Hey,

I'm a GM here, and I want to filter the threads in my game by group (ie group 1 vs group 2) using the new-ish filtering system. However, I can't understand it or get it to work.

Questions:

a) is this designed to only work for players?
b) is it designed not to work for archived threads?

If it's supposed to work on both GMs and archived threads, then I'm obivously an idiot so can someone point me to a really simple explanation of how to use the feature?

Also, not sure if this is related, but the 'change filter' option does nothing when I press it.
This message was last edited by the user at 10:48, Tue 16 Feb 2016.

Could you clarify what you are doing that doesn't work, because it seems to be working perfectly for me.

Sure. I go to this game [game link removed] in which I am the GM.

The threads are all separated into Group 1 or Group 0. Many of them are archived.

I press the filter button (in the top after 'Topic (all Groups)')

I select Group 1 only checkbox in the resulting popup, and press OK/set filter.

Now I still see all my group 0 archived threads. The Group 0 non-archived thread is no longer visible, so it has had some effect. However the effect is not obvious or predictable, hence the query.

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Note: when I filter threads in a game in which I am NOT a GM, the process is totally different, and it works perfectly. The box that opens is different also. It's only my own games with archived threads (ie precisely the places where I need to filter threads the most!) where the filtering appears to break.
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 03:41, Wed 17 Feb 2016.

I actually had to archive a thread to follow your steps, but I got the same result. Hmmm... That does make the filter option less than useful if you archive a lot of threads, I see your point.

Well, if nothing else we know it works that way for both of us. Not sure if it's how it was designed to work, or something about the archived tag gets pulled into all sorts, have to wait for someone who knows the inside of the system.

Archived threads are all, technically, part of the same publicly visible Group.  The act of Archiving a thread makes it visible to everybody (and the note about which Group it was in is just that - a note to let people know why they couldn't see it before).

So filtering Archived threads won't work, as they're all part of the same Group.
This message was last edited by the user at 04:15, Wed 17 Feb 2016.

What if I am not filtering to find publicly visible threads?

Well that's a shame. I was hoping that was not the case. Thanks for answering my query, and perhaps filtering archived threads might be added to some later development of rpol, as I'm sure I'm not the only rpol user who has a whole load of threads, lots of them archived, and who'd like to filter them.

So apparently what happens is that archived groups are considered part of all threads? That seems... wonky. Can we discuss a change in that?

Not sure why it would seem wonky - the whole point of archiving a thread is that it then becomes visible to everybody, no matter what Groups they have access to (or even if they aren't members of the game.

But you can discuss a change in it if you want.  That's what the RPoL Development forum is for.

Yeah, I thought the purpose behind archiving threads was to make it so they could be viewed by everyone in the game and/or used as reference/background material for new players coming into the game.  If you're going to filter them, then why archive?

Granted, I'm not in a game where I'm archiving threads, or even running multiple groups (at least, not that I know of...well, there is one game that has multiple groups, but it's basically being run as three or four different games taking place on the same world).  So there may be advantages to archiving that I'm not aware of...

But, y'know, if you want them readable by everyone, and still want to be able to filter them, just assign them (and all the players) to their own group.  Since they aren't archived and therefore aren't public, you can still filter them...but if you made the would-be-archived threads all, say, Group M, and assigned all the players to Group M, they could all see them (except for private lines and such), like they would an archived version.

Never realized that was the point of archiving, but just because it's available to everyone to read doesn't mean it should caught by everything being filtered. They are available to everyone on the game home screen, that should be sufficient. The whole concept of filtering is to narrow things down to just what you want, not just what I want plus what everyone can see.

I'd be in that - to my mind it'd be good to have another filter on the list for "archived threads", purely so they don't get caught up in the net if you want to look at group 1 threads only (or if you wanted to show only the archived threads).

Someone should suggest that ...  ;>