The Road Goes Ever On

Hey all, hope you’ve been doing well. In the two or so weeks since I’ve last posted one of these, I’ve been at work continuing to expand the management side of the site. And there’s good news to share.

As you may recall, I had been working on changing how user privileges worked and how a bunch of backend stuff responded to more granular permissions. Keeping track of what users do and when was also important for oversight and that took some time to sort properly. I also said that my next objective would be to use these new foundations to create another class of staff, one that would be able to interact with stories entries more directly.

All of that and more has now been implemented. In other words, setting things like synopses and story tags is possible by people other than the the author themselves (or a lone admin who bothered to directly interact with a database). While there’s a completely new kind of relatively unprivileged accounts that can only set these things, the rest of the staff is also able to use these new tools. In fact, the higher the status, the more options there tend to be to play around with. Wouldn’t want a relative no one to be able to change the title of a story or its author, right?

The page is pretty spartan if you’re only allowed to do the very basics

The inner workings of it all weren’t that difficult to conceptualize though, as always, the devil’s in the details. I spent about the same amount of time refactoring old code and even dealing with old bugs as I did building up all the new toys. As the general idea is to have people who I wouldn’t necessarily trust to moderate on the team, a lot of time was spent making sure that functionality would be limited in scope so no accidentally (or intentionally) the whole of a story or its information.

I ended up gutting a few of my admin-only tools and reusing part of the code for the new tools. I figured that the more generic tool with granularity in its functions depending on the user’s privileges would be the way to go. Even if that meant that it took me longer to get more complex code working just right, it makes sense not to duplicate functionality and contribute to much of the same sort of spaghetti that was the old Kusaba X.

I prioritized mainly tools for finding stories, especially ones with missing tags/synopses, and tried to make the actual editing interface as uncomplicated as possible. A lot of it is like the User Management page, which you might be familiar with if you're an author. There should be immediate feedback if there's an error or if things have gone well, so hopefully it won't be too hard to deal with.

In order to get things done more quickly, I also trimmed the scope of the work. Originally, besides the search tools and responsive tag fetching that’s in place, I had thought to allow story entries directly through the story list. It’s something not incredibly difficult to do, I don’t think, but it would have added maybe another week or two of work between reworking some of the existing scripts and the extensive bug-testing that would be needed. With my limited times and resources, some triage is necessary. Since more cool features will be making use of more correctly-tagged stories in the future, I wanted to advance all that mountain load of work as much as possible.

There’s a lot of polish that remains mostly invisible to a normal user that also made it in but I won’t bore you with the details for now. Suffice it to say there’s more logging, quality-of-life improvements and smarter implementations of some already existing functionality. Things work and they work well, judging from my various days of testing.

Most importantly, part of the point of going through all this bother was to recruit people who might be interested in helping out; if you’ve ever wanted to write up a synopsis for a story you read or add the correct tags, this is your opportunity. Let me know in a message through Patreon or send me a message through Discord and I’ll help you get set up.

I’ll be working on new features and quality-of-life type improvements for the user-facing portion of the site next. I don’t know how long it’ll take me, but I hope to have at least some of it in reasonable shape by the beginning of next month. And, after that, the other third mysterious thing that I mentioned I had put in the back burner for the time being. All in all, exciting times ahead.

Until next time, take it easy!