Clumsiness of Private Messages
While working on one of the sister sites to WoN I stumbled upon a plug-in allowing private messages. I don’t want to defame the author, so I’ll leave it to you to guess what I’m using. I was actually astounded that there is a paid version of that utility. I say astounded because the private message tool in WoN is superior despite it’s clunkiness. That is saying a lot.
I’m talking about the Advisor’s header that I wrote back in 2016. I haven’t touched that code in quite a while, and am surprised it still managed to keep up with some of the more recent game updates despite this. Here is a quick screenshot for reference:
This was a post from a test user a while back that is still in the database. The view is from my admin panel which allows me to coordinate secret messages between groups by pre-populating the message box. I am managing this manually now when the turn generator flags it because the user flagged this specific message as “Classified” which means I have to hide the recipient.
Still, I would never dream of selling this code, which was my first solid attempt at pre-populating an editor using only Angular. The code performs well but I good reflection of my skills as a developer. It’s a bit disappointing to see someone else selling a produce I would consider “half baked” when I know exactly how much effort would be needed to bring it up to speed. Here are just a few examples of what was missing:
- No in-line formatting, not even basic formatting (You can’t see it in the screenshot, but it’s there)
- Inherit default styles from website where it’s placed (buttons were invisible until I did manual CSS changes on fonts and backgrounds)
- Ability to PM multiple parties at once
- Ability to forward topics already created to additional parties when required
- Ability to filter and folder various threads by categories
- Simple date-time indicator