Development Notes

1. Introduction

Over the years of developing Xu-Fu's Pet Guide, many ideas and suggestions accumulated. I have tried a few different tools like Trello or even Confluence to keep track of them together with my development notes, but these tools are way too clunky for this small project. And they all lack transparency.
This section aims to solve both problems: all my notes in one place, and making them visible to you, the hopefully curious reader!

You will find this article changing constantly. If a feature or bug suddenly vanishes from this list, it usually means that it weng live :-)

2. Clean-up Tasks

- Detail Strat check stopped at ID 26
- Check script for account deletion on strategies. Does it work properly?
- update pet collection import to use PetUser instead of Pets table
- remove rematch functionality from celestial tournament
- remove create_rematch function, make sure it's not used anywhere else anymore
- 1590 strategy - problem with tooltip of the pets

3. Bugs

- Wailing Critters => Pet table when not logged in shows different pets than when logged in. Why!?
- PO file on Home.php => title for "Article creators" is hardcoded
- message when comment reaches gold status working or not?
- gold comment trigger will trigger email in the language of that person who made the deciding upvote. Not the person who made the comment. com_vote in ajax
- in profiles, btag and discord can be way too long. needs a way to display it properly
- comment previews on landing page show an incorrect time (yesterdays comments are shown as today)

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4. Project: Clever Alternatives (10%)

There should not be a limit to the amount of alternatives saved for any given fight. They should not have a fixed order either. The order should be dynamic and follow a logic that could include user settings, if the pets are in your collection, strategy upvotes, favourites, amount of pageviews, records of successful attempts or other factors.
The interface should use AJAX to reduce loading times and give a clear preview of the pets used.

4.1 Logic behind the priority system.

The order in which strategies are shown will be set by 4 factors. Each factor supercedes the next. From top to bottom:

1. Favourited by user
If you set a strategy as favourite, it will be shown on top always

2. Pets missing from collection
The sorting will prioritize based on how many pets from the strategy you do not have in your saved collection:
No pets missing > one pet missing > two pets missing > three pets missing

3. Tags - optional
In the user settings, you can set the order of importance for all tags. The higher the tag is, the more points it awards and decides on the sorting within this factor

4. Rating and Favourites
Ratings and Favourites are calculated together into one single score. The calculation is:
- One favourite counts exactly the same as one 5* rating
- The stars are transformed into the numerical sequence -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
- The average is calculated and multiplied by a factor that is determined on the amount of votes+ratings:
1-10 ratings: Factor = 0.5
11-20 ratings: Factor = 0.8
20+ ratings: Factor = 1
This calculation makes sure that a single 5* vote on a strategy is not counted more important than an average of 4.8* from a large amount of voters, for example.
Likewise, a strategy that received many below average votes will be considered worse than one that received only a single 1* rating.

The first three factors only apply to registered users. If you are visiting without a user account, only factor 4 decides on the sorting.

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5. Project: User Strategies (5%)

Users should be able to create and add their own strategies.
Todos: Once pet selection is active via AJAX, add function that checks on the Tags and updates the auto-tags directly. Then remove tag-checker from battletable.php as it's not needed there anymore.

6. Open Tasks:

- Editing option for comments
- Editing options for the individual pets
- editing options for strategy steps
- "My Strategies" page for strat creators. show # visits, comments, votes and favs of own strategies.
- Info section explaining how everything works

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7. Project: Pet Cards (0%)

Xu-Fu already has a database of all available pets with their skills, stats and info. This could be used to replace wowhead tooltips with built-in Xu-Fu pet tooltips that show more details about each pet.

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8. Project: Blog 2.0 (0%)

The blog should support different topics and different users posting updates. The blog should be sortable by topic / date. It should show a quick overview and should be searchable. There should be the option to go to a single blog post and view that in full screen.

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9. Miscellaneous Tasks, Bugs and Suggestions

9.1 Suggestions

By Irayna: Add XP Values to link list on left (like EU/US appearances of Menagerie). To see which fights give more XP than usual (espcially for legion world quests)
By Flatluigi: 21.03.2018: minor sort of request: for the pets that don't have a level/can't battle, take them out of the calculations for number of pets at max level/at rare quality
By Remte: I'd like to have fresh comment responses notifications cleared out when I visit them independently.
By Panseit: message system, put an icon next to the user profile icon when new messages are there.
By Irayna: When viewing other peoples collection, add a column for your own pets to compare the collections.
By Remte: A notice on the landing page when Squirt day is up on EU or US with a quick link
By Prudentius: Setting for each user to have child comments sort ASC or DESC (depending on preference)
By Remte: When substitute finder is used, the description of the fight changes pets aswell.
By Remte: Allowing non-family substitutes in non-specific fights

9.2 Tasks and To-Dos

- add protocol entries to admin pages
- Petimport - adm_petimport.php:
- check at beginning if user pets are not verified with "cageable or not" and go through them.
- user pets: option to set cageable or not
- Spells: entire API import missing
- battle tag in user profiles needs EU / US switch
- my comments section sometimes does not filter the comments correctly
- option to claim old comments
- crawl of pet collection: if a character is saved, use that one. If that saved char is not available anymore, crawl all characters from bnet again and pick most recently active one and save that one.

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10. Possible Future Projects

- SEO
- comment-section: show more info about the threads in tooltip? maybe the top comment + 2 or 3 additional ones with [..] and a "X more messages" ?
- comment-section: for "Votes", maybe add together all votes from the thread from your comments? Otherwise a +50 subcomment might be hidden because it's not the first one
- Email notifications
- Tools: Top X pets of all strategies
- "Your profile has been viewed X times."
- Add friend (what effects?)
- specific user icons and backgrounds for admins / mods /translators
- sticky comments
- user setting how many comments to display per page (currently set site wide)
- better brute force protection (pw reset)
- rework all tooltips to use tooltipster
- comment moderation features directly on page, including display of reports
- allow bnet connected accounts to unlink from bnet
- comment statistics (how many, how often per month, average upvotes etc.)
- Flavour growls:
"your collection was updated and you got these new pets in the last week!"
after X days of registration, still no password / battle.net connected - send reminder message "hey do this for x"

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11. Finished Projects

11.1 Project: Article Editor (finished April 16, 2018)

The page hosts many different articles and supports localization into 9 languages. This editor makes it easy for other users to add, edit or translate articles.
It is fully integrated into the user system, UAC, and allows on-page editing.

11.2 Project: Battletable 2.0 (finished June 02, 2018)

The battle tables were the first thing created on Xu-Fu. They are mostly static and not up to the standards of the current page.
This project was to fully re-create them, to integrate the user system, user collections and to add many more features such as breeds, coordinates, new Rematch formatting, an automated substitute finder and the option to record your attempts to make the strategy more accurate through crowd intelligence.

The substitute finder uses this logic:
no requirements => all substitutes are fine, based on skills and family
only a breed => creator pet, only show the selected breed(s). For substitutes, ignore breeds
only a stat => use the stat to determine which creator pet breed is OK. and use the stat for substitutes and their breeds
breed and stats => for the creators pet, only show the breed he activated. for substitutes, use the stat to show them or not.