Week Fourteen Site Updates

A quieter week on the surface, but a busy one underneath. There have been about 140 changes since the last update. Most of the work came straight from your notes on the new sheet layouts:

• Phones now open the new layout at a readable size
• the background around the sheet is easier on the eyes
• and a batch of dark-mode and marker fixes went out.

Outside of sheet fixes, unread notifications now always come first, and we fixed several search filters that had stopped working after last week’s switch to the new search engine.

Character Sheets

D&D 4e and D&D 3.5 are live! Both layouts went out together on Friday evening, a day later than planned for 4e. More than 60 D&D 3.5 sheets tried the new layout in the first few hours. As with the others, if you own a sheet on either system a banner at the top offers to “Try the new layout”. Nothing changes until you choose it, and you can always switch back to the classic layout in the sheet’s actions menu any time.

This week was focused on your feedback. Nearly every sheet fix below started as a note in the switch-back box or a report in the Issue Tracker. Thank you — please keep them coming.

Phones, take two: Last week’s patch made the new layout fit your screen width regardless of screen size and had an unintended side effect. One of the first reports after it said simply “too small to read on phone browser”, fitting a full page onto a phone shrank the text to about a third of the size the classic sheet uses. The fix as it is live does the following:

• The sheet opens at a readable size, the same way the classic sheet does. The page is wider than the screen, so you drag sideways to reach the rest of it, and pinch to zoom in or out as on any web page.
• A Fit page width button above the sheet shows the whole page at once when you want the overview. Tap Actual size to go back.
• The menu bar and the sheet’s header stay the same size while you pinch, so Save and the Actions menu no longer shrink to a few pixels when you zoom out.
• Pages stack one under another on a phone, and the background and menu bar now stretch across the whole sheet instead of stopping at the edge of the screen.

To make reports like that one easier to act on, a switch-back note now includes your screen size and browser, so we can tell “too small on my phone” apart from “too zoomed in on my tablet”.

A calmer background: Several of you told us the area around the sheet was too bright — “uncomfortably bright”, “hurts my eyes”, “harder on the eyes than when the background is darker”. It’s now a mid-grey in light themes and a dark grey in dark themes, which makes the white pages stand out instead of glaring.

A tidier header: Actions and Save now sit side by side, so on a wide screen the whole header fits on one line. On a phone, the sheet’s name and menu sit on top with Actions and Save underneath, and a long sheet name is shortened with “…” instead of taking a row of its own.

Faster typing: Every keystroke on a new-layout sheet used to redraw the whole sheet. It now does about 40% less work, which you’ll notice most on a filled-in sheet or an older phone.

Misc fixes this week:

• Black pips on a dark background: On a dark theme, filled markers like pips and dots stayed black, which is nearly invisible on dark navy. They now follow the theme, on about 3,400 markers across every new layout. Sheets with official artwork behind them keep their original colors, since the artwork doesn’t change with your theme.
• Checkboxes on a dark theme: Ticked checkboxes now follow the theme too, so you can tell ticked from empty again. They still show as a filled or empty square rather than a checkmark; bringing the checkmark back is a future update.
• Invisible radio circles on Legend in the Mist: The empty circles were drawn in a pale grey that barely showed on white or on the sheet’s artwork. They’re now clearly visible, and new layouts we build won’t start with that pale grey.
• A big blue blob on Blades in the Dark clocks: Clicking one wedge of a clock painted a large blue square over a quarter of the clock. That’s gone. If you move around the sheet with the keyboard, the highlight now traces the wedge or pip itself instead of a box around it.
• The Dark Eye 5e: Two invisible, unused markers were removed. We checked first: no sheet had ever stored anything in them.

Next up: Once the 4e and 3.5 rollouts settle, we’ll turn to the “legacy” Pathfinder template (the one simply called Pathfinder), which needs some changes to your sheet data before it can switch over, as we explained last week.

Notifications

Unread notifications now come first. A member had an unread message they simply couldn’t find as it was 62nd by date, four pages deep in both the bell and the notifications page. Now unread notifications always sit at the top of the list, newest first, with read ones below them. When you read one, it moves down straight away. Paging through the list is also much faster on busy accounts, and the counts at the top of the notifications page now cover your whole account, not just the rows loaded so far.

Search

Last week’s update moved topic and game search to the new search engine. This week we found, and fixed, a few things the switch had broken:

• Search Within and the date range work again for topics and games. Since the switch (October 23 for topics, October 24 for games), choosing a game or forum to search within, or a date range, was ignored. You got results from everywhere, which looked like a working search rather than an error. Our apologies, especially since our own guide recommends Search Within as the way to speed up a slow search.
• The Author filter works again for topics. Topic searches filtered by author were returning topics by everyone.
• Author now matches the start of a name. Typing eric in the Author box finds Eric, Erica and Ericson, but no longer every name with “eric” somewhere in the middle. The old way was very slow for a specific name, and with common fragments it was quietly returning only some of the matching authors anyway.
• @-mentions suggest the right people first. When you type @ in a topic, people who have posted in that topic are meant to be suggested first. That only worked if their name sorted early in the alphabet. It now works for everyone, and it’s faster too.

Under The Floorboards

• Security updates: We updated the post editor to fix a reported problem with pasted content, updated our email library, and patched the server runtime for a newly disclosed vulnerability. Nothing was exploited. As an extra precaution, email addresses containing a few unusual punctuation characters (such as ;, < or ,) are no longer accepted when you register or change your address. We checked: no existing member’s address is affected.
• A lighter sheet viewer: We removed some leftover development code that was still being downloaded with every sheet, about 345 KB of it.
• A sturdier release process: A good share of this week’s changes went into the tools we use to ship updates, so a failed release now stops and says so clearly, instead of reporting success. You shouldn’t notice anything, which is the point.

Every Site Update So Far

You can always find all the site updates at myth-weavers.com/updates.

What’s Next

1. On a phone? Give the new layout one more look. It now opens at a readable size, and Fit page width is one tap away. If it still doesn’t work for you, tell us in the switch-back box.

2. D&D 4e and 3.5 players: try the new layout, and if you switch back, tell us why. Your notes are how we found almost everything on this week’s list.

3. On a dark theme? Take a look at a new-layout sheet. If something is hard to read, report it in the Issue Tracker and name the system and the theme.

4. If a topic or game search gave you odd results this past week, try it again, especially if you used Search Within, a date range or the Author filter.

Keep on weaving those myths!