The Glowfic Constellation

[Kappa]

So I'm tidying up the character accounts in the magical girls continuity with Maggie and gosh, that feature somebody suggested at some point for going "turn all instances of this one character in this thread to this other character, keeping icons the same where possible" would be super handy right now. (I want specific versions of the Koskin triplets for that world, and technically I could edit these versions into those versions since they characters haven't appeared in any other continuties yet but Ravni appeared in some random site testing threads and it'd feel weird. I'll probably do it anyway if the feature doesn't materialize before the next time I contemplate glowficcing the Koskin girls. I am a patient Kappa.)

I also vaguely yearn for a sensible way to handle fusions in terms of template categorization, but the yearning is very vague because I don't even know what that would look like.

[Ezra]

Branching from replies was used in Effulgence only in error and should be corrected during import instead of imported as-is. I don't remember a Pedro thread doing it, but there is one old sandbox which does because a group of four splits into two groups of two.

I thought one or more party-threads used this. Do they really only use branching from tops?

[DanielH]

They do. They might want to be edited post-import to have a better structure; in-story there is post-top branching and merging but all the actual Dreamwidth forks are from the top.

[Kappa]

my kingdom for the ability to edit the continuity and section membership of posts I coauthor even when I'm not the OP

I get the organization bug sometimes and coordinating with coauthors to move posts around based on who made the top post is a pain

i love the way the site handles continuities so much apart from that, though. automatic sane indexes!!!!!!

[Unbitwise]

but mad indexes are so much more fun

[Kappa]

not when you're the one who has to maintain them they ain't

[MaggieoftheOwls]

The first page of Unreads refuses to display anything other than what the page was like at 11:08

[Marri]

@Kappa I am working on the thing! It has a branch! I sorted out a bunch of complicated render stuff and now most of the complication is currently "which continuities are you allowed to move the thing to".

Maggie and I debugged offline, and final result looks like her browser was caching the thing. I took a look at my cache headers but didn't see anything obviously worrying; if other people have this issue, please let me know, and also force refresh or appending random ?key=var strings to the end of your URL should both fix it.

[DanielH]

Not a bug but something that could be improved: the Unread page sometimes shows a thread as unread with 0 unread replies. This is confusing; I eventually figured out it meant a reply was edited, but there is probably better UI for that somehow.

It would also be nice to see the difference between two versions of a reply; that is probably very difficult to do since the replies are HTML, but I expect there is a library, or more likely many libraries, which do most of the difficult parts for you.

[Unbitwise]

Feedback on actually creating characters:

When creating a character, there are a whole bunch of fields that I had to think hard to figure out what they mean. For example, only from having context from reading lots about glowfic did I figure out (if I did figure out correctly) that "nickname" meant "distinguishing name for this character within this template". I think the page would benefit from having an explanatory blurb for each field.

It would be nice if there was a way for "I'm creating a character but I haven't uploaded their icons yet, so take me there next" rather than just showing only galleries that already exist.

When uploading multiple icons at once, they appear in the list in an apparently random order and are identified only by filename. It would be nice if the icons were displayed immediately, and they were sorted by file name (either one would help, but the former would help more).

I'd like there to be a Description (alt text) like DW has. I haven't used it much myself, but as a Person Not So Good At Other People's Faces' Implications, I've appreciated it when others have used it.

I think “Setting” should be managed somehow rather than being a free text field. At least, there are duplicates that differ in case only. And I'd like to be able to rename my setting. (...perhaps the site should have an AO3-like tag system? eep.)