Alora Fane

I've changed the site around a bit! Rather than having two separate sites (Alora Fane and Taming the Mind), I've combined them together into just Alora Fane (there was a lot of overlap anyway). I've also added a different commenting system, which requires you to create an account. It's not like the full-fledged communities I used to have, but it should address some of the issues with the Disqus commenting system, and might also give more of a feeling of community than before.

I've been thinking about whether to do something like this for a long time, and was finally swayed to make the plunge following comments on the previous post. I thought I could do it in a day or two, but it's taken four or five, largely because at first I was trying to incorporate the new system into both Taming the Mind and Alora Fane, and it took a while to finally make the (far more sensible) decision to combine them. It's a shame to say goodbye to the Taming the Mind name after spending years with it, but it's hardly the first time I've made such a change.

While running my old Fig Hunter (and to a lesser degree Alora Fane) community/ies was a pain in many ways - pain I don't want to repeat - I feel like those communities were as much of - or more than - a draw than the games themselves, and it does feel like a loss to no longer have them. This new commenting system is a bit of an experiment. If it's more stress than it's worth, I'll just revert back to Disqus, but if it brings more benefits than stress, then perhaps I can expand it to other community features as well. We'll see how it goes, though I think everything's done on Discord and social media sites like Reddit now anyway; do people use specialised forums anymore? For now, all you can do is comment on blog posts.

(A few people have suggested I set up a Discord server, and I've been thinking about it. It seems like more stress than this at the moment though, and I prefer the permanence, customisability, and aesthetics of a website.)

Disqus often annoyingly marked comments as spam (usually inaccurately), and a lot of messages were lost that way. This new system gives me full control over how the messages are handled, so that shouldn't happen anymore. I feel that having an approval system for comments did help, so I've still got that, though eventually 'trusted members' will be able to bypass it. This would be a status given to people who I'm familiar with and who have been posting for years.

Another issue with Disqus was that while I could see a list of comments when approving them, I couldn't see where they were from, and once approved, I was unable to find some of them again to reply to them. Now, accounts have an inbox thing - like on my old sites - where you can view all replies to your comments (or in my case, replies to my blog posts). This should make replying easier and more reliable (for me, at least).

Here are some details about how things work now:

The database of posts from before has been retained, so nothing's been lost.

You can create an account - or log into it - from the bar at the top. You'll need to provide a valid email for verification, and you can also select to receive emails at that address whenever you get a reply or when there's a new post in either the development or personal categories. This replaces the mailing list from before (which will remain active for the next couple of posts, until people have switched over). If you don't intend to comment but still want updates, you might want to create an account just for that reason.

Older blog posts still have their Disqus comment sections - those aren't lost - but new ones use the new comment system instead. Functionality should be similar to before (and I feel it looks nicer, though obviously that's subjective), though the rules for formatting text (eg bold, italic) are different, and Disqus probably allowed some obscure formatting which this system doesn't (though it's not likely anything any of us used before).

Posts are divided like before, into 'personal' and 'development' categories, which are now purple and teal respectively. There are a few that feel like they're in the wrong category, but I was generally posting to 'Taming the Mind' rather than 'Alora Fane' even when the posts were more appropriate for the latter before anyway. I won't change the old posts' categories, but I'll likely use the categories as they should be used more in future now that they're all on the same site. Only pinned development ones are shown on the main page at the moment.

There's a simple like/dislike system, like Reddit's upvote/downvote one. I don't know if it'll actually be used much, but it was trivial to add since I've done it with previous communities, so I thought I might as well.

From a design standpoint, Taming the Mind and Alora Fane each had a 'theme colour' before, both of which were slightly different shades of teal (Alora Fane's was slightly bluer). I don't know whether other people even noticed this, but for me it felt significant. Now, I'm using Taming the Mind's teal as the primary theme colour of this combined Alora Fane site because it's my most favouritest colour in the whooole wide world. How fascinating. I've also made the middle of the aster in the header yellow, which is a change, but which I find quite appealing. It represents the Nexus, which is Alora Fane's equivalent of Heaven, and which that part of the symbol has always represented. Interestingly, that yellow is the same hue as the brown background, just with a different saturation and value. Colour stuff! I feel that teal, purple, and this yellow/brown are the colours I like and use most, and I'm making conscious efforts to make them the primary palette of my recent work. (Most Hollywood films are teal and orange anyway. Also, Spyro Reignited was heavily purple and orange/gold, almost everywhere, which was interesting to notice. I liked that.)

I used a hidden post to test that everything worked properly. I've done this with previous sites before, but I've always cleared the database before opening account creation to the public. This time I've decided to make the post visible with the accounts and comments intact, just because they made me laugh quite a bit so I thought I might as well share that.

(I've been looking at Reddit and YouTube comments a lot recently, and so often the majority of them are people spouting the same memetic phrases, or even identical comments, like some kind of hive mind. I understand the social psychology behind it (feelings of belonging, showing group allegiance, etc), but it's not the way my mind's ever worked. I do find things like these test comments funny, but obviously humour's subjective, so maybe it's as funny to other people as their in-jokes would be to me. Still, I've wondered before whether to use something like this as a storytelling medium, making a website where all the accounts are written by me, but I don't know who'd be interested in such a thing... or whether there'd be any money in it.)

I've tested it quite thoroughly, so I think everything works, though let me know if you encounter any issues!

(I say, then it breaks as soon as I set up the appropriate redirects... I'm sorting some things out, so account creation is disabled for now, though I should be able to restore it shortly.)

Well, that was fun! Due to the way I'd organised the files on my site after the new version over, everything broke, and it took two hours to get it working again. At least it forced me to clean up some ancient files that'd been rotting there, unused, since like 2009.

EDIT: In fixing one bug, I created another, as is often the case, and logging in was accidentally disabled. It's fixed now though!

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