# 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.

---

## 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).
