Riven said:
Yes to merging Half-Life Forum AND Radiant Forum together [NOTE: NOT Half-Life 2 Forum! That forum should stay by itself with out ANY merger whatsoever].

Would the HL2 forum be better renamed 'Source Engine Editing' or something similar?

lol they were just figures plucked out the air, yeah whatever... 1000 for a map etc, +20% for each additional map or something?

And yes by downloads I did mean models/prefabds etc, not the number of times something has been clicked

hi guys
I've not been around the pit often enough to really know what could need tweaked, changed, removed,implemented etc. so there's not much I can add to this. Just some of the points that are fresh in my head after reading all that^.

First up is the snarkmarks ($M)thing.

Every post - 1 snarkmark sounds about right, but the old system had some other crazy stuff factored in, like + 0.1 x any submitted maps rated 3/5 or more. That's not the exact numbers, but it can be used to pay a slightly higher going rate to people that contribute more.

Each map - 100 snarkmarks - Considering how easy 100 forum posts are, compared to a full blown map, I'm thinking this might be a bit low. Maybe drop the post marks to 0.1

Each download - 50 snarkmarks. Again, downloading a file is even easier. Two clicks of a mouse could wipe out hundreds of hours of intense mapping. I'd definately make this a low, if any, reward. An open invitation to earn thousands of $M while raping your bandwidth.
Unless of course I'm ranting up the wrong tree, and by downloads you mean cotributers of models/prefabs/textures etc. In that case, I'd still be a lot more conservative than 50. I'd be looking at around 10, and that's would be me being generous.

Each article (once approved) - 100 snarkmarks. I'm finding it hard to justify giving the same reward to an article as to a map. Mainly because I know that I've lost track of the amount of hours that I personally put into maps, but that's not to say everyone else will. The same is true of the articles that people submit. Some are very well thought out and presented, while some have obviously been written by someone more used to using crayons than computers. But it's still safe to say that a sloppy article is still much less work than a sloppy map, which makes articles a less worthy, but still important, teaching tool. 25 would be my feelings towards them.

Could the $M be multiplied by the rating of the submission? Like a map gets rated 4/5, then the mapper only gets 80$M from the possible 100$M, or a poor 2/5 article only gets 10$M from the possible 25.

I know I've gotten a bit longwinded about these $M's ( to a point that I challenge anyone to find a longer post of mine. Reward for the finder, 10 $M's. ), but one more thing.{edit]ok, 2 more things[/edit] I'm not very good at maths terminology, so there's probably a name for this that I don't know, so we'll call it a score magnet. Like a magnet that sits on number 5 on a scale of 1 - 10. This is for rating stuff, btw. If the 1st rating is a 10, the magnet holds it back a bit, say at 9. A 2nd score of ten pulls it a bit closer to the top. The magnet gets weaker as more people rate whatever it is, until after 10 or so ratings it's magnetic properties have been sucked dry. That's more of a ratings thing than a $M thing, so I'll move on to the 2nd other thing . Transferable $M's. Used as a reward or bribe or bday present etc. Make $M currency.

There was something else, unrelated to $M's, that I've forgot now. Heh, these things happen on Friday nights.

The profile tabs are not saved between profiles. I coded it so that it defaults to whatever you have most content for will show by default, ie if you have 4 downloads, 2 maps and 1 article it will default to showing downloads.

I haven't coded the recent posts thing yet.... obviously.

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I thought about restricting ratings to people who have downloaded a file when you mentioned it a while ago. The problem with it is that I think it's going to be unworkable.

The point of it would obviously be to prevent people who haven't downloaded a file from rating it, but even if you could record this you wouldn't be able to know if they'd actually used the file or not. If someone wanted to get round this all they would have to do would be to click the download link - all I could do would be to record that click, but they wouldn't even have to go through with the download. Being so easily circumventable basically makes the idea useless.

Another problem is recording who has clicked, because unless someone is logged in I can't really record anything to identify that person that isn't changeable. If a user is logged in I can record their user id, but what if they downloaded a file when they weren't logged in, then logged in to rate it? They'd have to dl the file again because I wouldn't have a record of their first download.

You could restrict file dls to only logged in members, but obviously this would be enormously restrictive and ultimately pointless when it'd still be easy to circumvent the check.

Thus, I can't see a practical way of implementing this that wouldn't be totally ineffective.

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User links on the links page would not be a problem, we could have a separate section below the main links. However, there are over 7000 user accounts in the database. How practical would it be to have a page with thousands of random links? It would just be a spam fest. It would also be enormously helpful for automated bot accounts spamming the db with porn links, of which there were hundreds (possibly thousands) before I implemented the registration CAPTCHA which has slowed them down a bit.

You could add admin oversight to this, but I would think that you'd end up being spammed to death.

Making sure links stayed current would also be an issue.

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I didn't put the map/article/user/dl counts on the front page because generating those counts is expensive, especially for a main landing page. There is a faster way of doing it, but it would not return precisely correct values.

However, if you want them back then it'd probably be ok unless the site started getting ultra-busy.... there are quite a few smaller counts in various sections and things are ok. It's the posts one I'm worried about

I also didn't put any user online counts on the main page as there aren't really many people online at once... but yeah, could do, no worries.

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Yeah the user profile stats are all lumped together and it looks crap... I just chucked them there yesterday and didn't have time to do any more work on the profiles, so it's half finished really. I'll break them up a bit so they're more easily readable. I took the separate stats section out because the info can go further up now (and the 'view all' links are in the tab sections), and it moves the profile text higher up the page.

Tables? TABLES??!?!?!? XHTML1.0 DUDE!

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They're actually called 'snarkpoints' in the database, so thats probably why that's happened.

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I had an idea which may address the concerns about users randomly rating files etc and abusing the user rating system.

Obviously rating something/someone requires you to be logged in. How about restricting the ability to rate something based on some arbitrary value like, say, 10 forum posts or 100 snarkmarks.

This certainly isn't foolproof, but it would restrict ratings to people who have actually participated or added something to the site.

I like the idea of restricting it to people with so many snarkpoints since, if they are awarded by other users or for uploading content, it would restrict being able to rate something to people actively contributing to the site.

I don't think you'd have to set the bar too high, just high enough to give newbies time to find their feet.

How about:

Every post - 1 snarkmark
Each map - 100 snarkmarks
Each download - 50 snarkmarks
Each article (once approved) - 100 snarkmarks

We could also use this as a safety mechanism for the site. For example there is nothing currently stopping me registering an account, adding a map, uploading for its images some pornography with an xxx site address on, and having it appear on the 'latest maps' section of the front page.

We could restrict anything showing on the front page like that to user accounts with over 200 snarkmarks (or whatever) too... again it's not perfect and the numbers will need thinking about (I could just add two maps, get 100 marks each and then I'd be on the fp for instance)... but for any auto-bots or trolls who don't immediately know the system on joining it might possibly be a good thing to have.

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Everything else sounds ok... some stuff I was gonna do anyway... will work through it

Production may be slowed while Operation Anchorage is completed

larchy said:
I'll do this when we do the final globat db dump since the forums/topics/posts will need to be relatively up to date and so will be wiped anyway... I'll have to save this feedback thread when that happens tho!

Ok, I think you know what I'm talking about, but for just clarification's sake so that we don't have any problems down the road:

Yes to merging Half-Life Forum AND Radiant Forum together [NOTE: NOT Half-Life 2 Forum! That forum should stay by itself with out ANY merger whatsoever].

Ok, I just wanted to establish that for later down the road

Yea, adding [Radiant Editor] should be fine!

About the Profiles. I like the new tabs on the left! Very snazzy! One thing though, if I select the downloads tab (for example) and that user has 2 or 3 downloads, if I visit another user with 0 downloads, I get a blank slate saying 0 downloads. -The problem is I'm so used to visiting profiles on the SnarkPit, That I expect their maps to load up first every time. It's neat that the site 'saves' which tab you last viewed from profile to profile, but I think it would be much better to ground every profile when you load the page up to it showing the "maps" tab first; blank or not.

About user ratings:

aaron_da_killa said:
If the decision is made to implement that feature, than I ask you to have an option to display your rating.

Well, IMO, being able to disable your rating would defeat the purpose of having a rating system. The only people who would do that would be people with poor ratings.

Perhaps, when viewing your own profile there could be a button that says: "report rating abuse" and it would send an automated pm message to all the super admins. Then the admin could open a dialogue through the pm service with that user, and could change that user's rating by selectively blocking other user's ability to rate that person and removing their rating from his/her list therefore making it more true. -Does that make sense? or would it become too complicated then?

Here are some more feature requests!
[list]
[*]Aaron mentioned copying user links to the Links page but under their own section. I wrote that down and gave it some thought, and figured it would be pretty neat. I would like to see it implemented. Of course, in your edit profile page, you could check a box to have it not show on the Links page. But by default it should.
[*]On the Change E-mail page, it would be nice to see what your current e-mail is before you go changing it (if you haven't visited in a while or have a lot of e-mail address)
[*]I like the "no image" default picture you've placed for articles, I think the same should be done for maps too!
[*]Also if viewing someone's profile, maybe a little section showcasing that person's current signature? (it would show their siggie regardless whether the person selected to "always show my sig by default" in their posts or not. It's info about them and I don't think it should be excluded. Also, when going to change your signature, the form for it is necessary, but just like you can see your current photo and avatar, it would be nice to see your current sig next to the form before you decide to change it!
[*]On the front page of the old old site (Lep's version) you could see exactly how large the pit currently was by seeing a line of text that read:

old Snarkpit said:
6155 active users have made 142045 forum posts, created 2307 maps and written 208 articles. This is SnarkPit v4.5. Welcome to our newest member, downloader!

I'd like to see this line on the front page again! [Note: I know we already have the Snarkpit version number and the "Meet our newest member" section on the top and bottom, but perhaps (just for the front page only) you can add a space below the main nav bar and above the news and spotlight that gives the info I just posted AND tells you how many users are online! (clicking on the "# users online" would send you to the "users online page" of course!) -This should be a default value that anyone sees when visiting the site, logged in or not. It helps show people how big a community we really are and might attract them.

[*]About the listed info on profiles. The globat site has it so that there is a separate section for Stats, now I prefer the tabs on the top right (don't change it back please ), which leaves the "User posts:" section apart of the info block now. I just hate how it's not formatted whatsoever. It makes it hard to read what's title, and what's info.
Looking around, I found I like how Interlopers formatted their info: Interlopers standard profile page. I like our contacting setup, so don't change that. But I do like how they have the titles like: "Username:" & "Location" one color and the actual info: "stoopdapoop" & "Ann Arbor, MI" as another color with everything lined up in an invisible table. If you brought back the Sats section again, I think you could combine the "Joined date", and "last visited" titles with the "User posts". And like where it might say: "aaron_da_killa's profile has been viewed #### times, just say "This Profile has been viewed: #### times" -and that can also be added to the stats section as well.
[]I know you plan to update the BBcode help page with more info about the functions we have, but could you add an auto "color" tag (err, I mean colour ) to all posting forms and have either a list of all the colors with names (which I've found here) or a little drop down list box that has all the colors available and you just select which one you want to use in the post. (The list would also have each color word actually colored). That example took a good five minutes, but with the above feature mentioned, it could take less than 1!
[*]About Snarkmarks: First thing's first, they MUST be labeled as "snarkmarks", not "snarkpoints"!

next thing: I don't know the old forumla Lep actually used to calculate the score, (perhaps you could find it?) But I've talked with a few members about it (if they remembered) and recorded as much as I could. But before I bother mentioned what the calculations were, I found out that everyone seems to be leaning towards the snarkmarks. -They were fun! The cool thing about them was that they recorded everything you did on the site, not just post count. So it made things weighted and encouraged certain actions. If when we get the rating systems all synced up and working, AND when you make it so that a person must click the actual download link before they can rate a map, the snarkmarks can add value to rating other peoples' maps. AND the higher rated your maps are, the more points you get! Same goes for rating other people. the more people you rate, the more points you can get, and the more people that rate you, the more points you can get (depending on their rating) If someone rates you as a 1 you may lose some points. So, before we begin discussing how much everything would be worth, I'd like to wait and see if you can actually find the old equation?
[*] Mentioning that reminds me... The old pit had a page you could visit that listed the top aspects of certain categories. I don't remember where he placed the link to it, but it was one of those hidden features you had to find on your own. The page had categories like: Most downloaded download; most viewed map; most viewed profile; user with highest posts; user with highest rating; user who's rated the most people (and how many people) User who's rated the most people with 1s and then with 5s; User with most posts; User with most articles; Most viewed article.... You get the idea. Just kind of the "hall of fame" page so to speak.

[/list]

And that's all I can think of for now. I'm sure that'll keeps ya busy for a little bit, Na, no worries, these are just more ideas, you sift through them how you please

I'm not very fond of the user rating system to be honest. I think its really easy to abuse and mislead. For example, somebody A might get into a fight with somebody B and somebody A might rate somebody B 1/5, than the two guys might become friends again but somebody A forgets to change his rating for somebody B back to 5/5. Or perhaps somebody C might make a crap map and somebody D constructively criticizes it but somebody C takes offense to it and rates somebody D 1/5.

There used to be a n00b member on the site called thehalflifedude and he was trying to remake Half-Life 2 in Half-Life 1 which larchy, is impossible. And we where constantly trying to help him and steer him in the right direction but the kid was moody and took our advice the wrong way (this is the same kid who changed all of his posts when he realised he was wrong) and his rating of me would always change from 1/5 to 5/5 and back to 1/5 and so on so fourth. I just didn't like the user rating system.

If the decision is made to implement that feature, than I ask you to have an option to display your rating.

Other than that, I agree with pretty much everything Riven has relayed from Orpheus.

Currently everyone does have a default country flag, but it's blank. I did try adding a little globe picture, but it didn't look very good. Setting a default flag is no problem whatsoever if either you or I can find a decent one.

Merging radiant and HL forums is no problem. I'll add '[Radiant Editor]' in front of any radiant thread titles. I'll do this when we do the final globat db dump since the forums/topics/posts will need to be relatively up to date and so will be wiped anyway... I'll have to save this feedback thread when that happens tho!

Profiles m8! added shiny bits!

larchy said:
Certainly this applies to requiring javascript to view something.

Yes, that would. I agree that to require it would be a big NoNo, but on the old site it was an option you could select in your control panel. By default it was on I think, but I think it should be off by default on this site. Turning it on might allow separate windows to pop-up instead for selected options (like the users online and messages). Something to think about down the road maybe. -I thought it was convenient on the old site. But much like the 56k theme, that's something that doesn't need to happen right now. -That's something I'd like to get other people's opinions on first anyway before you ever spend time developing it.

larchy said:
so hope the current titles are ok.

The current titles are fine, so no worries

larchy said:
Hope you noticed I already added titles to the forum display :P See you found the flags too

Yup! I love the new flags option. I wish There was a way to add it automatically for everyone. I think when the time comes to switch to this version of the site, I'll make a front page post highlighting all the new features.

larchy said:
an extra theme would be too much to do right now unfortunately.

Not a problem; I totally understand. You should do what needs to be done first!

larchy said:
One last thing... I made a new forum for discussion threads for articles & downloads... d'ya think they could go in the maps forum and just have one big 'maps/articles/downloads discussion forum'?

I much prefer those forums to be separate. The maps forum is a big place And deserves it's own separate section simply because of the nature of this site. We're a mapping community, and That forum will have different features than the others I think. The Articles/Downloads forum is fine and I don't think it "clutters" the forums database at all. Actually when I mentioned it to Orph, he loved that idea. So, let's keep it the way it is!

larchy said:
Also, what about things like the radiant editor forum? Looks a bit dead now? How about mergin the HL/HL2/Radiant editing forums to just an 'editing' forum?

I thought about that, but most of the time when people post editing questions they tend not to mention which game it is for, and having them both in the same forum will only delay the confusion even more. So, having two different forums lets people know what they're about to read. Let's keep the HL and HL2 editing forums separate, they are two totally different engines and require different knowledge bases. As far as the Radiant forum goes: yes it is dead, and I think it should be merged into the Half-Life forum with little "Radiant" titles displayed over just those posts from it. -The is my work around for not having to actually delete those posts and lose that data. But yes, I would like to get rid of the Radiant forum (Orpheus agreed with us as well in that regard).

Haven't finished working on this yet, but... I think that is looking much better! Has the split layout you mention above which I think works really well for the inbox... although I think it makes more sense to keep the sent/outbox rather than splitting messages you send to people.

That's really awesome Riven, thankyou very much for taking the time to talk with orpheus and write all that. It's enormously helpful to me because I otherwise find it difficult to know what the main part of this community is thinking, especially members who have been involved designing earlier versions of the site.

When I started the redesign I had little to go on other than the relaunch thread, so everything was a blank canvas. That said, I think I've followed a few things you mention above.

For instance one of the main things I wanted to do when I first saw the original site was to bring out all the great content and make it as easy to access as possible, because even main sections like the maps were hidden away and buried beneath a myriad of obscure links. Simplifying how the content was displayed was one of my main aims, and now with the changes tot he games/mods database tables and the new site's maps/downloads/articles sections I think I've finally achieved that fully.

I've also tried to combine some of the old database tables together to (considerably) reduce the number of sql queries, duplicated info and increase database integrity&coherence. I think I took out about 8 tables altogether (some legacy ones still remain, unused), and there are only two main ones left that I want to eventually combine in the future. So yus, simple is best! For the db and the content.... incidentally all the code I've written I've done my best to keep as basic as possible in case someone else comes along in the future. There are a few bits of more advanced code in there, but 95% of it is written out the long way to make it easier to edit.

When it came to certain aspects of the design I prettymuch copied the way that major successful bits of code/site do things. For example the private messages system is prettymuch copied from phpBB, but the 'snarkpit way' sounds interesting - will have a think about that!

When it comes to opening popup windows, that is something I wanted to keep to an absolute minimum because it is universally accepted to be annoying and reduce usability. Certainly this applies to requiring javascript to view something. JS is fine for adding additional 'optional' features - like the spoiler tags or quick reply here, or the sort options on the maps page - but for actually requiring it to be able to view content on the site.... well, that is a big design nono which is why the new site doesn't do that. The only pages that did need it were the addmap/editmap pages, but that wasn't a big deal because it wasn't restricting actually viewing the site's content, and even that isn't needed with the new v6 site.

Soo... hopefully you can understand where I'm coming from with some of the decisions I've made.

The admin titles... funny you should mention that. I noticed the old titles you mentioned when I redid the site and wasn't sure whether to keep them as you'd all be used to them, or make them something less.. er... obnoxious I wasn't really sure what to call each access level, so hope the current titles are ok.

Also, all the access levels were unchanged by me because it's not my site to run and I've no idea who should have what level... so Orph just has whatever lep had last set him I guess. You've got full access Riven and you can change the level by clicking on the moderate button when a user posts, or using the dropdown menu on a user's profile... so that's all up to you m8 If there's anything needs changing that there's no function for then just lemme know. Only reason I have full access is so I can see all the options and make sure they're ok/working... last thing I'd want to be doing is taking any liberties and start acting as a mod or something

Hope you noticed I already added titles to the forum display :P See you found the flags too

Most of the other things are stuff I didn't know about or never got told how it worked/that it was needed. Most of it sounds good so I'll run through everything and try and get what I can implemented! Snarkmarks are still there in the database so I can add the code to support them again

The only thing I'm unsure about is the 56k theme because a)I've already done a bit of work on reducing the site bandwidth (you'll notice all the forum buttons are different now etc... that's part of it as well as the more obvious stuff) and would find it difficult to improve things in most places beyond actually removing all images or something drastic, and b)if it does happen it'll not be for a while as an extra theme would be too much to do right now unfortunately.

As you mention it, I made the 'messages' thing at the top go bold and white when you have new pms on here... but I've changed it to red to make it stand out even more I could add a count of unread msgs like on the old site, but I'm struggling for space in that area.

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One last thing... I made a new forum for discussion threads for articles & downloads... d'ya think they could go in the maps forum and just have one big 'maps/articles/downloads discussion forum'?

Also, what about things like the radiant editor forum? Looks a bit dead now? How about mergin the HL/HL2/Radiant editing forums to just an 'editing' forum?