A place to discuss casemates offers including splitting orders.
Will update the first post with more information as needed.
Kickstarter
Transition Guide: Wine.Woot forums to Casemates forums
31Happy New Year everyone! As of today Wine.Woot has been shut down and there’s many of you transitioning over here to Casemates.
I’ve wrote previously about how this is basically the third generation of forum software we’ve built but I thought a little transition guide could help folks make the adjustment.
“Topics” instead of “threads”
Wine.Woot broke “threads” up across four different “forums” (Woot Wines, World of Woot Wine, Gatherings, and Everything But Woot).
Casemates allows “topics” to be placed in a category (deals, gatherings, polls, and possibly more to come). The difference here is subtle but it allows us to present topics across all categories in a single, consolidated list (which is the default view) while still allowing filtering by clicking on the category selector.
“Comments” and “replies” instead of “posts”
Wine.Woot forums were basic collections of “posts” underneath a thread.
Casemates has a richer hierarchy where topics are collections of “comments” and each comment itself can contain collections of “replies”. We find this helps keep the overall conversation “on topic” when a comment warrants further discussion rather than letting a single comment hijack the entire thread.
Display mode
Wine.Woot only allowed you to view threads as a chronological list of comments. In order to view the most recent posts you first needed to navigate to the thread and paginate to the place you last left off without any help to show you which posts were new since your last visit.
By default, Casemates shows the 10 newest comments, the 10 newest replies in each comment, and all unread comments and replies since your last visit. You have the ability to quickly expand the topic to view the other comments and replies.
Unread comments and replies have a gray border on the right side to indicate it’s a new post since your last visit.
By default, comments are sorted chronologically but you can also sort them by most likes.
The display mode settings can be tweaked in your account settings and you can even revert back to pagination mode if you’re some weirdo who thinks the Wine.Woot pagination mode is still superior.
Markdown instead of BBCode
Perhaps the largest change to get used to is the change in text formatting. Wine.Woot used BBCode and provided no editor support.
You can use BBCode, but Casemates prefers the more modern Markdown format. We provide a helpful editor for basic formatting (you can read about the syntax here).
In addition to basic formatting, the editor can help you upload images
And pick Emojis
Mehdown
Casemates extends Markdown with our open source library called Mehdown. We’re currently on v2 of Mehdown which adds basic features to Markdown like automatic link detection, converting of image URLs to embedded images, and automatic detection of usernames.
Mehdown embeds
Mehdown also supports embedding content from other sites simply by recognizing well-known URL formats.
That means you can embed tweets like this:
YouTube videos like this:
And even Wine.Woot comments like this:
- Dec 28, 2017 1:05 AM
- permalink
-il Cesare 
Sole Absolute Triple
Exalted High Tastemaster Supreme
“In the entire world there are only a few sounds that bring joy to all but the most jaded. One is the murmur of a kitten purring. Another is the thwack of a well-pitched baseball hitting a perfectly swung bat. And the third is the pop of a cork being pulled from a bottle of wine.” —George Taber
Sole Absolute Triple
Exalted High Tastemaster Supreme
“In the entire world there are only a few sounds that bring joy to all but the most jaded. One is the murmur of a kitten purring. Another is the thwack of a well-pitched baseball hitting a perfectly swung bat. And the third is the pop of a cork being pulled from a bottle of wine.” —George Taber
Mehdown slash commands
Advanced users can type a / as the first character of a post and be greeted with an autocompletion UI for “slash commands”.
In Mehdown, lines that start with a slash / are commands and will behave differently from regular text.
You’ll find the full set of slash commands documented here: https://meh.com/forum/topics/mehdown-slash-commands
Edit window
After you post your topic, comment, or reply you’re given a five minute edit window to make changes or delete your post. After five minutes the edit and delete options will disappear and the comment can no longer be modified.
Email notifications
Wine.Woot didn’t have an email notification system when new comments were posted.
On Casemates, after the five minute edit window has elapsed and the post can no longer be modified, we send email notifications for any usernames mentioned in the body of the post. You can mention a username using the @username syntax.
Subscriptions
You can also subscribe to a topic to receive an email notification when new comments are posted (regardless if you were mentioned by username or not).
Topic sorting
Wine.Woot only offered a simple sorting of threads by descending “last post” date.
On Wine.Woot once you reach the end of the thread list you can view more threads though “newer/older” pagination links.
Casemates defaults to a similar sort (most recent activity) but also offers the ability to sort by descending topic creation date or by “most likes”.
On Casemates, when you reach the end of the topic list you’ll see a brief “loading” animation before more topics are automatically loaded into view.
Mobile
Wine.Woot never create an optimized version of the forums for mobile devices.
The Casemates forum provides an optimized version of the forums for mobile devices. There’s a few features only available on the desktop version (the WYSIWYG editor and some features only available on mouse hover) but the mobile version is very robust.
Broadcasts
Wine.Woot didn’t really have a solution to the “sticky problem” that I’ve wrote about before, so we invented a concept we call “Broadcasts”.
Broadcasts allow us to highlight important topics from time to time.
Quick Preview
On Wine.Woot, hovering over the thread’s title allows you to see the rest of title if it was truncated.
On Casemates, the topic title is never truncated. If you hover over the topic’s title you get a preview of the topic’s body.
Topic flavor text
On Casemates, each topic gets a little bit of text to help indicate the “flavor” of what you’ll find when you click through. We had a lot of fun coming up with these and hope we’ll find some time to do some more in the future.
Topic read/unread indications
When you’re signed in, we keep track of when you’ve last visited each topic’s page. This allows us to present a personalized list of topics that each indicate if there are any new posts since your last view.
Topics that have posts since your last view are rendered with full contrast. Topics that haven’t had any posts since your last view are rendered in a “grayed-out” style.
Likes
If you see some content posted by a fellow casemate you enjoy you can “like” it by clicking the star icon. Content you’ve liked will show up as a yellow star. You can hover over the star to see the usernames of other casemates that have liked that content.
Profiles
If you click someone’s username you can view their profile page that shows their recent activity
Settings
You can tweak various forum settings
- 23 comments, 80 replies
- Comment
Thank for the guide, super helpful!
+1
I should add that @shawn (CTO of Mediocre, the joint venture co-owner of Casemates) deserves credit for the actual building of this platform and most of these features as well as overseeing all our other front-end retail platforms. Incredible work. Thanks for the illustrated summary.
Some of you may remember the Deals.Woot platform, which was also Shawn’s work while we were both at Woot. That UI was a great community experiment and helped us define some elements in play here at Mediocre.
Luke (CTO of Woot 2004-2013) is here as well and keeps our internal systems working and advancing in sophistication.
We’re in very good hands here technically in addition to the wine industry side with WD and team.
@shawn @snapster Thanks for the cool work on the forum functionality and for the guide. I love the unread indicator and the ability to pare back the number of “comments” shown in each display to keep pages smaller.
Dang. That’s just purty. I am actually going to put it in a bookmark, because it’s full of things I didn’t know, and won’t remember when I need them. This is generally useful, not just here, although I think the innovation of providing a filter so that folks can just see gatherings, or other things (such as polls), is a great move forward.
When will we arrive at the day where Casemates.com is visible? I need some Iron Horse, please.
This should be made ‘sticky’, if such a thing exists here.
@rjquillin Broadcast would be the term here.
@rjquillin
Or perhaps a link to this topic could be placed at some point into the currently invisible FAQ?
@f00l Yes, this seems like the better answer
@klezman Agreed.
Thanks, esp to @shawn, @Luke (is that the UID?), @snapster;
Thx to “@spudnik” (nick);
and to everyone else who inspired, cheered, assisted, and/or created the back end for these excellent forum.
And thx much for this excellent extended explanation.
Thanks. I’m honored.
Yes, pagination is often inelegant.
And often damned useful, in spite of substantial fugly. Much depends on the quality and value of that which won’t be easily found by a search.
What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you’re searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don’t find the time for finding?
-Hermann Hesse
<The mostly-irrelevant famous-writer quote was added to this comment for purposes of pretended “faux-profundity”.
>
Please ignore. My having quoted Hesse here is most pointless, and quite pretentious.
@shawn you might want to mention the lack of a PM system so newcomers aren’t mired looking around for one… Unless we’re getting one soon?
@jbartus
.
That would be a
@jbartus @shawn a PM system would be highly desirable…we do need to find ways to meet up with our fellow casemates, after all.
While we’re on the topic of requests, can we have categories for deals, “pure social”, wine-related, and maybe politics?
@klezman Yes! THIS.
@klezman agreed
@klezman I’m with you on everything but politics, I’d just as soon that talk was carried out elsewhere. Barring that, @shawn, could we get a profile option for the filters to enable us to customize what is shown under “all”? For example, say politics were to be added, I could uncheck that option so as to never see anything in that category without manually browsing to it.
@jbartus @shawn I agree. I’m not used to the idea of “all” being on one page. I doubt I’d ever use that, to be honest. Categories are nice
But yes, being able to opt in to politics seems wise. We had a lot of good and mostly civil discussion/debate over on ww, and it’d be great to be able to continue that here.
@klezman please continue to have a lot of good and mostly civil discussion/debate here.
@shawn That’s the plan!
Is there, or could we get a preview function so we can see what we effed up and fix it before we ‘Say it’?
@rjquillin There’s a five minute editing window when you post, which may or may not be helpful to you.
@rjquillin I agree. I liked the preview feature at Woot! I know there’s a 5 minute window, but I stress-out that someone will see it before my edit is submitted. Who needs that much stress?
@heartny @rjquillen nearly everyone who has read a post I’ve recently made has seen me edit it. For my brain, the stress you mention is actually the motivation to quickly re-read what I’ve just written. I’m too lazy and this space is too casual to pretend with a preview.
As for formatting edits, those are for utility and aren’t embarrassing at all.
@rjquillin
@shrdlu
@heartny
@snapster
The 5 min edit window is incredibly important to me.
It is there, i presume, so that whenever I post some nonsense and then quickly edit it, I will miss many errors, misstatements, and other garbage, and create new problems as I go; and then run out of time.
After which, I will always appear as a complete Professional Incoherent.
And I will be able to blame the short edit window, and also Gboard.
@f00l I’m not quite So this is fine but. On the other hand I’d say the answer is no. That day in the woods. Sure, go with it.
@snapster
Yeppers.
@rjquillin @heartny I find the five minute edit window more than adequate for editing almost all of the time. (Deals.woot had the same window and I got used to it there.)
On the very few occasions where I’ve gotten close, I copy the text, delete the post and either start over or use an external editor. If I know that a post will need excessive editing a priori, I start with the external editor. (On deals.woot I used to do this once or twice a week; on meh, I’ve done it maybe five times in the 1551 days I’ve apparently been here.)
As for other people seeing your unedited post during the five minute window… trust me when I say that 99.98% of us won’t see it and 99.99% of us don’t care; for the other 0.01%, either ignore them or use an external editor.
@baqui63
Yeah, in extremis, I have done that.
Mostly, I just allow the nonsense to shine through.
@baqui63 When I worked in advertising I was a printing and graphics services buyer and also did graphic design and typesetting on the side. For me having a preview would be like seeing a press proof before going to print. The 5 minute window would be like going to print, finding an error, fixing it and then going to print again. I guess it’s a personal thing
Yes it is, and I’ve used it, but for more complicated links and such, preview is the ticket.
Thanks for putting this together! I was just about to make a request for this very thing.
What are the little images next to the topics?
@Twich22 it depends on the type of topic and some choices the poster has made when posting the topic. When you create a new topic one of several things will become that image:
This image is also the image used as the background for the upper section of the forum in your topic as well as the main forum when your topic is the most recently active topic.
@jbartus another fun feature not mentioned by @shawn
I think there’s actually a max message length feature that stops it from being added in. Creating a more generic FAQ out of Shawn’s post was a good idea someone mentioned. Maybe less wine.woot centric.
Technically Meh doesn’t have a WYSIWYG editor… what you see in the editor is not an accurate representation of the output upon posting, there are simply convenient buttons for injecting the appropriate markdown.
Great write-up otherwise!
I just have to give @shawn a teeny tiny hard time, how else would he know I care? 
So when I pull this website forum up on my IPad there is nothing on the top right side of the website ie- account, what’s this, and community. But on the mobile site/phone it’s visable. Is there something wrong with viewing this site on an IPad or is it somehow user error.
@stickyfingers1
Try portrait and landscape modes.
And try using alt browsers. At least Firefox and chrome, anyway. Do you have the same prob?
Also go into settings. Look at safari settings and at settings for any other browsers. See if you have content blockers enabled.
If you do, try disabling or uninstalling the content blockers.
@f00l Ha, thanks for the suggestions. When I turn my IPad sideways the categories are visable but not when I hold it normal. I guess I’ll just have to turn the IPad when I view the website. Thanks
@stickyfingers1
On mobile, the portrait and landscape views have differing functionalities.
It’s not perfect. But it’s pretty good.
Thanks so much, this was very helpful! I look forward to the new and improved options available.
I was playing in the account settings and was so happy to see so many options for display modes since the option to change that on pretty much any other site is non-existent. However my elation turned to horror as I discovered the default display mode already sounded great
Well, this will take a little getting used to, but we’ll persevere, and by-and-by we’ll get used to it. This thread is immensely helpful for those of us who get used to a forum’s ways and find it harder to change!
Thank You.
How do I do a signature (like one had one wine.woot.com)?
Also, we need a good wine bottle emoji!
@rpm
No auto-siggies so far. Dunno if people want?
@rpm I take it you were able to get YOUR username. This is a good thing.
@baqui63
@Dave fixed some things.
@rpm
is probably about as good as it’s gonna get unless Emoji One offers some means to add custom emojis.
@f00l Yes to auto-sigs. Lots of folks like to put their CellarTracker link.
And it’d be nice to have a white wine emoji to complement the red.
@mike808 as I mentioned, the emoji aren’t Mediocre sourced, they’re a cross-platform compatible emoji plugin. Adding custom emojis would, to my knowledge, require abandoning said plugin which allows for compatibility with the native emoji libraries on Android, iPhone, Windows, Mac, etc.
Maybe I missed it but what about the word substitutions! WTF!
@alukan Fuck 'em, there aren’t any. You are free to express yourself here. Yeah, I know it might be a little hard to get used to.
@alukan We need to sub-contract that out to TT. Really gonna miss her not being around here, in her old capacity.
@rjquillin TT is around, but she uses a different name here.
@rjquillin
She’s @del.
@f00l Unless she decides to change it on this site. You know, that can be done, don’t cha?
@barnabee I think perhaps there is some segment of the population who would actually prefer to have ‘coarse language’ filtered out via substitutions. Not to my taste, mind, but perhaps @alukan might fit in that category.
@jbartus I used to hate the language non-restriction, but it no longer bothers me, as you can tell.
@barnabee I’m not bothered either. Different strokes…
@jbartus Some might, it’s true…but I think more of us simply enjoyed the whimsy of the substitutions.
@barnabee
Yes, she could change her uid or create a second one.
Have heard rumors that some fine folk have done that. Surely no one we know, though.
@rjquillin
The general rules on Mediocre/Meh so far are:
No spam.
Avoid personal attacks.
Don’t be a dick.
Keep it all reasonably work-appropriate.
Don’t be a troll. (Unless you drink wine under a bridge. That sort of troll is welcome).
Be a reasonably decent, honorable, and non-manipulative human being.
I’m sure this site will have a unique flavor, I presume a somewhat more serious and dedicated one.
And I think it will have heft. And be fun.
A topic from @JonT (still missed) and @Thumperchick
Our forum rules: No BULLSHIT™
https://meh.com/forum/topics/our-forum-rules-no-bullshit
@klezman @f00l @jbartus @barnabee @rjquillin I am sensitive to reactions towards profanity.
The primary reason we’ve explicitly allowed it on Meh was/is to acknowledge a youthful rebellious state of mind against stodgy conventional retail. Conventional retail cannot tolerate it out of fear and this becomes a distinctive difference. I dislike the overuse that pops up from time to time but I enjoy the proof of uncensored commentary more. Those rules are specific to Meh.
I haven’t pushed a strong opinion for a standard here. My inclination would be to at least discourage the posts or entire threads that put on a show of using it. Maybe there’s no way to draw a line there and we need to moderate them. Perhaps a word filter would someday be a humourous solution too.
I haven’t a clue what you folks were doing behind the WW scene. My perception is that offensive posts were ignored and fairly soon stopped happening.
@jbartus I usually hate the kiddie filtering sites do, but I have to say there were some really funny ones on W.W that I liked.
@snapster, one of the things we found amusing were the word filters! It was even more amusing when the winemakers would post and their words were humorously filtered!
Especially when they would change them at times.
“Your father smelt of Elderberries” was a favorite of mine!
@alukan @snapster The way I see it, anyone who is old enough to buy wine should be old enough to deal with some colourful language without needing to show umbrage. I don’t swear myself (at least not anything much stronger than ass or damn), but I certainly don’t take issue with any swears I see on a site, especially one so clearly exclusive to adults.
Also, @alukan, I might suggest that you can have a crudgeflagem-load of fun replacing your own nerf-herding swears with what ever the shazbot you want in every suffering succotash post you share, you pan-galactic gargle-blaster!
It appears that that is already happening as WW folks seem to have transitioned to Casemates and seem to be dominating the conversations.
I imagine @shawn spent a tremendous amount of time creating the first comment detailing the “how-to’s”. For us oldsters here, filtering is your friend. Experiment, change it up, play with it, swirl it around awhile, decide what you like. Using the filters will save you time in the long run - and may have you deciding you like this format better. (I do not promise it will not send you down a rabbit hole in the short run! …but in a fun way ;))
@et al, thanks for skills!
Many of the rib kids are here; I’m ok with loosing the cutesy stuff. PMs would be nice - but hey, don’t most of you have each other’s email addresses and stalk each other on social media any way?!
@XsanityX
Growing community, new peeps …
Right now, many Mediocre/Meh habitués go over to woot to pm each other.
I would love a native/local Mediocre pm system.
PM’s would be a nice touch. I for one avoid most social media (except here and ww), but I’m an expired date to begin with.
@rjquillin agreed.
@snapster I join the masses - PM’s would be nice. While I belong to some social media sites, that was more protection for my name. I don’t live on them, and can easily miss something mentioned there.
Thanks for this topic! Is there a way to bookmark it for future reference? I’m on an iPad.
@bolligra Looks like these are directions for that - http://www.dummies.com/consumer-electronics/tablets/ipad/how-to-use-bookmarks-on-the-ipad/
@dave Thanks, I know about that and use it a lot. I was hoping to be able to bookmark inside Casemates, but that’s probably not possible.
@bolligra we only display your personal comment history for 30 days and currently don’t have a longer saved bank for threads via your profile. For threads that are important to our entire audience, one hope would be we could STAR them so that the sort-by-most-likes feature would work on threads.
That happens to have occurred very nicely here on this thread as it is the top result after the current broadcast with most-likes sort turned on: https://casemates.com/forum?sort=most-likes
@snapster I guess that’s another loss… no permalink
@jasisk plenty of that - it’s embedded into the time stamp.
@snapster So does this mean comments, tasting notes and other valuable information is going to get lost after 30 days? That would really suck big time.
@rjquillin adding so much so I’ll be highly motivated to just remain posting drinking and tasting notes back on ww. We refer to those ~years~ after original posts.
+1 SUCKS - WD and Snapster should know after all these years how their own forums are used.
@rjquillin no, no, just your own personal profile page has 30 days history because it’s more creepy to have longer. All post history is retained itself on the forums.
@Lighter -1 SUCKS
@snapster
Problem solved
@snapster I hope all fixes are so easy
@rjquillin
Due to infinite scroll of topics rather than (@snapster-hated) pagination, old topics will be something of a pain to retrieve, without someone having a very good memory of the right search terms.
After a few years, older notes on vintages, etc, may be difficult to find, even with Google search, which is not fun to use.
I’m hoping for a native site search.
I would prefer to have, in addition, “paginated topic lists” as a user-selected “alternative format presentation”, but I gather that TPTB really dislike the aesthetics (even if it’s merely an option most users would never choose to see.)
@f00l another method (other than native search we agree on) that would be more useful than pagination is to make meta index posts that organize particular threads that are worthy of future reference. Essentially an index. This is better because it would curate only the best threads and their location wouldn’t be completely variable from day to day. Perhaps we need a google docs embed or have an existing embed that would let this have an indefinite edit window.
@snapster
Yes. Like.
Perhaps an index of product by vineyard, also?
To make it easy for us to track down tasting notes?
Then people could simply bookmark threads of primarily personal, rather than global, interest.
Tho I would love it if the site itself kept the “saved/bookmarked topic” history for each user …
@f00l Something we did at WW was always link to the Cellar tracker entry for each wine in the 1st post for an offer. I also would x-post all community tasting notes from the product threads into cellar tracker using a user name Wine.Woot_taster.
It worked fairly well. I stopped doing my part in 2017 but its fairly easy to do and keep going.
@CorTot
That’s a substantial gift to everyone else. Wow. Thx.
@f00l Yeah, cortot is a good guy
Also, something to take us to the top of the page, or back to the main landing page. It’s a huge PITA to have to scroll back to the top of a long page. Again, something we’re used to from ww forums.
@rjquillin on mac safari it’s cmd + up arrow
PC Chrome is CTLR+HOME CTLR+END does the other.
@Lighter
Problem solved again!
@rjquillin
You got any more complaints RJQ??
@rjquillin Also “home” key goes to top and “end” key goes to bottom. Especially useful on this thread where the main post is looooong.
@klezman Not on a Nexus tablet or my Galaxy.
Absolutely!
or 
quite useful as I have multiple platforms I use and can’t/don’t remember all the keyboard shortcuts, and confess I’m just a grumpy old man.
My hand is on the mouse, I still would find
@rjquillin
Yeah home and end is kind of tough to remember haha.
As the great Norman Lear once said “When something is over it’s over…next!”
@rjquillin
Which is a one-up over the alternative.
@snapster
How do we ‘mark all threads read’?
This is entirely too chaotic with no clear way to locate earlier posts.
Count me (nearly) silent from here till things sort out, hopefully they will.
@rjquillin Not to mention unfollowing or hiding threads we don’t want to see at all.