Archived Secrets part 2

A picture is worth a thousand words so here’s several:  

I cannot overemphasize just how tired I am as it’s taken dozens and dozens of hours to do what you’ve seen. It has required analysis, reforming a lot of old code, modifying SQL data by hand, experimentation and, most painfully, wholly discarding work I had spent 20 hours on at one point. It also required me to add several hundreds lines of code to a monstrous file that already is about 4-5k lines long (on my ‘would be nice if someday that was simplified list’. Date: TBD).  I’m going to therefore keep this post short and sweet. Technical details are for losers, anyhow!

This builds on what you’ve seen in Archived Secrets part 1 and was on the road map of things I wanted to do anyhow. Here’s what’s been accomplished:

1) Threads that fall off the boards and are archived are added to a list to be reviewed by staff. If they have no problems (like missing images), they are processed with a click and copied to the right place. If they’re a non-story thread or whatnot, can be deleted also.

2) Newly created threads show up as potential additions to the story list. These can be processed as new threads or added to existing entries (via searching) in the story list. Data is autofilled but can be manually altered if there’s anything strange.

3) Existing story entries can be modified to an extent.

4) Groundwork has been laid for planned improvements to the story list and archiving.

In sum, archived things and the storylist are now more automated and it’s way onerous for staff (let’s be honest – pretty much me) to update the storylist or make sure threads were properly archived. There’s a lot of bells and whistles missing which you can intuit by looking at these images.  

That said, they’re mostly things that can wait until a later date. This is partly because they’re for special use cases/extended features and also because they would require a lot of effort to overhaul part of our database and the storylist page itself. There’s a lot of code debt and holdovers from years ago; decisions that weren’t made by me that I have to reckon with. I have yet to come up with a few technical solutions to some of these problems also.  

I’ll be switching tacks to things unrelated to the story archives/list for the next round of features. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time and might bring about a new way of using THP. Might take a while but, until then, enjoy a more frequently-updated storylist.  

Take it easy!