FrontierNav Weekly: 10th February 2020

Text Attachments

To progress the "Wiki", I've introduced text attachments. Text attachments, like image attachments, represent text files that you can upload. In the future, the text can be entered and uploaded through FrontierNav rather than requiring you to upload files.

Right now, you can manually add an overview Text Attachment Property to any Entity Type and it will render it as basic markdown on the Entity Overview page.

An Alternative to Text Attachments

After implementing text attachments, I didn't really like it. As mentioned before, it's too arbritary and prone to editorialisation. Something I want to avoid polluting the main database with.

Instead, I've been thinking about a different solution. Rather than having a single "Wiki" page, individuals should be able to create their own guides and link them to specific Entities. These guides would not be in the main database, they'll be in the user database like the forums and completion tracking are.

This would allow anyone to contribute without having to go through the stricter Merge Request progress. To add to this, the features required to make these guides would be useful across FrontierNav, as they're essentially powered up forum posts.

Email Link Login

Over time, FrontierNav will be moving away from social network logins. The main reason is because social networks are constantly changing their privacy policies and I'm constantly having to keep up with them. It's tedious to managed so many integrations and it just keeps growing. There's always the risk of people losing access to their accounts if any of the integrations stops working. This is especially worse for Twitter as they don't even provide an email to use for account recovery.

So, you can now login by providing just your email. A login link is sent to it to login. Pretty simple. Not as convenient as a one-click OAuth login, but since FrontierNav keeps you logged in, it's not a constant annoyance.

I'm avoiding Email/Password logins because it's a huge responsibility to store salted and hashed passwords and deal with hacked accounts.

It's Not A Back Button

I noticed a lot of people use the FrontierNav logo on the top-left as a back button. However, it's a home button. People would press it, realise they went to the wrong place, go back and press something else. To save RAM, FrontierNav cleans up data when going back to the main homepage so this user flow is not only wrong, but it also wastes resources.

So now, when navigating a game, the top-left navigation item is the game's homepage rather than FrontierNav's. When on the game's homepage, it changes back to the FrontierNav logo and takes you to the main homepage.

The consequence of this is a loss of branding, but I can always add branding elsewhere in the future (like the bottom-left).

User Library

To progress user libraries and allow users to add their own games, I've made some minor improvements to how libraries are stored. Libraries can now be sorted and filtered by status (i.e. 'playing', 'completed', etc.).

Activity Timeline

Almost forgot to mention, there's now an activity timeline to see what people are up to on FrontierNav. Activities include things like adding games to their library, posting on the forum and creating merge requests.

I have not made it public yet as the timeline does not include any activity before it was implemented so it's a bit empty.

This will be intergrated into Discord somewhere down the line for easier access and notifications.

Thanks for reading.