I also had the sneaking suspicion that as soon as the menu was up for real, *more* requests would start flooding in.
|
Besides pronouns, people often collect ribbons representing their
fannish interests, and a similar tradition has evolved on Discord
using, again, the role tags.
An initial list was proposed, some with suggested emoji icons and
some without, covering from broad sweeping topics down to specific
narrow gaming and entertainment sectors.
["Wandavision" was due to open the same weekend, so there was a lot of
interest in that and thus the "Westview" home.]
Once the flow of suggestions trailed off, I could go ahead and put them
into a list for building a large reaction-click menu of them.
For items whose sources didn't provide appropriate emojis, I was able to
pick reasonable choices from the standard set, which is already fairly
rich -- and the mini text search engine in Discord's selection
pop-up is quite useful for narrowing them down.
For menus I would almost always build the "source" to a message offline, and the paste it in. Discord honors newlines in a pasted message, and only uses an interactively typed <return> to send the content. In addition, forced newlines can be inserted into a message interactively using shift+<return>. So there's a lot of formatting freedom in working up menu messages to make them look good, and if changes are done offline and then copy/pasted back in it's easy to update one quickly. For example, the paste content for the top of this menu looked like
:pick: **Minecraft**
:smiley_cat: **Spacecats**
:flying_saucer: **Science Fiction**
:sparkles: **Fantasy**
double-spaced for clarity, with markdown for bold, and with two specific gaming subsets indented a bit. There was going to be a lot of both of those played over the weekend. With spacing kept consistent, it all lined up when displayed. |
|
|
My initial tendency was once again to assign a bunch of colors to the
actual role tags, but that got overruled down to everything in this
menu being the *same* color.
I thought that made it look more like a wall of text, but shadowy forces
in the upper aether apparently wanted color variety to only apply to
*peoples'* convention job functions.
At least my "formal objection" with comparative evidence was on file here.
I also had the sneaking suspicion that as soon as the menu was up for real, *more* requests would start flooding in. |
|
The number of additional requests was actually not so much, but needed an
additional icon that we didn't natively have.
Anna brought it in, along with an entire set of Pride flags and some custom
Arisia logos.
Then we had the one that had specifically been requested -- the SMOF
bow-tie, which I didn't previously know about.
Fortunately there wasn't a demand to make an entire menu out of the flags,
but now all the icons were available within the Arisia server for people
to drop into messages, react with, etc.
They all had identifier :names: in the typical emoji-label format.
Custom emojis is another Discord feature, but the ones uploaded into one server can't necessarily be used directly on another. What's crazy is that custom emojis for ALL the servers one is connected to show up in the pop-up menu, with a lot of the off-this-server ones greyed out. |
|
So a while later I only needed to add two items to the menu -- the SMOF bowtie, and since none was supplied for "con-running" I just selected the gear, sort of implying "change your settings" or "underlying mechanics" or the like. The text was added by editing the message with appropriate markdown, and then this time I hoped the YAGPDB "update" function would actually work and not destroy the click counts we already had. |
|
Managing reaction menus is one of the more common Discord admin operations; this is part of what it looks like on YAGPDB's backend. The server roles have to get created first, then referenced in the role-menu group. One stupid gotcha is that newly added items get inserted at the TOP of the group stack, but the roles are parsed from top to bottom when adding or rebuilding the reactions. So any incrementally added new entries have to be manually shuffled, one slot at a time, all the way to the bottom of the list. For large menus that gets pretty tedious, so plan ahead -- when I initially went to create this one I knew about that, and added all the original roles *backwards* so I wouldn't have to shuffle too much. |
|
The update actually did the right thing -- kept all the original counts, and
only asked for two new reactions for the two new entries.
Yay!
I figured if any more interest-requests or other groupings came in we'd just
make some new menus; we even had a channel for suggestions.
Little of import arrived there, as it turned out -- evidently this and the
pronouns were enough to satisfy everyone's thirst for "virtual ribbons".
Here I incrementally reported the update steps as I did them, and noted the ordering problem in case someone else wanted to take a whack at another menu later. Pounds and pounds of sausage. |