refsheet

It's time to say goodbye, and this was not an easy choice. Please forgive me.

I was thinking about the current situation regarding international legality of content moderation this morning, and it's more than I can handle.

I don't mean that to sound dismissive. I don't want it to seem like I don't care. What I mean is-- I genuinely do not know what I need to do to comply with the constant evolution of laws, and the consequences to me as the maintainer of the websit...

Moving Forward: Hosting Changes

My friends,

I have decided that the best direction forward is to focus development efforts on changing the way data is hosted and accessed within Refsheet. The plan is to divide the servers into many smaller servers that anyone within the community can host if they so choose, and to make each server invite-only. I will continue to host existing users across 13 official servers,...

Development Update - October

Now that the headache of funding the site is gone for a month, it has been slightly easier to put a little time into clarifying our path forward. 

1) I'm working on migrating the entire frontend code to something that can actually be maintained. The site was originally programmed just before some modern technology came around, so it's a hack of so many gross and ugly code patterns th...

Where we're at today.

This is a cross-post from the Forums: ( https://refsheet.net/v2/forums/support/where-we-re-at-today----3-20-2020 )

I wanted to give everyone an update on where the site is today, and the direction it's headed to ensure the site can be truly self-sufficient while I seek out new...

A satisfying round of updates!

Normally I copy/paste the changelog here and in the forums, but before the big pile of pastespam, I just wanted to say: I'm honestly really pleased with this round of updates. Rambling to follow:

I've been busy with fun projects at work and lots of crafting and costume making, but have still been grinding away at the website hoping to get some big change done that makes the rest of devel...

More Updates (01/02)

Happy new year! Here's a formal summary of everything since the last changelog, which includes more bug fixes and image handling improvements. I'll preface this by saying that I really am working to make this site not frustrating for everyone who uses it. All of your bug reports and feedback have, hopefully, been incorporated and used to improve the site.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed inp...
  2020-01-02 23:14:36 +0000 UTC View Post

Site Update - December (Long)

I'm around and working, but as usual, everything is still "in development" and hasn't been released yet. Normally I release changes as soon as I make them, but this has resulted in some pretty nasty feedback along the lines of "don't release things that aren't done".

So, while I don't have anything new deployed this month (as indicated by the orange theme still being here, wh...

In-Character Posts, Supporter Tiers, и переводы (and Translations)!

Hey everyone! It's been A Week.

There's a new feature for Patrons to play with, and that's in-character status updates on your activity feed, as well as forum replies!

There's a new standard "comment box" that I've added to the site, which has a "As:" link you can click to change who you are posting as. There is also a site-wide "Change Identity" button found under the user menu th...

Thank you. So much.

Patrons,

Thank you.

Honestly it's really hard keeping up with everything that I've been doing to make this project a reality, and lately I've been having trouble finding the motivation through the sea of poor reviews, vile comments and user demands, but in some of those pretty grumpy moments I've been able to look past it because you're here beside me.

I say "we" on...

New Cloud?

TL;DR - kube.refsheet.net is a site mirror on Google Cloud. It's a bit slower right now, but has stable image processing. Use it every once in a while so I can get testing data.

Lately I've been tweeting a lot of apology posts for downtime, especially with image processing, and I got a bit worried that it's an ongoing trend, so I decided to start migrating to another cloud prov...

Profile V2 update

The gif above says a thousand words, but I figured I'd give you folks a very quick update. As you might have noticed, we've been seeing a few outages, which I tracked to image uploads.

The old profile pages upload images directly to our application server, and they get processed there instead of on the new image servers. The end result is, if enough people start an upload at the same time...

Artist Android App?

It might not get you a discount on hotel reservations or change a flat tire, but some day the Artist Android App will help you at a con when you're sketching in people's books and need a quick way to pull up their references!

Based on the same content as the Illustrator / Photoshop extension (pending app store review on their end), the Android app will eventually render the Artist toolkit i...

Photoshop Extension Beta!

Good news, everyone! The Photoshop extension is close enough to being ready that I'll let you install it now!

Currently, it supports:

- Character search & view,
- Interactive color swatches,
- Image preview, open, and place.

The extension Should be supported on all versions of Adobe Photoshop CC. It's been tested on CC 2019. 

Photoshop Extension

Oh boy what a... month?

The bulk of the website had some backend overhauling that paved the way for some spiffy new features, and now we're back on track for building out those new character pages!

Patrons might've noticed the notification bell and chat icon in the top menu now, and while there are still some bugs, they're a feat of engineering. In tech terms: Refsheet is two React b...

<no subject> (Refsheet gets Conversations?)

Hey! Hi! Hey you! Listen!

Remember when I said "oh look we made some #infrastructure changes to #synergize our #devops" or something nerdy like that?

Well, here's another preview of some of the new features to come out of the new V2 code, which will soon be properly ready for Patrons to play with!

The gif says a thousand words. Per frame.
I'm so excited about this.

Long time no see!

First of all, super very sorry for the long radio silence. I've had my plate full with quite a few life changes, and most of the work I've been doing has been a whole bunch of background cleanup and refactoring to bring you...

Refsheet v``1.2: The Javascriptier Boogaloo!

Okay so it's not done yet, but I did a whole bunch of work during what little weekend time I had to mak...

Character Page V2 WIP

Following up on our last post about refactoring literally everything, I'm finally glad to be able to share this WIP of our new Character pages.

Some of you mentioned that you were satisfied with the current sections available, so I've prepared this profile to show the same sections you already have, as they would look rendered into the new app.

As shown in previous screenshots, t...

Code Refactor + Character Pages (V2?)

For the longest time we've been saying that we're making some changes to the Character pages, and finally we're starting to get there.

The character pages are the oldest component in our application, and when we wrote them just over a year ago, we didn't have the same design principles and processes that we have now. Because of this, it's become near-impossible to update the Character compo...

Notification Feed WIP + Bugfixes

We've been busy in every possible sense of the term, but found some time to wrap up a much-requested feature addition to the site. Previously, I mentioned our Notification system being online for browser push, and now we've expanded that to a new Notification feed.

The key feature is the read / unread state, which you can toggle using the check box (mark read) and open enve...

Image Reporting - Updated ToS

Last night we updated our Terms of Service to include Section 2.2, our Upload Policy.

Our community is built on the creative talent of each individual contributing, and we encourage members to showcase their own unique characters and artwork. This includes all aspects of our site, but most important, our image uploads.

Our Image uploads showcase a wide variety of talent, and we at Re...

Browser Notifications!

Hey friends!

I'm still plunking away at the proper notifications system, but for now, enjoy the lightweight browser push notifications.

They'll only stick around for about 20 seconds, and right now work on one machine, BUT, this might help you catch some stray forum replies on an active thread you started!

Currently, the notification types are:

- Comment on your image
- Fav...

"Temporary" Email Notification System?

Hey friends!

So, as it turns out, the notification system is complicated and I want to make it nice and friendly and super efficient before loading in tens of thousands of items. However, this will take a whole bunch of time and I don't want to keep people waiting!

I can, however, slowly roll notifications out backwards. That is, starting with emails, then going to browser push notif...

New Account Settings / Patreon Management

Hey all!

Sorry for the silence, the end of the year is a pretty busy time for everyone and I hadn't had much time to sit down and get to work here.

I just wrapped up the new Settings page on your dashboard, which will replace the pop-up modal on the user page and begin the process of moving more of your management tools to the account dashboard.

2018-01-15 00:28:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Activity Feed Update!

Hey there!

First: Oh my goodness, thank you so much for all your support!

Second: I'm going to try and globally launch the activity feed tomorrow, and my goodness was this a fun and glorious project. I do hope it proves useful (and pretty).

This will, in the future, serve as your main hub for managing your account as well, and I'm contemplating putting a character index here so you...

Patrons, I need to match you!

Hey Patrons!

I just went through and matched up as many of you to your Refsheet accounts as I can, but I still see 5 patrons in the system that I can't find a matching user account for. If you don't have Patron access on Refsheet and you should, please send a Feedback request using the form on site, or message me here. Include the email address on your Patreon account, and the email address...

News Feed Progress

Hey there!

I'm super excited to share the progress shots of the news feed. If you're a Patron, you can see all these live on the site! (If you aren't a Patron, you'll just see the home page.)

So far, you'll see news items for:

- New Images
- New Characters
- New Comments
- New Forum Threads

It's also configured to group together similar events, so if a use...

Explore Images!

This is a quick update for you guys, but I wanted something to do before heading off to the last weekend at the Renaissance Festival, so I did a thing.

Much like last weekend when I spent ~3 hours making Image comments a thing (go ahead, chat away!), I figured I would do another 4am deploy before leaving my computer for 3 days!

So here I present to you, Explore Images! You've got a c...

FORUMS?! WHAT!

HEY! PEOPLE!

The all caps means I'm very excited!

While we're far from feature complete fancy launchy stuff, I'm very happy to tell you that there is a basic concept of discussion boards live on Refsheet!

Of course, you guys, being my wonderful lovely Patreon beans, get first access to all my (less buggy) fancy new features. Any non patrons that try to get to the forums will g...

Coming Soon(tm): Forums

Hey guys!

So I've got a LOT of new features that I'd want to get done, but the one that stood out as a good way to set up some useful general-purpose interactions on the site was Forums.

Admittedly, I'm using the World of Warcraft forums as a loose idea for what to do here. The core features I appreciate from this feature planning is the ability to post as your characters, which faci...

What do you love about Refsheet?

Discussion time!

Among other things, I'm starting to piece together some more promotional materials and re-do our landing pages to better explain what Refsheet does and can do.

I'd also like to know what I should focus on in development, so I'm asking you my fine and fabulous patrons and supporters for some help explaining how Refsheet helps you and what you get out of it most.

2017-08-02 22:34:35 +0000 UTC View Post