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[PAID] Subaccounts or Account Switcher for SMF 2.1

Started by mythus, February 21, 2022, 05:03:29 PM

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mythus

Message:
I am willing to throw money at the development of this mod. I'm not sure what the going rate for mods of this magnitude is. I'm thinking USD 30.00, but please let me know if I'm being daft here.

Version
2.1 series of SMF

Description
A mod that lets you attach accounts to your main account that you can switch to easily to post as other accounts. This is largely a RP type thing, but there could be other uses.

Permissions
Permissions should be set by the admin to allow members to use the account switcher and mods to moderate it.

Feature Set
Attach and/or un-attach accounts to your main account that you can switch to . You should be able to switch to these accounts via a top menu or post as one of your attached accounts. 

More Info
Basically, this is the only thing stopping me from being able to upgrade beyond the 2.0 series. I run a RP forum and make use of the subaccounts module for it. When looking to upgrade I searched and found that subaccounts isn't working for 2.1. I've noticed a few attempts to make this mod or a similar mod for 2.1, but they seem to have all become abandoned. What is out there right now no longer works on 2.1 and with 2.1 series being gold now and 2.0 eventually reaching eol, it is important to me to have a plan to upgrade.
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Arantor

This is actually really hard to do properly, especially as all (but two) of the subaccounts mods do it incorrectly by making real new accounts, which mess up moderation and permissions handling, not to mention most of them are also security risks.

There's been two mods that got this right but both authors abandoned them in favour of pushing forward with RP based software. Sadly mine isn't ready for prime time yet.

mythus

Aye, I imagine that it is... Lots of hooks, afects more than one area of the software. That's why I'm offering money though, at the very least I'm hoping to spur interest in making this.

I've seen your StoryBB, looks interesting and am watching its development.
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Senkusha

Where can I find more information about your StoryBB project?  Like proposed features and such?  This would be a HUGE advantage since my forum is BASED on PbP role playing. :D
--Senkusha
The Anime Brigade
Anime-style Role Playing Games and Discussion.
(SMF v. 2.1.4, PHP v. 8.0)

Arantor

It's on indefinite hold after the number of people from the roleplay communities who told me not to bother and that I should just use Jcink.

In any case it's not in a usable state and won't be any time soon because I tried to reverse engineer modern software practices into SMF and burned literal years when I should just have started from scratch.

In any case it explicitly didn't work with having a drop down by the posting area to switch posters, it was done with repurposing the profile pop up menu, and has a bunch of features that apparently no one else would ever want like an explicit character sheet approval workflow with comments and drafts.

I was so disheartened by the number of people who came to my site and just asked when I was moving to Jcink that I honestly stopped even developing it myself. I have features that are almost done that I can't even be bothered to release like login/register with Discord.

mythus

Quote from: Arantor on June 23, 2022, 03:01:57 PMIt's on indefinite hold after the number of people from the roleplay communities who told me not to bother and that I should just use Jcink.

In any case it's not in a usable state and won't be any time soon because I tried to reverse engineer modern software practices into SMF and burned literal years when I should just have started from scratch.

In any case it explicitly didn't work with having a drop down by the posting area to switch posters, it was done with repurposing the profile pop up menu, and has a bunch of features that apparently no one else would ever want like an explicit character sheet approval workflow with comments and drafts.

I was so disheartened by the number of people who came to my site and just asked when I was moving to Jcink that I honestly stopped even developing it myself. I have features that are almost done that I can't even be bothered to release like login/register with Discord.
Sorry for the necropost, I didn't get a notification and just saw this.

All I can say is, ouch man. I know that had to hurt. What I could tell you were putting a lot of love into it.

I for one was really interested in character sheet approvals and drafts and being able to comment on them. I could see a lot of promise there, including being able to make complex or simple character accounts. To be basically steered to such a suboptimal solution as Jcink when you were working on something new that could have become a sweet RP forum software saddens me.

I don't dare to ask if you will ever consider working on it again. I myself had to move to phpbb for now because I needed a working character accounts system. The one that they have isn't that great, but it at least works well with current versions of the software. Still, I always liked SMF better, but yeah. But I keep looking back occasionally to see if I can get something that I like better. I wish my coding skills were good enough - very minor php with html and such just ain't enough for such a project.

If you ever do get an itch to work on it again, or anything related to make forum RP's better, give me a shout. I'd be more than happy to kick the tires , bounce ideas, and test the heck out of it.
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Arantor

Not apologising for the necropost here because I have a response to the above.

We're trying again. The plan is to strip back to SMF 2.1, refork, then re-add features gradually from StoryBB without having to worry about trying to reengineer the entire platform. I'm currently hard at work redoing the character system.

But we're going to be a while away from anything usable as a public release... just, we've tentatively picked this up again.

zushiba

Since this post has been necro'd I would like to also renew the call for an account switcher/subaccount/character mod.
I'm uninterested in installing a completely new forum software even if it's based on SMF. I would don't want to throw away the current mod & theme library.

There's a few "Post as another user" mods that might fit the bill as a starting point.

Arantor

Thing is, the post-as-another-user mods *don't* fit the bill as a starting point, they never did. Not when you start dealing with things like needing avatars and suchlike.

The other problem is that the actual complexity of a subaccounts mod is *vastly* more difficult than people realise; either you end up with a system that can't deal with having anything other than real accounts (which makes banning and moderation and permissions a nightmare) or you have to spend a lot of time diving into the real depth of it. That's why there hasn't been a maintained mod in years. There's a partial skeleton of one archived on my GitHub but I wouldn't recommend using it. There is also a character (rather than subaccount) one available on rpginitiative.com but it's also unsupported after its author decided not to support SMF and instead work on their own platform.

I'm mildly curious what mods and themes you'd be interested in but fully appreciate if you aren't interested in sharing.

zushiba

I agree that creating actual accounts is not the proper way to handle Sub Accounts. The Updated SubAccount mod somewhat addresses the banning issue by making it impossible to directly log into a child account. So banning a parent account does work.

As for permissions, this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand there are situations where a child account having it's own separate permissions is useful. Depending on the game being played, one might need to hide certain forums from a character for instance. But then you're also dealing with permissions and groups on a per account basis. And there's no way to bulk apply permission/groups across child accounts.

I did look at the character account mod at rpginitiative but found it severely lacking in features to the point of simply being unworkable for our needs. So I took the time to update the updated Sub Account mod by WQRTS on Github. I forked it over there if you want to take a look at it. I won't link it here for obvious reasons.

Currently my wife is looking at using the following.
Theme: Potato, by SychO

As for mods, she's just getting started but she's looking in to mostly Hook only mods as much as possible to avoid the old modhell nightmare.
She's evaluating...

So far those are the ones I know about/are currently testing.

Arantor

Yeah, I figured the characters mod from Kendra wouldn't fit right but I figured I'd mention it anyway in case it would. I suspect you'd have found Vesta clunky to use in practice (I certainly did) though it had a few features that were rather charming and that you don't see elsewhere these days.

Quote from: zushiba on March 21, 2023, 05:21:11 PMone might need to hide certain forums from a character for instance

The real question in 2.1 is what you do about alerts. This is something the original mod couldn't possibly have known about (nor the quick and dirty update) and means you have to cycle through all the subaccounts to see which ones got alerts.

I tried this several ways to see how that worked in practice, and the only solution that ever felt practical is to just not do this and funnel all the alerts to the parent account (with some ability to have alerts capable of noting 'xyz replied to abc's post' - which then means you *definitely* can't reliably have permissions on the child accounts because you'll have all sorts of drama of when an alert is readable/when it isn't. Just an awful user experience.

We did try it, we even had a whole mode specifically for doing this, called immersive mode, where it would apply permissions for this exact reason - at the time it was a Harry Potter themed site and we were trying in particular around 'Harry can't go into the Slytherin dungeons' as a use case. It just irked people so it went from on by default to off by default to removed. Folks coming from other similar environments - think Jcink - definitely won't expect it to work this way.

Interesting list of features, btw, I'd already implemented most of the relevant things in StoryBB, but the theme side... not so much, though I did have a working responsive theme that actually made sense even if I did replace all the templates with a template engine and get Sass going for CSS work. It would eventually have been easier to get going and customise if I ever finished the UI for it, but porting SMF themes to it was never a particularly tedious task, I ported more than one of DzinerStudio's themes over time.

Quote from: zushiba on March 21, 2023, 05:21:11 PMforked it over there if you want to take a look at it. I won't link it here for obvious reasons.

You mean the one that both WQRTS and you have violated the author's licence over?

zushiba

Vesta was okay, it had some great ideas but there was simply too much I had to work around to get it to a functional state and it's essentially been abandoned :/ I've had several installs of Vesta and have to fix a bunch of things just to get it to a bare minimum of functioning. Things like links in the admin interface missing the session validation key so they simply didn't work for example.

Alerts is something I didn't even think about. That will be an issue going forward. Even IF you funnel all the alerts to the parent account it'd be too easy to miss them for people who spend most of their time in child accounts. I'll have to give this some thought because I can see that being a problem. It might just end up having to be a hacky "alerts portal" feature until I can come up with a better solution.

I'd love to give StoryBB a try if you ever get to a point that you want someone to beta test it. If it's not too difficult to modify SMF themes to work on it and it has the other generally loved RP features like bookmarks/pages/menu management, it could easily be a drop-in replacement for us. Also RIP DzinerStudio's :(

QuoteYou mean the one that both WQRTS and you have violated the author's licence over?
That's the one, I don't expect anyone will throw up a fuss over it but you never know. I've tried to contact the original author several times in the past but simply never got a response. I'm not sure the license issue was ever his intention as he was pretty amicable in the past about modifications. This is why I didn't include a link, I'm fully aware of the licensing issue and if he ever wants me to pull it down I will. Unfortunately we live in a world with zero alternatives currently.
EDIT well aside from writing my own sub account mod from the ground up but... I have a full time job already.

Arantor

Quote from: zushiba on March 21, 2023, 07:10:52 PMEven IF you funnel all the alerts to the parent account it'd be too easy to miss them for people who spend most of their time in child accounts

And this is why you don't do it this way - it's such a monumental pain to deal with in practice. And it's only the tip of the iceberg; bookmarks are also per-character at this point which in practice is rarely useful and *honestly*? Bookmarks tend to be used as a surrogate for having a proper topic tracker that can show you which topics you're due to post next.

Which then gets you into the situation of wanting to have a way to flag to people that there is a topic for them that they haven't even posted in yet - as a form of topic invite so they can find it and respond to it after they've talked about it in PMs.

There's also all sorts of things that it becomes possible to do with a little work - being able to reattribute posts between characters, moving characters between accounts if that ever comes up (good for NPCs in practice or those special canon characters that exist primarily to move the site plot along where any of the admins might post as them, without having to fart around sending each other the content), but these are things far too few of the mods ever bothered to investigate, they'd get as far as the basic functionality and call it a day.


On the subject of the mod licensing, Matt was *very* clear in his choice of going ND back in the day - I remember having a long, long conversation with him about it back in 2009 or so just before his daughter was born, and it was all because he didn't want to deal with exactly what you're doing - making modified versions that people pester him for. It's also partly why his BitBucket account no longer has copies of his mods (even if it still exists, which I don't think it does any more)

I doubt he'll come after you, but it certainly put me in a very sour mood when I came to look at it myself when I first started on the StoryBB journey. Mind you, StoryBB wasn't meant to be a fork... it just ended up being one, but it also got shafted so hard by other peoples' bad judgement that I started over. Too much time burned going the wrong way (and I have a full time job, as well)

You're welcome to see whatever code is to be had on GitHub, but I know there's features I never fully released, e.g. login/signup with Discord. Though where I'm at in the rewrite is honestly so much cooler than what I ever dared do in the original StoryBB, and I don't intend to make the mistakes that were foisted upon me in the original (like the wrong template engine)

zushiba

Bookmarks wouldn't be that hard to work around. Changing the bookmark display to simply show all bookmarks associated with every character you have regardless of which account your on, be it child or parent account. Right up until you get people who have say 60 characters. Why my wife and her friends do :/

The current Sub Account mod does have shareable accounts which sort of frees up the NPC issue though honestly I don't think it's ever been used. NPC's are generally handled in-post by the players, I rarely see anyone use an actual NPC account.

As for Matt the only interaction I ever had with him was here, back in the day. I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to be hounded by people forever but honestly that decision simply made matter worse as it blocks anyone else from picking up the mod, only having the option to attempt to contact him to get an update.

You bring up an interesting point regarding the template engine. I would love to see SMF's template system done away with. It's far too cumbersome. My wife is proficient in HTML/CSS and a little with PHP but when it comes to uploading/updating anything on the backend she's somewhat lost. I kind of like how FudForum did it in the past.

Arantor

That's the thing about bookmarks; they're not a real solution for the problem at hand - they're a kludge for not having a proper topic tracker that can tell you which topics it's your turn to post in. While I never designed mine for 60+ characters, it could certainly scale to 20+ and I think 60+ would be achievable with a bit of UI redesign. (That said I have... reservations about the capacity to meaningfully play 60+ distinct characters. I find it hard enough to give a dozen of them unique voices that actually meaningfully are different and not just the same personality with a different name and face, but not my circus, not my monkeys.)

It was interesting how everyone used the bookmarks feature (which was what came first) until the topic tracker came along and everyone migrated to that.

The NPC thing is... weird. Virtually no-one uses an actual NPC account, though they're more common in fandom RPs, where you have specific canons that the admins take to drive plot and that you don't want the general playerbase having but they're not *really* characters you'd play. In Potter, for example, think Dumbledore, Voldemort - big characters who exist for site plot reasons where you'd conceivably let admins share the account. But I know Matt didn't *really* focus on the RP use case for that mod, it was a more broad sub-accounts solution even though the most common use by far is RP.

On being hounded forever, I still get requests for mods I wrote in 2009 and gave away in 2010. :-/

The template engine... we originally went with LightnCandy as a Mustache-like but there's a lot of inline logic in the SMF templates and because my co-devs at the time were insistent on having a Mustache like engine, we picked the one we could just about graft logic onto that still felt like what they liked (never mind my opinion as the person doing 95% of the work even then). I did subsequently plan on migrating to Twig but after burning a year doing the first template translation I wasn't keen on doing it again in a hurry - this time around, it will be Twig but this time around I have a more sane crew that's up for helping...

FudForum isn't one I've heard of but I'll check it out, out of curiosity.

mythus

I  have to say I am rather happy to see this still being discussed - in a way.

As of right now, the only places I know that have working "sub accounts" is phpbb, xenforo, and I think jcink and proboards but those last two are locked down remote hosted things. I think mybb had one but not sure it still works, and well we all know that smf used to have one. Perhaps forum-based roleplaying just isn't as popular now to have such functionality? I don't know. But it is something that is missing indeed.

In the end, I want something more like what Arantor has cooking up. What I've read of it seems a lot better towards my use cases. But! Sub-Accounts was also a working solution that worked a little nicer than phpbb's account switcher.

As far as theming goes, I just want simple where I can throw in some CSS and maybe some HTML if need be lol. I should be able to easily change to logo to a full size banner, change the background colors or image, set up some css color themeing for the tables, and roll with it. Things seems to get more and more complicated in that department saddly.

As far as functionality - a page or wiki or book system, character accounts, simple to use WYSIWYG editor, maybe a glossary, avatars, and attachments and I'd be happy. Direct in post attachments would be cool where you could upload an image in line in post.

Anyways, @Arantor I am looking forward to hearing more of your storybb and would love to kick its wheels when ready to do so. @zushiba thank you for keeping this alive as well!
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