Improving Highscore Formatting

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About an hour ago I quickly dropped by and changed the formatting of the main post.

If anyone’s got a minute to provide some feedback about the change, here’s a poll:

What is your opinion on the formatting change?
  • It looks better, we should change other highscore topics to use table formatting too.
  • It looks worse, change it back to the simpler formatting.
  • I have no strong opinion either way.
  • Other (please specify)…

0 voters

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I’ve closed the poll because after 8 votes (which is a fair chunk of active members) the results are almost unanimous.

I’ll try to go through and do some formatting edits here and there when I have a few minutes to spare. If other people with editing rights wish to join in, they should feel free to do so. Either way the edits shouldn’t bump the topic.

For the sake of consistency, here’s a few short guidelines:

  • Tables should use markdown table syntax
  • Tables should have the following three headings
    • “#”
      • This column represents the player’s ‘position’ on the scoreboard, so it should always begin at 1 (first place) and increase with each step down the table
    • “Score”
    • “Player”
  • Tables should have a markdown heading above them (usually a ‘h2’ (##) heading) because headings generate page anchors, which makes it possible to link directly to a particular scoreboard
  • There may be multiple scoreboards per topic if a game has more than one

Links to w3schools for people who aren’t familiar with markdown:

Lastly, I’ve forked this off into a new thread to avoid hijacking a game’s highscore thread any more than necessary.

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I missed the poll but this is really a nice formatting update. I like it :smiley: thanks for pushing for this. If I can find any spare time I’ll try and help out with any highscore pages missed. Holiday weekend so may be tough to grab time heh.

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All highscore topics should be wiki’s so anyone can edit them to add their scores.

I really like this design idea, and honestly didn’t use it initially because I didn’t know discourse supported Markdown at the time.

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There were less highscore topics than I expected (only about 15 or so),
so I just did them all in one sitting over lunch.
Hopefully I didn’t miss any.

Other remarks:

  • I noticed some topics had the ‘highscores’ tag and others didn’t, so I added the tag to all the topics that were missing it, though I do think that’s slightly redundant.
  • One topic’s title had different capitalisation to the others so I tried to fix it, but for some reason it just wouldn’t work. I don’t know if it means the title editor does a case insensitive comparison or if there’s some other reason why it won’t change.
  • One topic hadn’t been made a wiki, so I fixed that.

I cut down on the tedium with a bit of regex magic to translate the old format into the new format.
Search: [ ]*(\d+)\s*:\s*([^ ]+)\s*\(\s*@?\s*(.+)\s*\)[ ]*
Replace: | $1 | $2 | @$3 |

The regex had to be very forgiving to account for spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces, lack of @ in some entries and different formatting of some scores (one game at least has times instead of scores).

Lastly, here’s a template for future highscore pages:

# Highscores

<!-- Optional: Images, description and instructions go here. -->

## Gamemode 1 Name

<!-- If the game doesn't have multiple game modes, use the game's name instead. -->

<!-- Add and delete table entries as appropriate. -->

| # | Score   | Player   |
|---|---------|----------|
| 1 | Score 1 | Player 1 (`@`-mention) |
| 2 | Score 2 | Player 2 (`@`-mention) |
| 3 | Score 3 | Player 3 (`@`-mention) |

## Gamemode 2 Name

| # | Score   | Player   |
|---|---------|----------|
| 1 | Score 1 | Player 1 (`@`-mention) |
| 2 | Score 2 | Player 2 (`@`-mention) |
| 3 | Score 3 | Player 3 (`@`-mention) |

(I wonder if Discourse has a ‘template topic’ feature?)

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This is a really good template, thanks @Pharap !

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