The Snarkpit Relaunch

I'm thinking we need an :S emoticon.

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Aaron's Stuff

More importantly, a dancing banana:

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Why snark works.

Nice, I think where really going to have to annoy Gwil to get some sweet emoticons on the website :razz:

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Aaron's Stuff

What about a weighted average review points system? It may be a little complex, but I think its the most accurate.<br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;">For instance, you have maps rated on 4 or 5 categories (ie, Aesthetics, Gameplay, Sound, Textures, etc).<br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;">Gameplay is more important (for argument's sake) than Aesthetics, so it would be weighted highest, Aesthetics is more important than sound, so sound is weighted lower than aesthetics.<br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;">You end up with something like:<br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;">I know it is convoluted but it leads to a more accurate assessment of the quality of the map, which would enhance the reputation of the website.<br style="color: white;"><br style="color: white;">Just a suggestion. I'm an accountant, I like to make things harder than they need to be :razz:

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"Lovers of the law and good sausage should never watch either of them being made."

• Otto von Bismarck

Sounds good, problem through, what if somebody makes a map with Aesthetics in mind only, not really focusing on the game play or a similar situation.

Maybe users can select the importance of each category and not include categories that they don't want to be judged on... I don't know.

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Aaron's Stuff

Sounds good, problem through, what if somebody makes a map with Aesthetics in mind only, not really focusing on the game play or a similar situation.

All weights 0, except aesthetics? :smile:

In case you would want to give such a map a full-blown, official "review".

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Why snark works.

larchy has got a beta site running, which we will need a small number of people to help test and iron out any bugs. PM me if you're up for some code hunting, and i'll forward the details to you.

Tis a limited number for now though, so get in quick!

if my knowlege of code went further than making bold/italic text.......

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i eat paint

There has been more changes to the beta site, if people are free to come and give comment!

....unlimited radio options for the poll??? :sad: :sad: :smile: :smile:

Beta site? I didn't know we had a beta site. Can you give me a link?

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Reality has become a commodity.

"Beta site? I didn't know we had a beta site. Can you give me a link?"

Sent via pm - I don't want everyone on there just yet as there are bits that still need some polish

"....unlimited radio options for the poll???"

Yes.

I actually have a lot to say about the idea of making this a good "portfolio" site since that's something I have been thinking about.

(1) Better quality screenshots.
-- You can remote link screenshots, but you don't get any thumbnails then. If the pit could generate those, or let you link them yourself, that would be great. I am left to choose between either three screenshots with thumbs that are compressed so badly they look horrible, or five of the quality of my choosing, but without thumbs. Both options kinda stink.
-- I know there is an obsession to keep the site accessible to the three 56kers out there, but if we are looking at this as a portfolio site then hi-res, high quality screenshots are a must. And I doubt game designers or schools are running on 56k. I'm happy to host/remote link my images myself in terms of bandwidth.
-- In terms of loading time, I doubt offsite linking will be any slower. In fact, loading a page from multiple servers should actually speed up page loading time if client-side bandwidth is not an issue.
-- I know I complain about this a lot, but if someone is looking at your map or portfolio then the screenshots are their first impression. And I spend a lot of time making my maps look nice, so seeing my pretty screenshots ruined by compression artifacts is really frustrating. Crisp, clean screenshots also look a lot more professional.

(2) "Other Work" and/or "Scraps" section.
-- This would be just screenshots for the most part. It would let you show off artwork, maps you collaborated on, pics of mods you worked on or tested, etc. It could also serve as a "scraps" section kind of like on deviantArt- a place to show projects we started that are interesting but don't warrant a separate map entry.

(3) Same Map, Multiple Versions
-- Most of my maps are available in 2-4 flavors (I am a whore). Being able to list the same map as for multiple mods would be great. Would also need to let you have multiple, labeled download links to the different versions.

(4) "New Map" based on actual date or choosing
-- I finally added an old old map to my profile... and it is showing up as "newest map". That's kinda annoying but there's no good way to fix it.

(5) Tutorials
-- Maybe I'm missing it, but a list of all the tutorials you have written would also be nice.

Anyway, just some ideas. :biggrin:

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Action Half-Life - <A HREF="http://distraction-mod.com" TARGET="_blank">Distrac

Hey, some nice ideas imo. So, I assume most of these changes would effect a users profile?

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Aaron's Stuff

LOVE the new site, clean, easy to use and bright! No more squinting for me.

However, clicking on the maps forum section I get "Find user failed" =(

Hmm yes, must an error somewhere with a user account.

Not sure what it is, but I've made a change so that forum doesn't die from the error

Don't forget to check out the alternate stylesheet for the darker look (top right hand corner icon!)... its intended to be more like the original site but still easier on the eyes

This might be just a little nit-picky, but on the forum pages, when I go to look for the latest posts, my eyes always look to the stickies first (because they're at the top), and I have to follow the left edge to find the first post that isn't stickied (ones without the sticky icon). It's a task that has bothered me on other sites, and figured since I get to have a say on this site's design, I might as well say something.

It's not a big deal, but is it possible to have some kind of space or separator between the stickied posts and the regular posts? It's not that big of a deal anyway, but I hope I'm not the only person that feels this way?

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I agree with you man, I'm not noticing quick enough what is sticky and what isn't. Maybe give stickied posts a different coloured background? Or place them above a horizontal divider?

Ah, I'm hoping all these requests aren't too late into the game since we've already migrated over to the new site, but I'll let you know about them regardless.

1.>> When editing my profile, I submitted and refreshed and found that it did not upload my actual 'profile' text that I typed out. It did update everything else but that. I re-attempted four more times to no avail; it remains blank :(.

2.>> I only use steam friends and AIM so I've filled them out appropriately, but I've found that while my steam account gets a nice little quick button under mine and everyone else's avatar in the forums, any reference to my AIM account is ignored. It doesn't even show up in my profile, and there is no icon for it in the forums. I guess a lot of people don't use AIM anymore, or is it not popular enough? Either way, it's just something I noticed that doesn't really bother me. If people really want to contact me, they'll find out how no matter how convenient or inconvenient it is ...... :pccrash:.

3.>> If I decide to preview my reply, it decides to add a backslash '' in front of every apostrophe I've used. I then have to go back into editing to remove them. What's up?

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Yay, the new Snarkpit .

Riven said:
When editing my profile, I submitted and refreshed and found that it did not upload my actual 'profile' text that I typed out. It did update everything else but that. I re-attempted four more times to no avail; it remains blank smiley.

I have the same problem.

Also, I have a suggestion, is there anyway we can make the "show my signature" option by default turned on? Its kind of a pain in the ass to check that box every time and its pretty easy to forgot to turn it on.

Edit: I cant edit my signature either .

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Aaron's Stuff

Use BBcode instead of html for your sig.

-And I second that 'auto-check signature' feature.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Riven said:
Use BBcode instead of html for your sig.

Yeah, I changed it but it isn't updating.

BTW, I like your signature, images in signature ftw!

The old site let people put raw html in the database, which is obviously not a terribly great idea. Everything now, be it forum posts, siggies, map reviews etc, should all work with normal bbcode.

There are filters in the scripts which should translate the html in most older posts so that they still display ok.

If you update your signature you'll have to close and restart your browser to see the changes. This is because signatures are one of the things cached on a per-session basis to reduce the load on the database and improve site performance (hopefully). The cache should be updated when you change your siggy... but obviously it isn't so I'll take a look at it when I get time. For now you can use the above workaround though... hope that clears up any confusion.

This may also be the reason for profiles not updating... I'll take a look at sorting the mentioned problems out over the next couple of days.

A separator to delineate stickies is a good idea... I'll add that when I can.

The slashes being added on previewed replies sounds like addslashes() being called in the wrong place or not use stripslashes() on the output... again it will be fixed when I can.

cheers.

Incidentally, how has performance been for people?

My performance is fine today, it was a little slow yesterday but I attributed that to Globats side of the operation to be honest. I'll tidy up that front page news as soon as we have a definite competition guideline from Riven!

Gwil said:
I'll tidy up that front page news as soon as we have a definite competition guideline from Riven!

Well, I haven't bothered to write one out just yet. I will give it until this Saturday or Sunday to see if anyone else seconds an idea or presents any new ones. Then I will find the best one and structure something out.

-yea, my performance started out really slow, like dial-up slow, then for the past two days it has been pretty fast (or as fast as SnarkPit has always been for me). Sometimes it gets hung up on loading just the forums menu page.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Changes:

Line added below stickies

Error corrected where profile text wasn't updating

The profile cache now updates when you edit your profile

Backslashes on forum preview text removed (this was actually to do with the server's php configuration)

AIM contact icons fixed

Profile option added to enable/disable adding signature by default when posting.

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After initially moving over to the new code I noticed everything was pretty slow. I took a look at the database and, after backing everything up for the hundreth time, deleted all the tables which had been made obsolete by the new ones I'd made. This was about... 11am-ish yesterday I think... everything seemed to speed up quite a bit after that, but I don't know if it was anything to do with halving the size of the database or just coincidental as things have always been a bit temperamental.

Just seemed a bit better after I did that, so hope it stays that way!

Fixed issue that prevented smiley list displaying on the right when posting

Awesome, you work fast Larchy, your like our own website angel

...Yeah I just wanted an excuse to look at all the new smilies and use one I never have before :P

Just tried to find the memberlist and realised that it's actually really rather hard to get to. In the end I couldn't find a direct link, but had to go to my own user profile and then click the small memberlist link from there. I reckon "members" or "users" should be one of the tabs along the top bar. What do you guys think?

EDIT: Also, the memberlist currently seems to have a couple of issues. Firstly, that you can't sort by postcount, which was the only thing I was interested in sorting by. Secondly, sorting by some of the other things breaks the table (articles, maps, downloads...).

yea, sorting by post count is a good idea, but putting it up on the main nav bar might be a little much. That is, I don't think it's as important as articles and links. But I can't back-up my claim because I also can't think of a better place to put it either.

[EDIT]: It looks like it will add the backslashes if you return to editing after previewing. But if you post it from the preview page they're not there.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

The new site looks good Larchy. Still a bit buggy but its nice over all.

The site is running slow for me. I'll open a form post in a different tab and it will take like 30 sec to start loading but once it does it load rather quickly.

Sometimes when i try to change the pists theme, by way of that neat little button, the page will go blank and not refresh. Even when i try to refresh manually.

I think it be nice if there was a way to jump form section to form section without going back to the main index. Say if you wanted to got form general banter directly to maps.

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Reality has become a commodity.

By who?

Also, I'm having a bit of trouble noticing the folks signatures, instead of the signature starting under the users avatar, could we have them underneath the forum posts.

edit: If you look at Riven's last post in this thread, you can see the extra slashes, this is the preview error I was talking about before.

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Aaron's Stuff

I have the invisible user problem too. I got a PM, I think from Muhnay and his name has disappeared.

I preview my posts several times and they look fine, then why I submit I'm sure the ' gets replaced by \\\\', looks like it's run over the post twice. Also getting newlines replaced by
. Post stays fixed when I edit out all the rubbish.

Also the signatures are annoying being so wide right now, they look like paid adverts. Site is faster than it was a day or two ago. It seems that all maps have 1 rating right now of 0 stars. Unless someone is actually rating all maps 0 stars it's a bit misleading.

Everything else looks good, this site has changed a lot from the yellow on black I was used to. I saw mention of focus moving away from tutorials, is that so? I've spent a huge amount of time reading the HL1 tutorials on this site and recommended them to a lot of people (and still do), and they cover things a lot of sites don't. I'd hate to see them go.

The tutorials are still here - just contained under "articles" now. Our chief problem is of course that we don't have enough people writing tutorials. If you wish to volunteer, do so now :P

The tutorials are still here - just contained under "articles" now. Our chief problem is of course that we don't have enough people writing tutorials. If you wish to volunteer, do so now :P

Muhnay's name disappeared from your pm because I changed the name of his Moneyshot account to Muhnay and deleted his newer account - see the thread where he asks about this for details.

Aaron's issue looks like a problem with the cache... I'll look into it but might take a while to track that one down.

Moving siggies across is no problem.

I'll take another look at the problems with previews since people are still having issues.

Hmmm... ok, hopefully its fixed now. Sorry about this guys.

Please don't be apologetic larchy You have been more than generous with your time and efforts so far, I for one am extremely grateful for the work done so far as i'm sure all other members are too!

If I were a mover and shaker in parliament, I'd set about a bill to have a statue of you erected in some prominent public place!

Excellent. It would no doubt shoot laser beams from its eyes and cause all pigeons to spontaneously combust within an 80ft radius.

Changed the display for siggies.... any better?

Sim said:
It seems that all maps have 1 rating right now of 0 stars. Unless someone is actually rating all maps 0 stars it's a bit misleading.

These ratings are titled "unrated" if you mouseover them, however I have altered the graphics by adding the text "unrated" to clarify their meaning.

I say you should make a little 'ode to the developer' section in the site when you're finished. A tribute and a 'thank-you' for the man who brought us up out of the darkness and into a new refreshed light!

-Thanks for all the work you're doing. I hope this is benefiting you as much as it is us!

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Riven said:
I say you should make a little 'ode to the developer' section in the site when you're finished. A tribute and a 'thank-you' for the man who brought us up out of the darkness and into a new refreshed light!

-Thanks for all the work you're doing. I hope this is benefiting you as much as it is us!

Seconded.

An environment free of advertising is a healthier one by a long shot

In the links area

Prefabland
Editing Collective
Hot Death Diner
Half-Life Radio
Source Prefabs
HL2 Coders
Cheroke Team
Half-life.org
halflife2source
PCGameMods
hl2mappers

Are all broken, domain is lost, or lead to nowhere.

Also, how about a "new threads" area, so we can click it and get a nice listing of all the new threads since we've been on the site?

Also, a "newest post" link per thread would be nice.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Where are all my Snark Marks and the photo of me,why can't I comet maps,tutorials...?
The site is fixed,but there are removed things,that i miss!I think that the old SnarkPit is iven better.

Cheers guys

1) Links Page

Everything on here is editable by site admins via the control panel. When I redid the site Gwil requested this so that it would be easy for him to update the page.

I pointed out at the time that most of the links were dead, but now that it is easy to add/edit/remove links from this page I am sure that he'll be able to fix any current problems when he gets time.

Its not something I have touched because I have no idea what should or shouldn't be on there, or if any sites have new URLs etc

2)New threads/last post link I'll look into certainly

3)This thread was started in November. I started developing the new site in February. There was a beta site for months. As far as I can recall snarkmarks were never mentioned, noone requested them when it was obvious they weren't a part of the new site (there was a "Feature request list" on the beta site which was started in May to cover things like this).

I could look at bringing them back but tbh since in all that time noone has mentioned them I'm not convinced it is something that would be worth spending time on. I would also need to be told how the system actually worked in order to recreate it.

You can comment maps. When you view a map there is a huge box titled "reviews". In it there is a button called "write review".

Originally this was called "comments" and you could post any short comment you wished, but in discussions here and on the beta site members of this forum argued that there should be a minimum word limit of 200, which I added despite my own objections that this would simply discourage user feedback and leave the system mostly unused/redundant.

If you would prefer a shorter commenting system instead of the 200 word minimum reviews then thats something that could maybe be further discussed amongst yourselves.

Comments on articles would appear to have been overlooked. I would assume that is something that should be added really... is that another place that would require a 200-word minimum?

I relent! You can reduce the 200 word limit if it means we get comments back, and keep people happy. Perhaps admins can still have the red cross/edit pad to moderate comments though - with a guideline (eg Try to feedback constructive and relevant, identify good and bad areas of the map).

Links, i'll sort out later thanks Crono - unless larchy got there first. I know for one to be added as well in MapCore so that's good.

Snarkmarks, don't bother returning IMO. If there is a loud enough outcry, maybe so, but I don't think they're pivotal to the site in any way.

Apologies for my fleeting presence still, only got one more family birthday to clear but it's my dads 60th so not only do we have that (I cook round here..) but I have a party to cater for on Saturday too

I'm glad to see my concerns about excessive image compression have been taken seriously ;p

And why are my maps popular

Turning up the image quality was one of the first things I did

Even if the old ones weren't so bad the space saving was negligible.

You might be getting quite a lot of views because your maps are appearing on the "recent updates" list, and one is spotlighted and so is frontpage all the time.

larchy said:
Turning up the image quality was one of the first things I did

Um I was being sarcastic. They actually look worse than before. It seems we have traded compression artifacts for DOOM-esqu pixelation?

I don't like the new 'profiles' either. The one-page profiles that showed your actual maps were much more user-friendly and useful. They could serve as a makeshift portfolio, even. The current profiles are pretty bland, with only tiny links to actually look at your work. And what it takes you to is just a search page on the regular map database- your maps are not even part of your actual profile! Oh, and my beta maps don't show up at all.

Basically, there are no "pits" any more. Just useless user profiles like any generic forum has.

Sorry to be negative, I know you put a lot of work into the new site. But I just don't see how this is an improvement. As far as I can tell, the big change is that we are losing features left and right.