09-19-2002, 05:25 PM
Hiya all -- I am having a terrible problem with my hotbuttons and wonder if any of you can help. There is a feature I came to rely on in the Old UI that i cannot reproduce in the New UI. I call it text redirection, and it's best explained by example. The example has three parts: (1) my very first attempt in the Old UI, with its problems explained; (2) my solution to those problems in the Old UI; (3) how the problems resurfaced in the New UI, with my failed attempts to solve them.
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(1) My first "Assist" hotbutton, long ago, looked like this
        /gsay All Hands assist * %t *
        /assist %t
        /attack on
        /gsay in attacking << %t >>
I would use the button by selecting the Main Tank via F1, F2, ..., F6, then mash the hotbutton at the appropriate time, causing target focus to shift to the mob being attacked. So, for instance, if "Gijoe" were the main tank, attacking an "Orc Pawn", then the group members, via gsay, would see the following text
        All Hands assist * Gijoe *
        in attacking << Orc Pawn >>
handy. Problem is that when in multi-group raids, you've got to change /gsay to /say or /guildsay or /ooc or /shout in the old days, or /3 if using the new chat channels. Not a problem for just one button, but I have dozens of them:
/gsay Please assist ME in attacking << %t >>
/gsay Feigning to evade aggro (i'm a monk)
/gsay Feigning to split pull, please don't heal me
/gsay Feigning for a nature break, AFK, brb
/gsay Dragging %t corpse to zone
etc. etc. etc. They all follow the pattern of telling my partners something important, and they all share the problem of having to be redirected manually depending on the raid situation.
Reprogramming all these buttons by hand before a raid and unprogramming them afterwards is time-consuming and error-prone.
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(2) The OLD SOLUTION
One day i discovered that the /channel command lets you redirect UNdirected text. Undirected text is what you get when u just type "Enter" at the main chat, then type a message, and type "Enter" again. It normally defaults implicitly to /say, but if you type /channel gsay, undirected text goes to implicitly to /gsay and u have to type a /say explicitly to use say. But this is great, because you can go /channel guildsay and everything in the hotbuttons goes to guild, or /channel chat kaelraid or whatever and all hotbuttons automagically go to chat channel "kaelraid" and so on. boffo. Once i settled on this solution, i never had to reprogram the hotbuttons again, instead the all follow this pattern, illustrated with my assist again:
        All Hands assist * %t *
        /assist %t
        /attack on
        in attacking << %t >>
That's right, no direction in front of the text, just text. Boffo!
******************************************
(3) Enter the New UI
Unfortunately, it stopped working, so I am back to the frustration of reprogramming and unprogramming my hotbuttons before and after every raid, with the occasional embarrassing oversight of a misdirection. For instance, on a recent raid, the raid channel happened to be /4 on my list. However, i forgot to unprogram the corpse drag after the raid, and the next time i did a corpse drag for someone, i was spamming /4, which happened to be a social chat channel. bummer.
Things i have noted:
/channel gsay or /channel chat kaelraid etc. still work as commands, they just don't seem to redirect my hotbutton text. wtf?
There is a right-click option to set the default channel for a chat window. It also does not seem to work.
Since there are now a zillion ways of combining the /channel command and the right-click option, before I go stumbling into that maelstrom, I thought I'd find out if anyone else has solved this problem.
</p>
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(1) My first "Assist" hotbutton, long ago, looked like this
        /gsay All Hands assist * %t *
        /assist %t
        /attack on
        /gsay in attacking << %t >>
I would use the button by selecting the Main Tank via F1, F2, ..., F6, then mash the hotbutton at the appropriate time, causing target focus to shift to the mob being attacked. So, for instance, if "Gijoe" were the main tank, attacking an "Orc Pawn", then the group members, via gsay, would see the following text
        All Hands assist * Gijoe *
        in attacking << Orc Pawn >>
handy. Problem is that when in multi-group raids, you've got to change /gsay to /say or /guildsay or /ooc or /shout in the old days, or /3 if using the new chat channels. Not a problem for just one button, but I have dozens of them:
/gsay Please assist ME in attacking << %t >>
/gsay Feigning to evade aggro (i'm a monk)
/gsay Feigning to split pull, please don't heal me
/gsay Feigning for a nature break, AFK, brb
/gsay Dragging %t corpse to zone
etc. etc. etc. They all follow the pattern of telling my partners something important, and they all share the problem of having to be redirected manually depending on the raid situation.
Reprogramming all these buttons by hand before a raid and unprogramming them afterwards is time-consuming and error-prone.
******************************************
(2) The OLD SOLUTION
One day i discovered that the /channel command lets you redirect UNdirected text. Undirected text is what you get when u just type "Enter" at the main chat, then type a message, and type "Enter" again. It normally defaults implicitly to /say, but if you type /channel gsay, undirected text goes to implicitly to /gsay and u have to type a /say explicitly to use say. But this is great, because you can go /channel guildsay and everything in the hotbuttons goes to guild, or /channel chat kaelraid or whatever and all hotbuttons automagically go to chat channel "kaelraid" and so on. boffo. Once i settled on this solution, i never had to reprogram the hotbuttons again, instead the all follow this pattern, illustrated with my assist again:
        All Hands assist * %t *
        /assist %t
        /attack on
        in attacking << %t >>
That's right, no direction in front of the text, just text. Boffo!
******************************************
(3) Enter the New UI
Unfortunately, it stopped working, so I am back to the frustration of reprogramming and unprogramming my hotbuttons before and after every raid, with the occasional embarrassing oversight of a misdirection. For instance, on a recent raid, the raid channel happened to be /4 on my list. However, i forgot to unprogram the corpse drag after the raid, and the next time i did a corpse drag for someone, i was spamming /4, which happened to be a social chat channel. bummer.
Things i have noted:
/channel gsay or /channel chat kaelraid etc. still work as commands, they just don't seem to redirect my hotbutton text. wtf?
There is a right-click option to set the default channel for a chat window. It also does not seem to work.
Since there are now a zillion ways of combining the /channel command and the right-click option, before I go stumbling into that maelstrom, I thought I'd find out if anyone else has solved this problem.
</p>