Published by Loren
Learn about the 2021 Donut Team Thanksgive-a-thon Contest entries and more.
Introduction
Hey everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to another Tuesday Topics blog post!
This week, we'd like to shine a spotlight on the 2021 Donut Team Thanksgive-a-thon Contest entries and talk about some more unrelated stuff.
The 2021 Thanksgive-a-thon Contest Entries
The contest is coming to a close and there are now a few entries live on the forum and the Event Releases page. Go check them out!
We will announce the winners in the next Tuesday Topics so stay tuned. :)
A Quick Interlude About The Season and These Posts
Before I go, I'd like to say that there were two key reasons I started Tuesday Topics:
- To keep the community better in the loop about what we're up to.
- To keep myself more responsible about working on Donut Team related projects.
This means that every week, I always try to get a little something done at minimum so I can talk about it with you all.
I work retail, though, and it's the Holiday season so that may_* be difficult for me to do in the coming weeks.
In the event I just don't have the energy to work on anything, perhaps I'll hand the keyboard over to Borb again or maybe some other member of the team to write something for y'all.
That said, I do have some slightly interesting tidbits about the forum to talk about this week.
Working on the Forum
Unlike all of the new web services I'm building for Donut Team, the forum was created in PHP. This is not a language I typically work in but I'm still interested in adding some new features to it.
Up until a couple days ago, however, I hadn't bothered looking into setting up a better development environment. Testing any of my code changes required deploying to the live server which was clunky for (I think) obvious reasons.
That all changed this week when I spent some time setting up a local copy of the website and also setting up a debugger so I can peek into what's going on in the code with each request.
This has already helped me implement some features on my backlog:
Banned User Banner
This was relatively simple and I almost certainly could've trial-and-errored my way to getting this working without a proper development environment, but I never got around to it.
Since it became much easier, however, with one I went ahead and did it.
Users who are currently banned will now be listed as such when viewing their profiles. This banner does not provide any information about why a user was banned but it does make things more clear if a user tries to contact one and they're not responding.
Note: Banning Borb is obviously a joke for this example.
Forum Event Webhook
Something I added to our issue tracker a while ago was making the website post to a webhook on certain forum events, such as creating a new topic, so we could catch spam topics quicker and deal with them faster.
I'm happy to say this feature is finally off the ground. Here's an example post from the site:
There's still some work to do on it but it's nice to be making some progress. :)
The changes discussed above will be included in the next website update, either alongside the previously discussed content system changes or before them.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading another one of our Tuesday Topics posts! See you again next week.
- Loren from Donut Team
P.S.: Borb thinks you should listen to this.