Site suggestions

Here's a page for all your Blognomic TECHNICAL suggestions and gripes. Feel free to reorganize this list as it grows.

Big new functionality

Automatic Dynasty tracking

I've always wanted to write an extension to EE to allow us to designate ranges of posts as dynasties, assign them names, associate them with their emperors, and do all the cool stuff that would allow. That's a pretty huge job, and I probably can't do it alone.

Automatic member statuses / lists

We could perhaps have idle/active players determined automatically by when they post. We could have the Status field of the member profiles toggled automatically, and the player lists in the sidebar generated by EE instead of updated by hand. We'd need to be careful not to let this be scammable, however.

Mobile site

A proper mobile site would be a massive help, as using BlogNomic via smartphone is currently a bit of a chore.

Improvements on existing stuff

MediaWiki upgrade

We're using a positively ancient version of MediaWiki. Upgrades from this old a version are not straightforward. May need technical assistance.

The wiki was upgraded in November 2014. --Kevan (talk) 14:33, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Stop the spammers

For what it's worth, I'm deleting about one user and one "Chinese mining stone crusher" spam post a day, as of mid-January 2010. I don't know if it's as easy as just fixing the captcha, or if we're up against determined humans. (I haven't checked EE, but it's presumably possible to make it so that new users can't post until they've been approved - which would mean changing the signup process for players, but we can do that.)

We now require new users to be signed up manually by wiki admins. --Kevan 16:04, 26 Oct 2010 (GMT)

Unless I'm mistaken, this refers to the spammers who make accounts on the main blog, post links to websites on the bio pages and occasionally make a spam post, and the problem still exists (although the rate of account creation has been slowed significantly since the question about blognomic's past was added to the registration procedure). --Purplebeard 17:22, 26 Oct 2010 (GMT)

We eventually switched to requiring new accounts to be verified by an admin before they could make their first post. --Kevan (talk) 14:33, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Clean up after the spammers

I think we're probably going to have to just make a fresh MediaWiki install, and then copy across all the pages we actually want. Unless there's a plugin that can scan and delete spam pages? --Kevan 16:04, 26 Oct 2010 (GMT)

We managed to do exactly this, in the end, it was easy enough to compile a list of the pages that we wanted to save. --Kevan (talk) 14:33, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

GNDT functionalities

This has been brought up before, but an 'update all players' button would be really handy for stat initialization and such. Alternatively, if we want to limit this functionality to admins, we can make it so that a default value for a statistic can be specified in the gndt config (this would also save time when adding new players).--Purplebeard 17:22, 26 Oct 2010 (GMT)

Automated GNDT updates (e.g. add 1 Hunger to all Players at the beginning of each week). No idea how difficult this would be to implement.--Purplebeard 17:22, 26 Oct 2010 (GMT)

Vote Status

Have posts display current vote counts at the top (using BNScript?) Aguydude 23:38, 1 Jul 2011 (GMT)

It already does that. I'm confused. --Elia 07:10, 31 Aug 2011 (GMT)

Fix searching

Currently the search functionality (including "see all posts by this player" links) ignore any post which has been changed from ExpressionEngine's default "open" status - this includes all enacted and failed proposals, which isn't great. --Kevan (talk) 11:17, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Update: I've been able to fix the search (by editing the search form to specify that it can search statuses except 'quarantined'), but not the "see all posts by this player", as I can't see anywhere to edit the link it uses. --Kevan (talk) 11:43, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

... and this doesn't seem to work from the sidebar, but works from https://blognomic.com/search. --Kevan (talk) 14:30, 14 October 2019 (UTC)

Blog config template

Flagging this as a wishlist item which may or may not feasible: a single "dynastic config" template somewhere which includes all the settings admins are likely to change and update (name of current dynasty, basic colour scheme, hiatus status, etc), which other templates can then read from. Not sure whether straight PHP would work there (setting $dynastyName in the config and using it in the index template, etc). --Kevan (talk) 14:59, 5 July 2019 (UTC)