April Update - Things to Come

Mafia451 Announcements
#1

Hey everyone,

Thanks for joining the site! In honor of April fool’s day here are some very real updates on some things you can expect to come soon, as well as some longer term plans.

We’re building this forum to become the best place to play forum mafia and related games. Our core belief is that games should be fun, and that they are the most fun when players have compatible (but not necessarily similar!) mindsets about why they are playing them. We’ll always be designing things with this in mind.

We’re going to be continuously experimenting with almost every aspect of the site - up to and including the format and the software (we’re keeping an eye on all modern forum softwares to see where they’re at). I know some things are still rough around the edges - and there may be more turbluence to come as we test new things. Thank you for dealing with some things that you may find potentially unpleasant. We value all your feedback and suggestions so please keep it coming.

Things coming soon:

  1. A “How To” Category with topics that are each dedicated to a different questions. We feel this will be more organized and accessible than the current posts on how to use the site. There will be a variety of other minor changes as we generally make the site more organized, welcoming, and easy to use.

  2. :white_check_mark: Vote tags. Making the plugin to get them to work was a bit harder than anticipated - all the fault is mine. We’ll be making sure they’re active ASAP.

  3. New logo coming soon! And we’ll make sure it actually works with all forum skins. We’ll probably have two skins other than the default white/gray (a dark one and a peach one). Mobile designs will start matching desktop designs soon once the former are close to finalized. (Of course we’ll never really stop tinkering around with the css to make small things better!)

  4. Non-forum website. Mafia451.com will finally actually link somewhere! Content will be a bit sparse at the start but we’re hoping to fill it with great mafia-related content.

  5. We want to be the best place and resource for players new to mafia to come discover and learn about the game. We’ll be talking about how we hope to achieve this in a topic of it’s own that will be up soon.

  6. More members! We’ll be beginning formal outreach soon - especially once all of the above things are in place.

Things coming eventually:

  1. Getting ISO to work on mobile view the same way it works on desktop view. Some workarounds will be in the ISO “How-to” topic that will hopefully suffice until we get this fix in. This may belong in the “soon” category - we’ll be taking a look at how hard it’ll be to implement after vote tags are done!

  2. Automod and automated vote counts. This will be an ongoing project - hopefully an initial version will be ready to play with within the next half year. We have a topic for discussing the bot here: Mafiabot Discussion.

  3. We’ll be launching an advertising campaign across a variety of sites. (Think Facebook, reddit, etc.) We’ll be looking for your thoughts on sites and demographics to target our ads towards.

  4. An opt-in ranked system for more competitive players. The details for this are still being worked out and a seperate post talking about this in more detail will be coming soonish. The only thing we know for sure now is that any ranked game system we have will never be mandatory.

  5. Better navigation for long topics. We know discourse is working on this and we’re excited to see what they come up with! How much independent work we put in this will be dependent on the dev timelines of and how we feel about discourse and other forum softwares. We might try and build some of our own navigation tools (e.g. mod posts indicated on the topic timeline with a small horizontal etch + hover prevew) and put together some sort of pagination option if we need to.

There are probably more things but this post is already long enough as is. Thanks for sticking around! :beers:

3 Likes
#2
#3

UPDATE: Vote tags are here!

[vote]name[/vote] and [v]name[/v] go to VOTE: name

[unvote]name[/unvote] and [uv]name[/uv] go to UNVOTE: name

2 Likes
Tips for Hosting/Modding on Discourse
Tarot uPick: Under A Deviant Moon - Night 2 to Day 6
#4

Some more features are live!

  • Our post editor has a better toolbar now. New inclusions include alignment, size, color, vote, unvote, and more. Also useful will be the far left “Quote whole post” button - unlike highlight quoting this type of quoting maintains styling. (Discourse is working on getting highlight quoting to maintain styling too). Only some of the new buttons (most prominently vote and unvote) will appear on mobile for now.

  • We have a new category that forces accounts to become anonymous. No more alt slips! You can see what it’s like here: https://forum.mafia451.com/t/anonymous-category-test-topic/30

  • We now support foonotes.

Here’s an example [1]

The markdown is as follows:

Here's an example [^1]

[^1]: of a footnote
  • You can now post times in your posts that display to other users as their local time. To do this, go to the gear symbol at the far right of your post editor toolbar and click on “insert date”. Here’s an example: [discourse-chronos time=03:53;date=2018-04-17;format=LLL;timezones=Europe/Paris|America/Los_Angeles;]

  1. of a footnote ↩︎

#5
#6