Did I tell you how much I love the quick reply feature! -It's awesome; I think it might actually encourage more people to post more often!

Anyhow, I finally got around to calling up Orpheus the other day, and we had a good long hour chat (and I'm sure my long distance bill will be out of the roof!), but it was totally worth it. He visits a lot more than I thought, he just doesn't have time to post. So, he tends to follow the main discussions, and he always checks his pms. Which was his first point when I asked him about the new site.

As you guys know, He and Leperous were very VERY tight-nit amigos on the old site. And as a result, He could tell Leperous what he thought the site should have and Leperous would find a way to implement it. About 98% of all the features and items on the old site came directly from the mind of Orpheus, and by the end of our conversation, I was convinced they were. Of course, a lot of the other members delivered their feedback to make the site what it was, much how we're doing now!

So what did the great Orpheus have to say? I was afraid to ask at the time, but his general good-will and fun-loving nature showed through, and I was able to chock back a good dialogue with him, but good lord, that man can talk up a storm!

So on with the advice. I want to specify firstly, Orpheus really hasn't gotten the chance to check the site out a whole lot. Where he lives, they still don't have internet, and the DSL is expected to be laid in within a year or so (so they say), so his comments were pulled from memory of the old site and comparing what he knew with his little experience on the new site. Of course, I tried focusing his attention on a lot of the new features that larchy has implemented to let him know we have a good guy working on this. With that he had plenty to say.

So, one of his first comments was on the "private message" system. The way it was designed on the old site, was there were two boxes. An "Inbox" & "Outbox". Unread messages in the Inbox were bold and had a different icon associated with them. Clicking on it, would open up a JavaScript window with the message in it and a button to reply to. Clicking the reply button loaded the reply form page in that same JVS window. "It was convenient" He said. The Outbox had a different story. The Outbox was split into two sections. The top section contained "Read" messages; the bottom, "Unread" messages. The two repeatable regions were totally separate from one another and had the appropriate titles to go along with them. "All on one page; simple".

The color scheme: The reason for the color pallet on the old site, was purely Orph's idea. The yellow gave a high contrast against the black allowing him to read everything easily. The old site had 6 different themes, one of them being a "56K" theme, which is what he recommended for our site. Many of you will remember Orpheus being very big on image resolution and dimensions. He suggested if there were another important theme to add, it would be a 56K theme for those people out there who still have to live with it (and he assured me there are). Of course, he was mentioning this in the context of the Globat server, which isn't a big dilemma now when we transfer the site over to our new hosts, but I'm all for the idea of a 56K user theme. How many other sites have that feature! BTW, he likes the new oldschool theme, and after mentioning his like of a blue theme, I quickly replied: "we're already testing that one out right now!". So I think we're on the right track!

Moving on! I had mentioned in a feature request list not too long ago asking for a better way to highlight messages on the front page if you had any so that you could take notice. Well, Orpheus took the next step: On the old site, he had Leperous actually bold AND color the text bright red to let it stand out against the black background (and I think the font size was increased a little too) so that there was no way you could miss it. -I am tending to agree now as well. I also like how on the other version of this site, you could see in parentheses how many messages were waiting for you too; is it possible to re-fit that in too you think? -Not a big deal really.

Another small feature he had implemented on the old site was the "who's online?" page. On the old site, it would open in a JV window as well, so you could continue surfing the site, and be able to refresh that window and see constantly who's on the site. The list itself actually didn't list the current active members in alphabetical order either, no, it listed them from the top down, the members' join date order. The earlier members were listed at the top, and later joiners at the bottom. Fan service really, but back then when the pit was still more active, it was a lot of fun to see and catch who were the original members on the site. -I never noticed the feature myself, but looking back on it, I remember Orpheus being at the top of the list quite often. "It was a way of showing active rank".

The admin titles. Orpheus used to be an admin, but I learned that Leperous was very strict with the privileges, and even though the two were good buddies, Lep would constantly turn on and off admin ability for Orph, leaving him not caring any more, until he started noticing exactly what Lep was calling himself. Lep saw himself as the "Uber Lord" and all other members were his minions. And his title on his profile reflected that, and that was something Orph found wrong. I told him about the different level accesses we have on this site, and the names to go along with them. He agreed that there should be some indication on who's an admin and who's not, just don't go naming them "Uber Lord" or anything like that. "That kind of mentality drives people away."

The other features he was able to recall at the time were the User rating system and the snarkmarks. The user rating system was put in place to show people who to stay away from, and who to look for. Simply put, it was an option much like the rating systems on maps now, that allowed other uses to rate a user's performance on the site. Options 1-5. It was successful for the most part, and gave you another clue about the person when viewing their profile. -If this were to be re-implemented, there should still be entries for it in the DB. -I'm all for it. As for the snarkmarks, I let him know we follow post count solely now. The snarkmarks were a way of showing user activity on the site, and encouraged users to take advantage of the other features (rather than just posting in the forums) I remember personally that adding a tutorial on the site would have given you a butt load of snarkmarks. then adding maps, then downloads, then when someone would make your response the correct response to an editing problem, and the one for making a post. You could display them proudly and it made sure most editing questions would get answered, but we don't have that feature yet.

The last thing I wrote down from the mouth of Orpheus was his constant reminder throughout the conversation to "not make the Database so complicated. "Keep it simple" He said. Too much complexity drives people away. that's why there have always been so few forums. So, I hope we can live up to his ideals of a mapping community in the near future! As soon as he can get his internet back, he says, he'll be up on here as active as he used to be, so the pit is definitely will see a rise in activity one day again!

Latest maps rss feed added!

oops, sorry... old database innit Access changed!

No the new host will be fine with showing more forum topics... it's just globat was so slow and the database timed out with relatively small queries that I wanted to try and limit the load as much as possible else the whole site would grind to a halt... especially with lots of users. The new one is working as it should, no worries... although I still want to restrict showing extra stuff to registered users - no point having resources raped by non-members

Yeah could probably squeeze the 'welcome <blah blah>' message into where the newest member thing is... I was thinking about where the controls above that are as there wouldn't be enough room without squashing the main logo.

Yus, no doubt Orpheus can tell me everything I've done wrong again j/k

Oh, and any thoughts on what sorts of limits we can have for uploading maps now? Given that we have unlimited bandwidth and disk space and a POST upload limit of 50MB? (as opposed to a few measly MB with globat)

I did do a little work on an upload progress bar when uploading maps etc and had a flash one working at one point (just as a test, wasn't properly integrated with the site) but IIRC it was gonna take a lot of time to fix up and I wanted to get lots of other stuff done first. It's something I'll probably work on in the future which would be good if we started allowing larger uploads.

larchy said:
Oh, and you may want to have a look over the games admin section Riven. I changed a few game names, but most still need cleaning up... I'll get round to it eventually. Also added a thing to upload game icons for each theme... got a couple of new ones, will make some more at some point!

I don't have level 4 access on this version of the site so I can't see what you're talking about.

larchy said:
Number of forum topics that are displayed when viewing a forum is now selectable from your control panel > edit profile

Yay! That's great! (side note: MAN, I'm LOVING the new host! I can check out all these new things so quickly now! it's awesome! /side note)

larchy said:
btw I think the number of posts etc per page was limited because the database would have died on globat if ppl could increase it.

So, you're saying it will not be good for the new host either?

larchy said:
However... maybe some sort of front page would be nice, and we could have a 'latest maps' and/or maybe even a 'random maps' section(s)... or whatever. Will have a think smiley

I understand the work done to the games database, and I wholly accept it. I think that is a better idea, I just like the idea of a fully formatted list on the first "Maps" page to help people get a grasp with exactly how many maps we have in our DB. I know the drop down box has them all and the number of maps beside them, but if one person is looking through the icons, because they saw an icon on the front page and wanted to see the maps for it, the drop down box can't offer that. I dunno; it just makes sense to me to add a formatted list like on the globat site.

'm not sure where the 'welcome <random peon>!' link would fit Riven... if its a link to your profile that is missing then maybe a 'view your profile' link on the control panel page is what's needed?

Really? It doubles as another way to show you're logged in (other than seeing login/logout at the top) I think it's important enough to push the "hi, welcome our newest member ____" phrase to the side. I don't think it will look too cluttered eh? -Of course it only shows if you're logged in.

That's all the time I have now; I will look into the site some more later, I need to get to bed :zzz:. I'm thinking about giving Orpheus a call to jog his memory on all the features he requested on the old site as I know he was a major proponent in its development. Hopefully he'll have something good to say

Number of forum topics that are displayed when viewing a forum is now selectable from your control panel > edit profile

Article names made clickable on the articles list page.

Hovering over stars now shows number of ratings for both maps and articles.

---

btw I think the number of posts etc per page was limited because the database would have died on globat if ppl could increase it.

I'll add a posts number select menu nps for the forums... for the maps page I ain't so certain. I was actually thinking of taking it down to 9 (current is 12) per page to save bandwidth... although we've got unlimited bandwidth here so I don't think it's a big deal. Don't wanna take the micky tho

Thanks for the feedback guys, sounds good! Will get working on things over the next week and really polish things up nicely!

I'm not sure where the 'welcome <random peon>!' link would fit Riven... if its a link to your profile that is missing then maybe a 'view your profile' link on the control panel page is what's needed?

About the maps page... the current main menu page on the globat site is what I came up with to be able to organise the old database system, and it got absolutely ripped and slated by ppl who said it looked awful That's why I went to the trouble of reorganising the games database to simplify the layout.

However... maybe some sort of front page would be nice, and we could have a 'latest maps' and/or maybe even a 'random maps' section(s)... or whatever. Will have a think

A lot of things are just stuff that's been overlooked really... a note for who the admins are for, article names not being clickable etc... no worries, will fix. Number of ratings when hovering the star icon is an excellent idea and quicker to change than me typing this sentence

Oh, and you may want to have a look over the games admin section Riven. I changed a few game names, but most still need cleaning up... I'll get round to it eventually. Also added a thing to upload game icons for each theme... got a couple of new ones, will make some more at some point!

The private messaging doesn't quite look right... the formatting for the posts looks off, will have to have a play around with that.

thanks guys, massive help, appreciated

For the articles page I think it would be a good idea if the title of each article was a link to the article, because I was browsing the articles page and I wanted to read one of the articles (for bug finding purposes) and I instinctively moused over the title of the article only to my horror to discover it wasn't a link! I had to search for like 1.5 seconds and I saw the "view article" button.

By the way, the sites looking real nice, the new changes are awesome!

Here's a list of a few features I'd like to see implemented into this build...

• Clicking the "new post" icon in a thread will take you to the 1st post you haven't read. Check this forum for an example of what I mean over at Interlopers. (I dunno if you have to be logged in order to use it :/ ) -In their forum, they have a separate button that does this task.
• -Can we include a drop down list option box that lets you select how many posts you want to show per page in a thread? (from 10-20-50-100?) -This would be a universal option in your control panel. I remember the old site having this feature. I liked it a lot.
• Please bring back the "Welcome (your username here)" message/link at the top of the bar; I like to view my profile, and assuming that others like to as well, that link makes it easy for them.
• I don't know if people found this annoying or not, but to allow auto-locking topics in the general banter forum if they haven't been responded to in over 4 months. This would only apply to the general banter forum. -And admins would have the ability to make certain threads (that we wouldn't want to sticky) never lock. -Like the "Recently found" threads... -Or would that be too confusing for users and not necessary?
• This is just my personal opinion and am quite coy in mentioning it, as I think other sites recognize it... But I think people need to know who their admins are. On the old site, Lep made it so that those users' names would be highlighted a different color, or we could do what Interlopers does and have just the word "Moderator" or "Administrator" under their posts. If people are having problems, they need to know who to go to. -And or who to fear.
• Does it make sense to add the (memberlist) button to the top of the control panel page as well? (same place).
• also add a drop down list arrow to show more maps per page as well when viewing them.
• -For the Maps page; I kind of liked the idea of having a main menu page. As it stands on the older version of the site still on the Globat server, when clicking the maps page, it would show a list of all the games on the left, allowing you to see their icons along with them (which is fairly important IMO, and helps people associate their maps with the games) The dropdown lists used for sorting now are fine, and would remain on the top bar, but just a main page to look back on would be nice I think.
• hovering your mouse over the rating of maps should show the alternate text dialogue box of how many ratings that map received instead of just listing the number of stars.
• Because it's commonplace for people to abandon their maps, I think there should be an option to do so that adds an "Abandoned" stripe across their pictures just like the "Beta" stripe we have now.
• I don't know if this would require a new DB entry, but for map profiles, I'd like to see their original post date and THEN their last update date. Is there an entry for this already on the DB to filter through a recordset as new info on a map's profile?
• I think it makes the site more user friendly, if by clicking on article thumbnail images in the articles list brings you to the article itself instead of limiting it to just the "view article" button.
• I know we don't have new list of iconsets yet, but for now, could you add the functionality for "Hot topic" threads? -Any thread with 50 posts or more becomes a 'hot topic' and receives a different icon. -We can use a placeholder icon for now...

That's all I have for now. The new site looks amazing, and I'm loving the new features and organization!