# Future planning/musing **URL:** \ **Category:** Roll20\ **Created:** [November 5, 2018, 11:33pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634 "2018-11-05T23:33:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/dave/32/6344_2.png) [@Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/Dave)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 10:55pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/81 "2018-11-16T22:55:22Z")
The Menagerie are our good luck charm. I say go for it. ![Image result for make it so gif](https://forum-menagerie-team-assets.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/original/2X/8/863f0240291ede8f5140ae7e25efdb8b5c481e70.gif) author: \*\*\* Dave H. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971526](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971526) ---
**Author:** ![Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/dave/32/6344_2.png) [@Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/Dave)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:13pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/82 "2018-11-16T23:13:02Z")
> _[Bill G.](https://app.roll20.net/users/118980) said:_ > > Here’s my work items for the forum. If you’d like to see a feature that’s not in the list already, let me know: > > [https://trello.com/b/d7F3j5k0/forum](https://trello.com/b/d7F3j5k0/forum) 1. Cut-paste of images (vs image URLs) into Discourse kinda-sorta works. It converts them into .jpeg files (observed with both .gif and .png), which is fine for static images, but makes cut-pasting of clever animated gifs more bulky. (Some might consider this a feature already in the product). This can be gotten around by pasting in URLs, but that’s sometimes a lengthy process. Priority=LOW 2. You indicated that pulling in the markdown-it as a plug-in for discourse would cover a lot of sins, so I’ll wait for that to see what it does. 3. Configuration item: topics can only be edited within 4 hours of initial posting. Unless there are performance issues around that, I’d like to see it removed. Priority=MEDIUM More as I think of it. author: \*\*\* Dave H. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971566) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:20pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/83 "2018-11-16T23:20:19Z")
**Image cut-and-paste** : I’m not sure what the difference is between “cut-paste of images via URL” and “pasting in URLs”? To me they sound like the same operation. Can you describe what you’re doing? **Markdown-it** : this is actually a plugin-aware Markdown formatter, and there’s two plugins for it that I intend to incorporate. Specifically, this will enable hyperlinking of hashtags in posts, and allow you to add styling to elements in Markdown, e.g. to float images right, center paragraphs, and so on. This will still be somewhat manual, but should give you the tools to do funny formatting if you think it’s important enough. This will probably take awhile for me to get right, though. And if you’re hoping for something to work that I didn’t just list, you’re out of luck, so let me know what else there is. **Topic editing** : the time was set to 86400 seconds (1 day). I disabled this setting, please let me know if that did the trick. author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971577](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971577) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:27pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/84 "2018-11-16T23:27:17Z")
Or I misread what you said about images. Let me look into it. author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971586](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971586) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:45pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/85 "2018-11-16T23:45:39Z")
Okay, so: I picked a GIF at random from my “reaction gifs” collection, it’s this one: [https://i.imgur.com/0NWbSL1.gif](https://forum.menagerie.team/uploads/short-url/xcL5HjnMH3HYK2ZTKbGrX3dj3u3.gif) ![](https://forum-menagerie-team-assets.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/original/2X/e/e8b8fafe3a78160341d4ca0b64c121a60c98466b.gif) I copied this from Chrome and pasted into Discourse, sure enough it’s a JPEG. Is it _just_ Discourse? Let’s find out. Chrome, right-click \> Copy Image, paste into GIMP. One pasted layer, it just grabbed one frame of the image. Copy Image, paste into Gmail, which I know for a fact supports animated images. Same thing, a static frame. I find this page: [https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/21bh5d/how\_come\_chrome\_cant\_copypaste\_a\_gif/](https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/21bh5d/how_come_chrome_cant_copypaste_a_gif/) While not the most coherent post available, the gist is “the OS clipboard mechanism doesn’t work like this”, so it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to copy an image directly. You can still copy-paste the URL, save and upload the image, and so on - in fact, pasting the image URL directly into the editor worked just fine for me, and was as fast as copying the image. TL;DR: this is probably not going to work anywhere, and it’s probably not something I can fix in Discourse. author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971642](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971642) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:53pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/86 "2018-11-16T23:53:04Z")
I haven’t heard back from Margie or James, but I do remember that one factor was their access (or lack of it) to the forums. However much they _prefer_ to participate, it’s important to me that they have the option. So hopefully reply-by-email and similar features will help out there. But if there’s anything else we can do to make it more accessible, please let me know. author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971663](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971663) ---
**Author:** ![Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/dave/32/6344_2.png) [@Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/Dave)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2018, 11:53pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/87 "2018-11-16T23:53:43Z")
**Image cut-and-paste** - The difference between (a) “Copy image” and (b) “Copy image address” when right-clicking on an image in the browser, then pasting the result into a Discourse edit window. (a) When pasted in, Discourse auto-uploads the image (as Roll20 does), but converts it to a JPEG of the file (even if it was a GIF or a PNG; this appears to be true for all uploaded images). This is okay, but breaks animation. (If we are working a personal domain, we might not want to be doing this anyway.) (b) When pasted in, Discourse displays the linked image. The problem is, finding the good URL to copy can take extra steps (if it works at all) under Google’s image search. It’s a low priority thing, at worst. I can just find a usable URL (i.e., (b)) and paste it in; it’s just a matter of changing my workflow. **Markdown-it** : It’s probably the “styling to elements in Markdown” I’m most interested in, and the examples given all sound of use. I’ll hold off further until I actually run into something I want to do that I can’t figure out how to make work. As a side note, it looks like the Discourse Markdown is the “Commonmark” spec, which has an official cheat sheet here: [https://commonmark.org/help/](https://commonmark.org/help/) **Topic Editing** : I’m still trying to figure out why it was saying 4 hours, but now it seems to work without any such text. If this causes performance problems, let’s talk. Thanks, and thanks for being all Admin on this. author: \*\*\* Dave H. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971665](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971665) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 12:05am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/88 "2018-11-17T00:05:35Z")
A feature I haven’t mentioned is that Discourse has a background job. When a post has an external image link, Discourse will go fetch it from that URL, save it locally, and update the post to use the new local copy. So even if you’re pasting image URLs into the site, if that image goes away later it won’t matter. author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971688](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6971688) ---
**Author:** ![doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/doyce/32/15_2.png) [@doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/doyce)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 4:54am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/89 "2018-11-17T04:54:37Z")
We’re on two different topics in here right now, but on the subject of games… [https://alasdairstuart.com/2018/11/16/after-the-war-starfleets-worst-day/](https://alasdairstuart.com/2018/11/16/after-the-war-starfleets-worst-day/) I dunno. I backed it. author: Doyce T. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6972328](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6972328) ---
**Author:** ![Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/dave/32/6344_2.png) [@Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/Dave)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 6:10am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/90 "2018-11-17T06:10:04Z")
> _[Bill G.](https://app.roll20.net/users/118980) said:_ > > So even if you’re pasting image URLs into the site, if that image goes away later it won’t matter. Nice. author: \*\*\* Dave H. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6972430) ---
**Author:** ![doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/doyce/32/15_2.png) [@doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/doyce)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 3:46pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/91 "2018-11-17T15:46:00Z")
> _[\*\*\* Dave H.](https://app.roll20.net/users/418114) said:_ > > **Topic Editing** : I’m still trying to figure out why it was saying 4 hours, but now it seems to work without any such text. If this causes performance problems, let’s talk. Actually, the 4-hour thing was over on Vanilla (which I also shut off). author: Doyce T. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973020) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 6:53pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/92 "2018-11-17T18:53:57Z")
### The Doors Are Open [https://forum.menagerie.team/](https://forum.menagerie.team/) - If you are creating a category, do not put tags into the “required tags” configuration. This doesn’t pre-populate a list of tags or anything, it says ONLY these tags can appear. - I sent Dave and Doyce invitation emails because I helpfully forgot to harvest the list of users off the scratch server, good job me. I verified that new user registration works (but needs staff approval for now), so ping me if you aren’t getting service fast enough. author: Bill G. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973384) ---
**Author:** ![insomn14](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/insomn14/32/5949_2.png) [@insomn14](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/insomn14)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 6:59pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/93 "2018-11-17T18:59:33Z")
> - I sent Dave and Doyce invitation emails because I helpfully forgot to harvest the list of users off the scratch server, good job me. I verified that new user registration works (but needs staff approval for now), so ping me if you aren’t getting service fast enough. Registration email worked, but now I’m waiting approval. author: Mike url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973394) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 7:01pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/94 "2018-11-17T19:01:35Z")
![](https://www.japanator.com/elephant//ul/user/4-4753-15791-AiAGaoGaiGarFINAL08avisnapshot350620100723011116jpg-620x.jpg) Approved! author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973400](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973400) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2018, 7:36pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/95 "2018-11-17T19:36:54Z")
I took the list of proposed game systems (not necessarily campaigns) and plugged them in over here: [https://forum.menagerie.team/t/proposed-game-list/21](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/proposed-game-list/21) author: Bill G. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973491](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6973491) ---
**Author:** ![garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/garrett/32/3_2.png) [@garrett](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/garrett)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2018, 4:20am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/96 "2018-11-18T04:20:21Z")
> _[\*\*\* Dave H.](https://app.roll20.net/users/418114) said:_ > > I figured as much. I’d certainly be interested in some sort of extraction tool (or, for that matter, just dealing with a big extract and pulling out the stuff I want). I do NOT want this to be any major effort on your part, Bill, unless you already have similar intent. > > I also want to be respectful of other folks’ stuff. And now back to this again! Between shopping trips, acid reflux attacks, and other holiday activity today, I took a few minutes and scraped the site again into a single JSON file. I’ll be feeding that to pandoc in a few minutes to turn the Roll20 HTML into RTF/Markdown/etc., but I think I can do one better: Why is Gamora? Wait, no, let me try again. Discourse has an API, and you can create new posts through it. Is there any interest in plugging Roll20 forum content in there? It would be pretty easy from where I’m sitting. author: Bill G. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6974629) ---
**Author:** ![doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/doyce/32/15_2.png) [@doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/doyce)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2018, 4:30am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/97 "2018-11-18T04:30:03Z")
I’m all for it. Though the markdown file would be cool also. author: Doyce T. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6974646](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6974646) ---
**Author:** ![Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/dave/32/6344_2.png) [@Dave](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/Dave)\ **Post date:** [November 18, 2018, 5:49am UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/98 "2018-11-18T05:49:42Z")
Having it available over in Discourse would be fine. I’d eventually like to have a separate Markdown file just to have a personal copy. That said … the campaign (and submissions) aren’t over yet. So … author: \*\*\* Dave H. url: [https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6974789](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6974789) ---
**Author:** ![doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/user_avatar/forum.menagerie.team/doyce/32/15_2.png) [@doyce](https://forum.menagerie.team/u/doyce)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2018, 7:01pm UTC](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634/99 "2018-11-30T19:01:30Z")
> - Also, did I mention I love [goofy sci-fi adventures](https://youtu.be/ujC4W8hJ4mg)? Campaign soundtrack starts with 1612. [https://youtu.be/jRHQPG1xd9o](https://youtu.be/jRHQPG1xd9o) author: Doyce T. url: [Community Forums: Future planning/musing | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop](https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/7006230) [Previous page](https://forum.menagerie.team/t/future-planning-musing/634.md?page=4)