BBCode bug reporting channels, and a few BBCode bug reports/feature requests · 3:06pm May 5th
Table of Contents
- Why create a blog post?
- Question and best guess: Current channels for bug reports or feature requests
- Feature request: Adding collapsible widgets to Fimfiction BBCode
- Feature Request/Bug Report: Highlighting or colorizing links in Authors' Notes (client-side CSS styling)
- Bug report: Right align button in BBCode Editor does nothing
- Feature Request: Hiding "Show More" button when the list is empty
Why create a blog post?
- This is extremely long.
- Whether the answers on the site were up to date wasn't immediately obvious. See "Current Channels for Bug Reports or Feature Requests".
- I didn't have a Discord account when I started looking into this.
- I wasn't originally sure if GitHub allowed multiple accounts, but it seems to allow it at the time of this blog post.
Current channels for bug reports or feature requests
My original question:
What's your preferred channel for asking about bug reports or feature requests. FIMFiction's Discord? Private messages? (I didn't have an account) Is https://github.com/knighty/fimfiction-issues/issues something you are subscribed to? The recent issues were old or closed by reporters. (I know email is recommended for security issues, but wasn't sure if that was only security issues)
Findings
The note in https://www.fimfiction.net/staff is still current as far as I can tell.
If you want to contact administration about any issues that don't involve stories or moderation, please speak to knighty on Discord (preferably) or email...
User page comments would get drowned out by other notifications and aren't a good channel. https://www.fimfiction.net/staff is still current.
- Ideally, there would be a public/private/etc group or other channel for bug reports, for users that didn't have or plan to create GitHub accounts or Discord accounts, but unfortunately, spam/bots/moderation/etc. are things that Discord/GitHub are already equipped to deal with.
The GitHub issue tracker https://github.com/knighty/fimfiction-issues/issues had past activity by both Fimfiction admins and my best guess is that it will probably continue to have updates long-term, though there hasn't been recent activity.
Discord appears to be current and #site-help-and-dev seems to be the place to ask about feature requests/bug for both Xaquseg or knighty. Fimfiction's mail feature may also work. (Any security issues would be private messages/email to admins instead of public channels)
Xaquseg is the Fimfiction admin who rewrote the BBCode parser to be much more efficient and is probably the most familiar with it.
Adding collapsible widgets to Fimfiction BBCode
Collapsible in BBCode was mentioned on the Fimfiction discord years ago as a planned feature (possibly excluded in a few places such as chapter contents), and the main issue seemed to have been choosing a BBCode tag name.
Either a [details] or [hide] tag.
I'm requesting a way to add https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/details support (collapsible HTML widgets) to FIMFiction's version of BBCode? I don't see a way in https://www.fimfiction.net/articles/bbcode to add this. E.g. what I want is to write the BBcode
[hide=Story References]Long BBCode description goes here.[/hide]And have it transformed into something like the following HTML in places such as author's notes or user comments, direct messages, blog posts, story descriptions, etc. (i.e. almost everywhere except possibly chapter contents, though the main reason for my request is author's notes, e.g. lists of references, lists of character descriptions, art, etc)
<details>
<summary>Story References (click to expand)</summary>
Long HTML description goes here.
</details>(Possibly with better CSS customizations to light.css and dark.css, e.g. a non-standard one I've seen is https://pokefarm.wiki/BBCode#Hide (image) - though other sites add barely anything)
Motivation: Spoilers also draw attention to text and take up lots of vertical space, many users would skip over author's notes.
Highlighting or colorizing links in Authors' Notes (client-side CSS styling)
In author's notes, links look exactly the same as normal text at the time of posting this comment. They aren't underlined, and they are the same color as normal text.
My personal preference would be to make links in author's notes look like regular comments.
/* This already exists in light.css */
.chapter-body .bbcode a {
text-decoration: underline;
text-decoration-skip: ink;
}Would it be possible to add a similar rule (to the rule for the body of chapters) to Author's Notes, i.e. .authors-note.bbcode .a to add the underline, so that readers get the hint that a piece of text is a link by default (no space because of <div class="authors-note bbcode" ...>)
/* Proposed addition to light.css and dark.css */
.authors-note.bbcode a {
text-decoration: underline;
text-decoration-skip: ink;
}(and the same for dark.css. I assume the default style rule removing the underline for "a" is as a default because there's many widgets that are also "a" such as miscellaneous buttons and boxes or blue text without underlines)
Motivation: It's inconvenient for an author to add underlines manually to the links, and authors may not realize that links will look the same as normal text when author's notes are posted.
Workarounds: Authors can work around this with extra BBCode tags by adding wrapping tags such as both color and underline with [color=#3073b9][u][url=https://www.fimfiction.net]Example Link[/url][/u][/color] (Example Link)
(or just [u]...[/u] for just underline, and I'm doing that already. This bug is specific to author's notes, and doesn't affect other places such as stories or comments)
Right align button in the chapter BBCode Editor does nothing
The right align button on story chapter edit pages doesn't add the bbcode [right]...[/right] BBCode tags. Running the following snippet in browser developer tools https://static.fimfiction.net/js/scripts.js?ZUZ72uXU adds the missing rightAlign method that that button is meant to call.
(example [right] aligned text)
// based on the minified JS
BBCodeEditorController.prototype.rightAlign = function(c, d) {
this.insertTags("[right]", "[/right]")
};Hiding "Show More" button when the list is empty
Feature request: The ("Show More") button on the top right of the BBCode editor is currently just a blank, thin list with 0 menu items when editing stories/comments. If there are no items in the <ul class="toolbar_buttons"></ul> for the bbcode editor, can ( "Show More") be hidden, or render placeholder text such as "No available toolbar buttons" instead?
