteth-afar, #effulgence, etc))

- general community norms (it may look like everyone knows each other, because it's tiny, but it's not an invite-only thing; probably a link to the 'introduce yourself' thread; maybe times people tend to be around on IRC)

- how to get started writing glowfic (come up with some characters (original or fan characters are cool), how to find coauthors, facecasting resources, we seem to get the 'is it OK to do a character someone already writes' question pretty regularly...)

- how to use the Constellation (for authors; special mention of things which are historical holdovers, like the screenname feature)

- that one list of all the settings might be nice, we also seem to get a lot of people wondering which settings are original and which are from other sources