Week Thirteen Site Updates

We’ve been hard at work on the dev team, mostly behind the scenes this week. There have been about 110 changes since the last update. No new feature themes were delivered; instead, most of the work went into the two major projects. On the sheets front, Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e sheet layouts have been updated to the new viewer, and the new sheet viewer now supports dark mode and mobile layouts. Meanwhile, we’ve finished the search engine revamp, and now every core search on the site runs on OpenSearch, a significant performance and search quality improvement.

Character Sheets

Pathfinder 2e and D&D 5e Are Live: The new layouts were deployed on Thursday and Friday going into the weekend to get the most eyes on target. 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 Switch back to the classic layout in the sheet’s Actions menu works any time.

The first days went smoothly, apart from one save problem that was quickly patched (more details below). We’ll continue watching both closely since they’re among the highest usage sheets on the whole site. The Pathfinder save problem from last week’s update has stayed fixed.

Next up: D&D 4e on Thursday, October 29, and D&D 3.5 on Friday, October 30. Once that’s complete and we finish implementing your feedback, we’ll handle “legacy” Pathfinder data transformations, then start planning the retirement of the 15-year-old legacy viewer.

Dark mode works on the new layouts: If you use a dark theme, the new layouts now turn dark to match, instead of staying bright white. There are still a few color edges where theme colors aren’t applying as expected (mostly on Edge of the Empire), and we’re hunting them down. We already fixed what we think is the biggest one, where the legacy viewer’s border colors were inadvertently hard-coded into sheet templates.

Your switch-back notes are working. Last week we added a short question for anyone switching back to the classic layout. Several fixes this week came straight from your answers, so keep telling us what isn’t right and we’ll prioritize getting it fixed. The clearest message so far was about phones and tablets. Five of the eleven written notes said the new layout doesn’t fit/scale, and two of them came from D&D 5e players right after we deployed the template updates.

We rolled out an urgent patch to get the new layouts working on phones. On a narrow screen, a new-layout sheet now opens with the whole page fitting width-wise on the screen. From there, you can pinch to zoom in and drag to move around, just as you would on any web page. Rotating your phone fits the page again. Before this, the sheet sat inside its own scrolling box, and that box was what stopped pinch-zoom from working.

Your notes now reach us faster, too. Late on Friday, a member wrote “Internal Server Error with every save attempt?” in the switch-back box. The initial reports went to our monitoring dashboard, which is checked routinely but is less visible than the Issue Tracker. Now, if you pick Something didn’t work, a private report goes straight into the Issue Tracker within about fifteen minutes. The same happens if you pick Something I use was missing or Something else and write a note. Each report includes your sheet and your username, so staff can follow up with you. All the other answers are still read every week. Keep the notes coming!

Fixed this week:

• A box starting with “=” blocked every save: Some people start a box with “=”, for example to make a separator like === Notes ===. On the new layouts, a box like that couldn’t be changed, and any save that touched it was entirely refused, with an “Internal Server Error”, blocking at least three members, one of whom reported it. We fixed this on Saturday, and what you’d typed in those boxes was left untouched. If a save on a new layout failed for you this week, please try it again.
• No way back to the new layout: If you switched back to the classic layout, or pressed Not now on the banner, there was no way to change your mind. Now Try the new layout is always in the classic sheet’s Actions menu. The banner won’t keep asking once you’ve said no.
• A strip down the left edge you couldn’t scroll to: On any window narrower than the sheet, such as a phone, tablet or half-screen laptop, about 90 pixels down the left side were out of reach, a defect we inadvertently introduced last week. Several of you reported it through the switch-back question. It’s fixed.
• Pages side by side again: On a wide enough screen, the pages of a new-layout sheet sit two across again, as they do on the classic sheet viewer.
• Lined rows that lost their lines: On write-on lined rows, each row covered the line above it at most browser zoom levels. At 110% zoom, the Call of Cthulhu Equipment box showed only 7 of its 10 lines, and one member saw it as blank. This is fixed on about 3,500 fields across 44 layouts, so it zooms correctly.
• Labels hidden under their own boxes: Some labels were drawn underneath the box next to them and got cut off. Now they’re fixed:
  • Star Wars Saga: missing labels, the Condition track (whose markers had also turned into ovals), and the Skills [ Auto Fill | Clear ] brackets. Thank you to the member who reported all six problems.
  • Shadowrun 4e: the tradition column (such as “Manipulation” and “Drain / Fatigue”), and “Public Awareness”.
  • Edge of the Empire: “Specializations” and “Available XP”.
  • D&D 5e: “Experience” and “Background”, fixed before it went live.
  • D&D 3.5: ready for its release next week.
• Naruto: A stray dark bar and bracket over the Other Notes heading are gone.

Thank you to two publishers: Son of Oak Game Studio gave us permission to use the official Legend in the Mist character sheet artwork; Legend in the Mist sheets and the Attributions page now carry the credit. Meanwhile, the amazing Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing granted us permission to use his artwork on the Without Number systems, so those sheets will soon get the art upgrade.

A word on styling: Several members expressed disappointment that the sheet layouts are more or less the same, with only minor changes to items like checkboxes that “make the sheet seem more like a tax form”. To be clear, the sheet engine changes aren’t a subtle homage to Randall Munroe’s xkcd (https://www.xkcd.com/1566/), trying to trick you into doing our taxes. The key milestone is to retire the 15-year-old legacy viewer, and the transformations we’ve done have largely been aimed at replicating the current layouts. We will definitely be putting more polish on, including official artwork where authorized by the system owner.

Search

Core search is now on OpenSearch: Back in September, post search moved to our new search engine. This week the other big search indexes followed, so posts, topics, games, issues and the suggestions that pop up as you type are now all served by the same system: OpenSearch, an industry standard engine.

• Suggestions as you type are much faster. This switch went in on Tuesday night. Before, each keystroke took about half a second; now it takes 30–55 milliseconds, about ten times faster. Two-letter searches used to be the slowest, and now they’re the fastest. Suggestions also match from the start of a word now, so typing eric offers names that begin with “Eric” instead of every name with “eric” somewhere inside. More games show up too: dragon now suggests about ten instead of four.
• Topic and game search moved over on Thursday and Friday nights. Topic searches are about six times faster: character went from 225 milliseconds to 36. Game search was already fast and stays that way.
• Your own games still come first. The old search ranked topics and games you belong to a little higher. The new one briefly lost that boost when it switched over, and it was put back on Saturday. Nothing the old search found has been lost.
• We checked before switching: For each switch, we ran the old and new searches side by side, as several different kinds of members. That caught three problems before any of you saw them. One of them would have hidden 1 in 7 topics from search.

What’s next: The smaller searches come next: downloads, recruitment ads, the Issue Tracker’s own filters, and eventually wiki pages and blogs. After that, search will start favoring results from where you are. Once it’s live, searches will automatically prioritize content based on the topic, forum, or game you’ve navigated to. Everything will still be findable; nearby things will just rise to the top. This is similar to the capability that Baldr had, but doesn’t limit itself to just the local scope, so if you happen to be in an adjacent topic, you’ll be able to find what you were looking for.

Editor and Composer

The plan for Editor and Composer is written. It covers sixteen of your requests, and most of them can go ahead now, including custom quotes, images in HTML mode and mobile formatting. Four wait for the larger character design. As we said a few weeks back, we don’t put any hard delivery dates on these because more urgent priorities can and will come up, as they did this week with sheets and search. We’ll pick up this theme once we’ve gotten the major sheets deployments fully in the done pile.

From the Issue Tracker

• Upload won’t work? One member couldn’t upload a profile picture at all. The cause turned out to be a browser extension blocking our image storage. If an upload fails for you, try a private window with extensions turned off. On our side, failed uploads are now logged with the reason, so we can tell why without guessing. An upload that times out also shows an error now, instead of hanging forever.
• GMs: “Open” means anyone can join. A GM with a recruitment ad running found players joining the game before the GM had approved any applications. That’s because the game was set to Open, which lets anyone join directly, ad or no ad. If you want to approve every player yourself, set the game to Read-only while you recruit.
• Dice: put the modifier outside keep(). Write keep(2d20,highest)+5, not keep(2d20+5,highest). The second form currently gives an unhelpful error message, and we’ll continue to enhance our syntax tips to clarify what the problem is.

Under The Floorboards

• A security update: You may have heard of the significant PHP vulnerabilities disclosed this past week. They didn’t affect us since we are no longer using that programming language, but our own security audit did find a couple updates related to our framework. Nothing was exploited, and you shouldn’t notice any difference.

Every Site Update So Far

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

What’s Next

1. If you own a Pathfinder 2e or D&D 5e sheet, try the new layout. If you switch back, please tell us why in the box that appears. As this week showed, your notes are how we find problems.

2. D&D 4e and 3.5 players: your turn comes next Thursday and Friday.

3. Pathfinder users: We’ve realized many of you are still using our more-popular Pathfinder template, which carries the Pathfinder system name, as opposed to Pathfinder [Experimental]. In this case, you won’t see the “Try the new layout” banner, and there’s a reason. This template was based on our original D&D 3.5e template, so upgrading will require some changes to your sheet data to add fields that had never existed but are part of the current Pathfinder data model. The switch/switch-back will necessarily be a little different. Stand by for more!

4. If you’re 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.

5. On a phone? Give the new layout another look. It now opens to fit your screen, and you can pinch to zoom. If it still doesn’t work for you, tell us in the switch-back box.

Keep on weaving those myths!