It basically allows you to specify to different colors - one for if the user's device is in light mode, and the other if they're in dark mode. Here's an example gen showing how to use it:

https://perchance.org/css-light-dark-test#edit

```html <style> html { color-scheme: light dark; } /* this line is important! otherwise the code below won't work */

body { background: light-dark(lightgrey, black); } </style>

<p style=" color:light-dark(blue,lime); ">this text will be blue in light mode and lime in dark mode</p> ```

Note that this is a very new browser feature, and a lot of people are on older browser versions, so for at least the next few months you should probably still add a default color before your light-dark color like color:blue; color:light-dark(blue,lime);. That way the older browsers will still get the right colors, but in the newer browsers the light-dark color will override the default color.

I know there are a few people here who enjoy archiving - e.g. https://perchance.org/vionet20-abulafia-conversions

So I figured I'd mention this which I just stumbled across - from this post:

https://www.stevensavage.com/blog/2023/09/seventh-sanctum-next.html

> I’m going to start making my generator notes and data available to you. The data is pretty easy to just bundle up, but I also want to make some notes on how to use it. I’ll make this very visible on the site so you can just download it and go do your own thing.

> Replicate my generators. Enhance them. Build your own. Learn from them. Whatever works for you.

> I know I can’t maintain the site forever – if nothing else, I won’t be around forever.

Perchance, on the other hand is going to be around until the heat death of the universe, so if anyone wants to help Steven preserve his work via Perchance versions of his gens, here's the data:

https://www.seventhsanctum.com/archive/sanctumdata.zip

If you work out the conversion rules, I or someone else can write the JavaScript code for a mostly-automated converter.

First, some context:

When you call list.evaluateItem, it evaluates the square and curly blocks of course, but it also removes backslashes that were before any square or curly blocks. Backslashes are used to tell the Perchance engine that a square or curly bracket should be interpreted 'literally' - i.e. not as a character with a special meaning.

So, for example if we call evaluateItem on a list item like this: {1|2|3} \[cool\] the output will be something like 2 [cool]. If we didn't put the backslash before the square bracket, the Perchance engine would look for a variable/list called "cool" and if it didn't find one, you'd get an error. The backslash says "treat this as a normal/literal square bracket - not a fancy Perchance thing".

Now to the point of this post:

Notice how in the above example of using evaluateItem on a list, the output (2 [cool]) has the backslashes removed? As previously mentioned, that is the correct/desired behavior. But I just found a bug where if you call evaluateItem on a string like {1|2|3} \[cool\] it would output 2 \[cool\] instead of 2 [cool].

I've just fixed this bug - so the backslashes are now removed (just like when using evaluateItem on lists and list items), but I've made it so the bugfix is only applied when you next save your generator - just in case there are any issues with the fix. So please go ahead and save your generator, and if you run into any issues, even if you fixed them, please let me know in the comments. Any examples of issues will help me build an understanding of the effect of this change.

Thanks!

This likely won't be relevant to a lot of devs here, because the remember plugin does the job fine in most cases, but:

Here's a normal text input (id is not needed for this example, but is almost always needed so adding it here): html <input id="thingyInput"> And here's one which remembers what you type into it even after page refresh: html <input id="thingyInput" oninput="localStorage.thingy=this.value" value="[localStorage.thingy || '']"> Of course, the remember-plugin can do this for you, but I often find myself reaching for the above pattern for its simplicity.

localStorage is what the remember-plugin uses behind the scenes - whatever you store in it will be persisted even after page refresh. It's a built-in browser/JavaScript feature - not something that's specific to Perchance.

The || '' in [localStorage.thingy || ''] means or ''. In other words, it means or output nothing. If you want a default value for when the user loads the page for the first time, you could write [localStorage.thingy || 'blah'] which means "use whatever is in localStorage.thingy if it exists, otherwise use 'blah'"

(To be clear, since I realized just now that to non-devs the title might be misleading: This feature does not add AI bots to your comments plugin by default! The comments plugin and the AI plugins are completely distinct. But plugins can of course interact with one another, and this new feature of the comments plugin allows for some interesting interactions - the title just gives one of those as a fun example.)

You can now "programmatically" submit comments on behalf of the user, and you can also get/set the contents of the input text box.

If a comment was programmatically submitted, then a little icon is shown on the comment to indicate that the user didn't personally click the submit button.

This feature, used alongside the onComment/onLoad feature can e.g. be used to create an AI bot that "lives in" your comments box, or create a multiplayer game of chess, or maybe add an auto-error-report log using window.onerror, and so on.

Edit: Also, you can now use c.comments to get an array/list of the comments - but make sure to do that only after onLoad has triggered, since c.comments only returns loaded comments - so if comments box hasn't loaded yet, you'll get an empty array.

Let me know if you find any bugs/issues!

https://perchance.org/programmatic-get-set-submit-comments-plugin-example#edit

I'll probably create a little AI bot example at some point, but you're welcome to beat me to it! (Please post it here on lemmy if you do)

The comments plugin has a new feature that allows you to access the "stream" of comments as they are submitted to your comments box. So now you can "do stuff" on your page in response to comments that people make.

Title is (mostly) a joke, but it wouldn't be toooo hard to create simple multiplayer games like chess or little point-and-click worlds that people can play on your page via the comments (just need to ignore invalid user moves/inputs based on the rules of the game you're making).

I expect a few perchance devs to play around with some "mad science" along those lines, but for most people, probably the most useful thing here is that it allows you to completely customize the way comments are displayed. Including e.g. adding avatar pics to comments, changing the background image of every comment based on the keywords in it, making confetti fly across the page (for everyone) when someone says a secret/"easter egg" keyword, and so on.

Examples:

• Display the most recent comment in bold at the top of the page: https://perchance.org/simple-comments-plugin-oncomment-example#edit
• Fully custom comments feed/style: https://perchance.org/comments-plugin-oncomment-example#edit

For example, if you've made a world building religion generator, and you title it "The Arch Bible" or something like that (i.e. something that's more of a "brand" than a "description"), then people won't be able to use a web search engine to find it unless they already know its name. In other words, people don't search for "The Arch Bible" when they want to find a religion generator - they of course search something like "fantasy religion generator" or whatever - so make sure you put keywords like that in your $meta.title/$meta.description if you want to make it easy for others to find it.

Search engines heavily weight the page title in their search, so it definitely pays to have a $meta.title which appropriately summarizes what your generator does in a few words. It's fine to have something like "Fantasy Religion Generator - The Arch Bible" as your title - i.e. a description, plus a "brand". Just don't leave out the key descriptive terms.

I'm writing this post because I don't think people realize how the "popular" generators on Perchance actually tend to get popular - it's one of two things:

1. (rare & temporary) The generator happened to go viral on social media somehow.
2. (common & long-term) The generator's title and/or description was descriptive, and so random people around the world each day hit their page via a Google search, which can add up to thousands of visitors in just a few months if it's a popular "topic" that people search for.

Popular generators almost always get popular via #2, and #2 often eventually leads to #1 - i.e. people find it via a search engine, and then share it with their friends on social media, and then at some point (for whatever reason) it goes viral. I think people tend to incorrectly assume that #1 is the main factor in a generator's popularity (it can be, but it's rare).

TL;DR: Use appropriate descriptive terms in your title and description if you'd like your generator to become well known. Think about the sorts of keywords that people would type into a search engine to find your generator.

Unfortunately for now it's just phrase banning (with regex pattern-matching supported) and user ID banning - i.e. no ability to "login" and delete stuff, like you can do with the comments plugin. Hopefully this will suffice until I get around to making it easier (I want to make moderation easier on comments plugin at some point too - e.g. 1-click bans alongside existing 1-click delete).

• https://perchance.org/text-to-image-gallery-moderation-example
• https://perchance.org/text-to-image-plugin

There may be bugs! Please let me know if you find one in the comments below. I haven't thoroughly tested it, so I'm relying on y'all :)

Edit: Also, a reminder that when I'm short on time (like lately) I'm most likely to fix things that people complain about often. Thanks to Allo and others for posting and complaining about this. Feel free to complain repeatedly and tag me often. It helps me prioritize.

Note that the 'auto' checkbox doesn't actually clear variables - it just fully re-executes all the square/curly blocks in the HTML. So if you're doing stuff where your code needs variables to be "cleared"/fresh before the first generation, then you'll have noticed that you actually need to click the 'reload' button (or refresh the whole browser tab) to get your generator back to a completely "fresh" state. But, as the annoying message would inform you, clicking the reload button required saving your generator first. That's not required any more. I should have fixed this about 6 years ago. Took about 15 mins 😐

New plugin: https://perchance.org/upload-plugin

This plugin is like https://perchance.org/upload except in 'programmatic' form. So you can allow users to e.g. upload their generated text with a button click, and get the resulting URL to share with their friend.

It does not require the user to be logged in, but as a result, the daily allowances (based on IP address) and max file sizes are significantly smaller than with perchance.org/upload - see plugin page for details.

As an example of what you can do with it: I just used it to add a feature to https://perchance.org/ai-chat where you can easily share the AI character that you've made via a link.

Just a little demo/example for now - feel free to fork and play around with the instructions and stuff, of course! https://perchance.org/ai-generated-hierarchical-world

Currently notifications aren't supported on mobile, and also you won't get notifications if you don't have a perchance comments section open somewhere on your computer. It doesn't matter which comments section you have open (i.e. it can be on any generator/page, regardless of which particular comments boxes that you've subscribed to), but it needs to be visible somewhere.

Also, some browsers will "hibernate" a tab that is backgrounded/inactive which will pause the notification script, so it's best to pull the browser tab out into its own browser window so that the tab is deemed "active"/visible by your browser - that way it won't "hibernate" the tab.

So, with the above caveats, you now have a crude way to get notified if someone comments on your generators! Or when people are active at your favorite hang out spot, etc. The caveats are annoying, but it's the first step! Please give feedback if there are any issues - I may not be able to fix them, or at least may not be able to fix them right away, but it'll be helpful to hear about the most annoying issues so I can plan future improvements here.

Example generators made with this plugin:

• https://perchance.org/ai-character-design-example-simple#edit
• https://perchance.org/random-character-chat-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-character-design-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-chat-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-render-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-text-to-speech-example#edit
• https://perchance.org/ai-text-plugin-tester#edit

See the plugin page for more. There will probably be issues/bugs! Thank you in advance to the pioneers who test this and report bugs/issues in these first few days/weeks 🫡

(It was actually possible to discover this plugin a few days ago, but no one made it through all the clues lol ^^ some people did at least figure out the first step)

Wondering if someone can get in contact with Raggedflight to ask if they'd like to donate the link-plugin to the admin account so I can put it into the official plugin list? Credit to Raggedflight would be added at the top of the page just like in https://perchance.org/image-plugin of course. No worries if they'd rather not!

Simple example usage: https://perchance.org/url-params-plugin-example?blah=abc123

It's really simple: ``` url = {import:url-params-plugin}

output [url.blah] // this will output 'abc124' if URL has '?blah=abc123' on the end ``` This plugin allows you to, for example, have several "different" generators within the same generator page, where each sub-generator has its own URL. Or to just adapt the output of your generators based on the URL. E.g. you might have an English and a French version of your generator with URLs like this:

• https://perchance.org/my-cool-gen?lang=en
• https://perchance.org/my-cool-gen?lang=fr

In that case, within your code you can use [url.lang] to determine which language the user is viewing, and adjust your list selection/odds/etc. based on that.

You can also use it to e.g. link directly to a particular seed for the seeder plugin, and stuff like that.

(Note for experienced Perchance users: The old document.referrer hack is no longer required since Perchance now copies all parameters over to the iframe when initializing it)

For images and other files that you need for your generators/plugins/etc. - rather than using base64 strings, or external file hosting services like catbox.moe

https://perchance.org/upload