# Contributors — Hellion Chat

Hellion Chat is a one-person project on the code side. But without the people on this page, the bug fixes and UX
improvements that have landed since the early versions would not exist. Every entry here has made the plugin concretely
better.

Attribution for the upstream Chat 2 authors (Infi and Anna) is intentionally in [`../NOTICE.md`](../NOTICE.md), not
here. This file covers contributions to the Hellion Chat side specifically.

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## Development

### JonKazama (Florian Wathling) — Maintainer

Hellion Chat is my first FFXIV plugin and my first larger C#/Dalamud project. My professional background is web
development (Next.js, React, TypeScript, Prisma). Plugin development in an unfamiliar codebase, ImGui, FFXIV game hooks
and the entire Dalamud stack were new territory.

Privacy-first defaults, per-channel retention, Auto-Tell-Tabs, pop-out input, ChatColours presets, the Hellion theme
plus Exo 2 font, and the v1.0.0 standalone cut are the Hellion-specific surface areas I built on top of the Chat 2
foundation. The learning story behind that is in [`LEARNING-JOURNEY.md`](LEARNING-JOURNEY.md).

Hellion Chat is part of [Hellion Online Media](https://hellion-media.de).

---

## Testers

A quick note: I do not test this plugin alone. The people listed here reported bugs before they hit more users, raised
UX problems I had gone blind to, and brought in feature requests that pushed the plugin in directions I would not have
gone on my own. That is not a given. External testers are worth their time.

### Carl Beleandis (Carla) — Beta Tester

Carl has been testing since the bootstrap phase and has shaped both the pop-out mechanics and the theme direction.
Feedback comes direct and without detours, which is exactly what I need when testing.

Concrete contributions:

- **Pop-out discoverability** — pointing out that pop-outs were only reachable via right-click triggered the header
  button and the one-time hint banner in v0.6.1. I knew the right-click path by heart and had stopped seeing that new
  users could not find the feature at all.
- **/tell pop-out mode** — the request to open /tell tabs directly as a pop-out instead of going through the tab sidebar
  landed in v0.6.1 as an opt-in settings toggle. Bonus: during implementation an old ghost-window bug surfaced (LRU drop
  left pop-out windows as ghosts), which got fixed at the same time.
- **Theme variants with brightness gradations** — the request for a green family shifted my thinking from "one theme =
  one colour" to "theme families with mood variants". On the [roadmap](ROADMAP.md) for a later cycle.

### Jin (Jingliu) — Alpha Tester

Jin is the active tester from day one and pushed the pop-out workflow architecture in a different direction.

Concrete contributions:

- **Pop-out tab with input bar** — the suggestion to be able to type in a pop-out (instead of just reading) triggered
  the v0.6.0 pop-out input bar. That was a larger refactor: the input layer from `ChatLogWindow` had to be opened up so
  it could also live in `Popout.cs`, with an independent text buffer and history cursor per pop-out. It dominated the
  cycle because the design had to be clean before any code could happen.
- **TempTell persistence** — the request for /tell tabs to survive a relog via a pin toggle is on the
  [roadmap](ROADMAP.md) for a later cycle. It touches the tab system architecturally and needs its own design work.

---

## Translations

Hellion-specific UI strings are maintained in `HellionChat/Resources/HellionStrings.<lang>.resx`.

- **German (DE):** JonKazama (native speaker, primary project language)

Upstream language files (`Language.<lang>.resx`) are not covered here. They are maintained via the
[Chat 2 Crowdin project](https://github.com/Infiziert90/ChatTwo); Crowdin translators are listed in the plugin settings
under **Info → "Chat 2 community translators"**.

---

## How to Contribute

Bug reports, feature requests and feedback are welcome — the best place to reach me is the Hellion Forge Discord:
[discord.gg/X9V7Kcv5gR](https://discord.gg/X9V7Kcv5gR). Join and ping me in the Hellion Chat channel.

For pull requests and contribution guidelines see [`../CONTRIBUTING.md`](../CONTRIBUTING.md), Code of Conduct in
[`../CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md`](../CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).
