New BBCode markup, new forums, sticky threads, spoiler tags

[Gary Teter]

We rolled out a few new improvements to the paizo.com messageboards today.

New play-by-post forums. See more details here.

New BBCode markup for play-by-post. {ooc}Out-of-character commentary.{/ooc} [Use square brackets instead of braces, of course.] This markup looks like this when rendered.

(Also a minor change to our BBCode rendering, as shown by the paragraph above. In the past you couldn't use square brackets at all in your text. Now we leave them there if they don't correspond to a BBCode tag rather than stripping them.)

Product discussion forum. Now you can start a thread for discussing any product on paizo.com, and recent discussion is shown right on the product page. You can also respond to product threads in the Product Discussion forum. (To start a thread, go to the product's page and click the "start a discussion" link at the bottom of the page.)

Sticky threads. Paizo staff have the ability to mark threads as "sticky" so they stay at the top of a forum's page. I'm embarassed to say that this has been on my to-do list for years, and when I finally got around to it, finished the implementation in about ten minutes. D'oh.

Spoiler tag. For those times when you really, really want to let the cat out of the bag, but don't want to spoil it for everybody. {spoiler}This is a spoiler.{/spoiler} Spoilers look like this:

Spoiler:

The chick in The Crying Game is really a...

[Lilith]

Nifty! Many thanks, PostMonster!

[Mothman]

Nice.

The spoiler one is cool. Nice example too.

[Sebastian]

Neat stuff.

Spoiler:

[Damn. I used to hide things in the square brackets. Oh well.]

[Gary Teter]

Spoiler:

Anything you hid in the square brackets in the past will remain hidden unless the post gets edited for some reason. Going forward, however, yeah, the square brackets are not so good for hiding stuff.

Edit: And yeah, I guess I did just spoil your spoiler. :-)

Edit again: OK, now it's back inside the spoiler. :-)

[Sharoth]

Thanks Gary. We appreciate the

Spoiler:

great effort you put into keeping the place up and running.

[Sebastian]

Gary Teter wrote:

Spoiler:

Anything you hid in the square brackets in the past will remain hidden unless the post gets edited for some reason. Going forward, however, yeah, the square brackets are not so good for hiding stuff.

Edit: And yeah, I guess I did just spoil your spoiler. :-)

Edit again: OK, now it's back inside the spoiler. :-)

I figured that - I went and looked at some of the old posts where it occurred.

Spoiler:

And thanks for preserving my secret.

[Festivus]

Yay, thank you! Quite wonderful improvements.

[Gary Teter]

Hmmmm. Apparently perhaps some problems if quoting a spoiler. Will have to fix that.

[Cosmo]

I love new toys!

Spoiler:

Ohhh... MAN can I think of some fun ways to use this!
[spoiler]But can we put spoilers within spoilers?

Nope.[/spoiler]

[Zynete]

I noticed when I mouse over links to posts I can still see the spoiler text in the preview.

Is there an easy and efficient way to remove spoilers from previews?

[Gary Teter]

Yes, that was part of an upgrade planned for Friday but bumped to next week.

[Gumball]

How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb ?

Spoiler:

F I S H

[jthilo]

Gary Teter wrote:

Spoiler tag. For those times when you really, really want to let the cat out of the bag, but don't want to spoil it for everybody. {spoiler}This is a spoiler.{/spoiler} Spoilers look like this: ** spoiler omitted **

Gary,

At least one RSS feed reader (Sage, the one I'm using) doesn't hide the spoilers since you're relying on ECMAScript and CSS to implement them. I don't actually care about that, but I thought I'd mention it in case it bothers you. :-)

[Gary Teter]

Yeah, I noticed that in my feedreader (NetNewsWire) shortly after we rolled out the spoiler code. This has been fixed for the next site roll (hopefully today).

Also, spoilers were not being removed from search results. This has also been fixed.

[Gary Teter]

OK, I found another problem with the spoiler tags not working properly when quoting someone else's post. Will fix soon....

[Sebastian]

How about layered spoilers, do they work?

Spoiler:

I'm your only friend

Spoiler:

I'm not your only friend

Spoiler:

but I'm a little glowing friend
[spoiler]
but really I'm not actually your friend
[spoiler]
but I am.

[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]
[/spoiler]

Hmmm...that doesn't work and it looks like it does weird things when I tried to fix it (or even put multiple spoilers on a single post).