[Feature] Allowing slashes in front of commands other then 'me'

Bugs & Features
#1

I’ve run into this a couple of times myself now, and can’t think of a (technical) reason why this is, nor do I found anyone else talking about it so far:
For 99% of the commands that I saw, they need to be posted without the / in front of them, the one exception being /me (the alias of pose)

On quite a lot of other chat-type sites, whispering someone is done with /w and since I’m used to those, I usually start a whisper (especially when I want to type quickly) with /w some name => .... only to see it is red, having me pause, think, remember, and fix the issue. It isn’t a big / long problem, and probably gets better with time, but it is still something that is bothering me a little at times, slowing down the RP at times, and possibly make things (a tiny bit) less accessible for newer members.

Now, the basic solution of making aliases for all commands to also include a slash-leading variant, would probably be quite a work, especially since any new alias or command would also need to include that.
Because of this, I would personally suggest a solution that would be more generic and at the same time (hopefully) easier to implement which is to, when the first character of an input is a / (or a \ and maybe some other symbols like space?), to have the processor ignore that first character and continue processing the 2nd to Xnd characters like normal (and if it isn’t just process like it is now already).
The only other thing that you would have to do, is change the /me alias of pose (internally at least) to me so it keeps working :wink:

Personally, I can’t find any other reason the slash would have to be kept in-use, as I doubt there are any slash-leading commands that have a different result than the non-slash variant, that would just be bad design IMO, but if I’m overlooking something, please do clue me in.

1 Like
#2

What I don’t quite get is why /me is there. It’s a holdover from IRC as best I can tell. It always seemed a bit odd to have that one specific thing. Then again, a lot of chat clients like Discord and ye oldies going back to the AIM/MSN days use it.

#3

The idea behind systems that use slash commands is that by default, they assume everything you type is going to be text to chat, because that’s the entire point of the exercise; they’re either chat systems with no real geography, or games where most navigation are done outside the chat window. The slash is needed to identify something as a command.

In mucks, MUDs, and the like, they were originally designed with a view toward being multiplayer interactive fiction of one flavor or another (Infocom games and the like, to name the best known). There are rooms to navigate, and in most things older than Wolfery, that navigation is by text commands; there are objects to pick up, carry, and use, and, for MUDs, mobs to kill and spells to cast or whatnot. The command paradigm reflects the additional possibilities available.

As Windchaser says, though, the /me alias for pose is an odd one out, and it’s not so much that there’s a command indicator that only works for this one thing, as the command processor has likely been told that there’s this one command that just happens to be “/me”, presumably for the sake of people used to using IRC, Slack, Discord, Second Life, and likely a big double handful of MMOs.

#4

Regardless of the history of why some systems use / in front of their commands and others don’t, it does seem pretty reasonable to me to support ‘/w’ as another alias for whisper. It’d be weird to change the primary behavior, but… by and large, we’ve been pretty willing to add helpful aliases for the various ways people’s fingers have already learned to type intentions.

#5

I think more than anything, no one has requested slash commands yet. And as said, unless there’s some technical debt making it difficult, just ignoring leading / or \ (or whatever character folks want to use) characters in a line would work fairly well to let everyone who’s mind immediately starts a command with one of them keep their muscle memory, then just replacing the /me command with simply me.

#6

The /me command is literally an alias for pose, as the input parser for wolfery does not rely on a prefix to specify that it is a command.
It is there to provide some familiarity for users coming from other ecosystems, and whisper / page and similar commands aren’t prefixed normally.

I don’t think it really needs to be classified as a problem, nor do I think a globbed “ignore” for / is good for future potential development. (Such as out of band commands at some point, for example)