Idea: short-form quest link

[neilb]

Probably not worth doing, but it's occurred to me a couple of times, so thought I'd mention it. You could add a pseudo URL type quest: to make it easier to link to other quests in comments. So I could write:

[berekuk's quest](quest:512203d8e05a54a63a000022)

This would be more useful if quests had a shorter ID :-)

[berekuk]

This would be more useful if quests had a shorter ID

This probably won't happen, since ids are just MongoDB ids. And also, potentially, auto-increment ids are a bad idea because they don't scale well. Which means you still have to copy-paste the id, and I don't see much benefit of implementing the syntax you suggest.

What would be good, in my opinion, is to automatically substitute quest url with a named link, so you don't have to write [...].

[neilb]

Yeah, that's why I thought "probably not worth doing".

Assuming you're thinking of a generic format for the link, rather than using the title, since some quests have loooong titles?

[berekuk]

Actually, yes, I thought about just using the title. Maybe shorten it to ... if it's too long. And style it a bit differently from other links.

[neilb]

Or: take the first contentful N words from the title and use that in the link, and put the full title in a tooltip ("Berekuk's quest 'take over the social todo world and become a bazillionaire'"), so the link would be:

[Berekuk's 'social todo' quest](...)

You've probably got enough data that you could see whether this approach might work. If you dump all the titles in a text file and email it to me, I'll have a play.

[berekuk]

Interesting idea! (But very low-priority, tbh, considering the amount of other stuff to implement.)

You can get all quest titles here: http://play-perl.org/api/quest

Here's a one-liner for you to dump all titles: perl -MJSON -MLWP::Simple -E 'say $_->{name} for @{ decode_json(get("http://play-perl.org/api/quest")) }'.

[neilb]

Ta. I've written version 0 of a quest-title-summarizer. I'll save it for sofa hacking, as I should get back to work.

Thought of a better approach though: when people are entering a (new) quest title, show another box which is labelled "short quest title". If you don't type in it, then it shows the automatically shortened version of the quest title. Users can type their own short title if they want, which would disable the auto feature. The shortened title would have a hard character limit.

I know: very low priority :-)

[berekuk]

I consider quest's title to be the short title, and will probably enforce hard limits on title length after implementing quest description field.