Snarkpit v6 Alpha - all visitors please read!

larchy said:
No idea how lists work (somewhat worrying since I coded the function that makes them ).

lol, and I felt embarrassed for not figuring it out by myself.

You're changing those things lightning-fast, larchy... I feel like I just posted about them - now everything already done!

One more little polishing thing: Could you add some indent to custom code boxes (quotes, code, etc.)? They kinda stick too much to the border, visually.

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Why snark works.

reaper47 said:
You're changing those things lightning-fast, larchy

Hah, he does that. Things are rolling here! When you've got larchy on the job you need no other!

to make a list, you can use the list tag button at the top to form the two [ list] & [ /list] tags and then place your separate bullets between them using the [ *] button at the top. for each [ *] you get one of these: [list][*][/list]

If you use the [ list=] tag instead, each [ *] is listed as a number in sequence. until you close it with the [ /list] tag. Like this:
[list=][*]
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]
[/list]Easy Peazy!

reaper47 said:

• I don't like the idea of not being able to edit a post after 30 minutes. There are many good reasons why you should be able to do so (updating outdated information, links, fixing confusing errors, avoiding double-posts (such as this one) etc.). Identifying edited posts by a short warning (or maybe even archiving the originals) should be enough to avoid evil out-of-context edits.

Sure, we could remove the time limit, but I ask you to give it some time first. I think it just takes some getting used to. Having been using it for the past three or four months, I like knowing that the last post is the most up-to-date info, and not some post a page back someone edited. I might miss edited info and never know it. Double posts never bothered me. If I had to correct a mistake hours after making it, I can always copy + paste to re-iterate what I was originally talking about. The only problem I could see this causing is if anyone who was hosting a competition or similar, and wanted to keep the thread updated by using the first post, I think they should be able to edit that anytime they wanted with the "last edited XXXX" message appearing at the bottom of it. Same goes for links and whatnot. If you want to make a thread that you'd hope others could use for a resource, then by posting all the info in the first post, would allow you to update it and whatnot. subsequent posts after it are meant for discussion and should be permanent with amends later if the user made a mistake realization after the 30 min time marker. Forums are reflective of real-life discussions, and therefore, you shouldn't be able to re-write what you've said and screw the entire discussion over for anyone else who might be viewing it after the matter.

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

I should also point out that the edit time does not apply to mods or higher.

I did have an idea that we could make removal of the edit limit an unlock once you get to so many snarkmarks?

Added country flags for England, Scotland, Wales and the EU, if anyone is feeling patriotic

Hello

I like the new fell of the site. It's a definite improvement over the old site.

Few things:

When browsing the maps section the text will pop up when u hover over it. witch is nice but if you click on it while hovering over the text are it wont click into the maps page. I'd like it if clicking on the text are also took u to the maps page.

My monitor is 1440x900. I'd like it, if possible, for the with of the pages to be dynamic so stretch to fit monitors better.

Your doing a fantastic job Larchy. I find it surprising you would do all this work for us considering you never really used the site before you came to help us out. Thank you.

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Reality has become a commodity.

no worries

I'll take a look at the overlay link thing... you're probably right about that needing changed.

Unfortunately variable width is troublesome because it makes laying out content far more complex. This isn't an issue for text based pages like these forums where you can just make the element widths a percentage, but it definitely is for places like the front page and maps pages where the layout is built around images which can't just be dynamically resized. If you look around virtually all websites, certainly the major ones and those dealing with dynamic content, are all designed in this centre aligned fixed width fashion for these (and other) reasons.

It is a shame to restrict the width so much, but when I widened the width with the current globat theme people started complaining it was too wide (about 1200px I think?), which is why this new site has it's current narrower width.

I did think that wider layouts could be added as additional themes in the future though, so there'll probably be some fixed-width widescreen layouts added at some point

Thanks for the feedback

Overlay clikyness sorted

Cleaned up and improved the search results pages quite a bit!

RedWood said:
My monitor is 1440x900. I'd like it, if possible, for the with of the pages to be dynamic so stretch to fit monitors better.

It's no joy to read a too broad text window. Even if you don't notice it at first, there are many good reason to stick to a maximum width. You don't accidentally skip lines and you have to move your eyes less. It's the reason why big news papers arrange their text in columns rather than stretch it over the whole page. That's why all professional layouts do the same for websites.

Speaking of typography: This forum text needs an additional 0.1-0.2 pt line distance.

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Why snark works.

How's that?

If you have time larchy, you should give a read to this currently active thread going on over at Interlopers. Basically, they're talking about adding a rating system to their maps and having top rated maps filtered for a "great maps" section that users could look through.

It makes me laugh because I know SnarkPit has had this feature for years before Interlopers was ever conceived of and yet it troubles me to wonder why they remain popular and our site has died out so much. Because for some reason, I think this site gained the reputation for being "elitist" back in the day and therefore not enthusiastic for new users. Which has always been a misconception unfortunately.

Their discussion did bring up a new point though. I know we have our rating system, and we will have 5 star-rated maps next to obvious "godly" maps that have had that much more time put into them, but our system has no way of showing the 'spectacular' maps. I was hoping as one of the features for a Map menu page would be a link or listing of hand-picked awesome maps and downloads on the pit. You'd have '5 star' rated items, and then you'd have 'outstanding' items (filtered out by people [admins] who know what users are talking about and have experienced the content themselves and are capable of making an informed decision about content that is 'extraordinary').

There is no reason why our site (after the switch) can't handle 100 plus active users like Interlopers or MapCore. We have all the cool features and knickknacks (plus some) like they do. (not to mention a very active web god continuing to support us!) Can anyone answer me why?

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

Yeah no worries m8, good idea - I can just add a 'featured' option that an admin can add to a map, and give them there own special 'featured' icon and add a 'featured maps' option to the search list

What do you guys think about adding an emoticon for your forum posts?

I must admit, I enjoy the novelty of adding in my mood/morale for each post on the forums I occasionally visit that have this feature and always check what peoples custom emoticon for their post was :D. Ofcourse, there should be a no emoticon option available as the default option for the folks who don't want to bother with this.

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Aaron's Stuff

Riven said:
It makes me laugh because I know SnarkPit has had this feature for years before Interlopers was ever conceived of and yet it troubles me to wonder why they remain popular and our site has died out so much. Because for some reason, I think this site gained the reputation for being "elitist" back in the day and therefore not enthusiastic for new users. Which has always been a misconception unfortunately.

This might be more of a philosophical debate than anything you could turn into a site feature, but I think that the "problem" of the Snarkpit is that it, and its user base, have simply grown up - quite literally. I think you feel kinda lost as a 14-year old (and many many, including myself picked up mapping at about that age). We don't really have the nerves to put up with the hormonal outbursts of a typical newbie at that age, we don't really celebrate the latests 4chan-memes in Off-Topic threads... It's the reason why I can stand this place, while getting annoyed rather quickly by Interlopers.

A big plus point might also be the fashionable "blog style" layout. The front page of Interlopers is essentially Source engine news. Updated regularly, with links to respective forum posts and vivid discussion threads. Again, I don't really see the Snarkpit doing the same, though...

Point 3, IMO, is that, with our focus on HL2DM, mappers for CSS ect. feel a bit lost again. No, we do not state anywhere that we are a HL2DM site, but look at the mapping sections of Interlopers, look at the spotlight maps... 80% CSS. I guess that sums up the mapping community as a whole. Now compare that to the Snarkpit mapping section and the kind of quality you have to deliver to get a respectful nod for a map. It might not be elitism, but our preferences are definitely a little off the mainstream.

Last but not least (and please don't get this the wrong way): That white-on-black color theme, which admittedly has become a trademark of the Snarkpit, just isn't fashionable any more. There, I said it. I'm not really for turning all into white and pink now, but the Snarkpit theme certainly has this 1999-2001 feel to it, design wise, and it doesn't really scream "I'm the hip and trendy place for mappers" like the Interlopers frontpage does. We have the better service, but it doesn't look as simple and inviting as the rather straight forward Interlopers layout. I remember feeling intimidated the first time I visited the Snarkpit, not knowing wth a "pit" or "map profile" was, whether I needed to have frontpage-worthy maps to join and the whole theme had an "underground club" feel to it, like you needed to go through an initialization rite in order to join. Interlopers is just a big forum.

Now that I wrote all this... maybe it's not that bad of an idea to swallow the bitter pill and admit: The Snarkpit is an elitist place in some way or another. Maybe not in the way we think, but if so many people have been saying it for such a long time, maybe it's a good idea to instead of going "Bah, humbug!", we take that claim seriously and think of how to change it?

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Why snark works.

reaper47 said:
Last but not least (and please don't get this the wrong way): That white-on-black color theme, which admittedly has become a trademark of the Snarkpit, just isn't fashionable any more. There, I said it. I'm not really for turning all into white and pink now, but the Snarkpit theme certainly has this 1999-2001 feel to it, design wise, and it doesn't really scream "I'm the hip and trendy place for mappers" like the Interlopers frontpage does.

That's why I tried to change it back in the summer... but heaven above the outcry

It's also why I made themes modular so you can always change them in future, and why I made the blue theme.

Tbh I think Interlopers looks really bland :/ Everything is better than that eyesore vomit-on-concrete on TWHL though.

Oi! Riven! Maps landing page!

Oh, very nice!

-Feature request:
For the contact page, can you make mention (perhaps with a screen shot of the page itself) and link to the SnarkPit Steam Community page: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/snarkpit If people wish to contact us via that method as well.

-Response to Aaron's request:
I like the idea. It can be added to your profile, but I don't find the need to add it to forum posts. Having more than two images on a post (especially custom images) begins to clutter each post. It seems more appropriate for Profiles. Which reminds me larchy, On the globat site, you have mention of "user journals." -What happened to this feature? On the Lep version of SnarkPit, users could make announcements in their profiles and select a check mark that submitted the news to be added to the front page. So anyone could post front page news about whatever, but it would get moderated by an admin first. Could we bring that back, and also retrofit old user news to keep the DB full? Or did you run into a brick wall on that feature? I know as a user it was nice to make an announcement that everyone could see about competitions. It's a way for other users to be active on the site and treat their profile as an actual up-to-date profile page/blog. We're a community, so I think we should highlight this feature!

-Feature request:
The new star banner should be visible over the images on that map's profile page too. Not just in the Maps section. -Should act like the beta banner and the new abandoned banner as well. BTW, I would like for the abandoned banner to have a red stretch behind it regardless of the theme; the Beta banner to have a blue stretch behind it. Would that be too much you think? Should it remain the way you have it now? I thought it might help people spot unfinished and abandoned maps better. Although, coating abandoned maps with a red banner might be antithetical to their status. Abandoned maps might be ones you'd want to avoid and red tends to be a high-contrast color.

I'll speak more on this later. I have some other things to mention, but I need to cut myself off short this time. I'll continue when I get back!

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

The maps page looks better.

What if in the game select drop down menu the most popular or recent games were separated by a line and placed at the top. I don't like scrolling and 95% of the time only a few will be used. (CS:S, TF2, HL2DM, Portal, Hl2 Single player, L4D)

I like the featured games thing. I think it should be extended to L4D, CS:S and Hl2DM, HL2, and maybe more. Have the maps shown in the featured games be randomly selected every time the page is refreshed. Would the cost of bandwidth for a page like this be a problem?

Have the random featured maps go for 2 rows to make up for the games not being shown in the featured sections.

I'd like to see a line or divider of some kind in-between the featured games.

All the pics on the maps page (maybe every page. im to lazy to look) have a dubble border on the bottom and left. i don't know if this is to make the pic look lifted or something but i find it annoying.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Hmm could probably just sort the dropdown menu by the number of maps, although it's alphabetical at the moment and doing that could make it tougher to find the less popular mods.

Will have a think... I've got an idea

The featured games section is controllable by admins! So any game can be added in just a couple of clicks... all that is needed is the banner graphic

The maps for featured games already are randomly selected, although only from maps that have an average rating higher than 3 stars. Can easily change that if it doesn't work too well.

Um, the bandwidth is less than the existing maps pages We've got unlimited bandwidth with this host, but even so the new themes have been done to reduce bandwidth, all the image generation is dynamic and the output quality controllable by admins etc. For an image-heavy site it's pretty good tbh.

I did some work on the globat site in October that roughly halved the bandwidth use, and noone noticed anything had changed so that worked pretty well... and the new site is better again.

I think there are some minor alignment and width issues with the map thumbnails and overlays that need to be fixed - I thinkt hat is what you're seeing.

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Riven - I had some problems early December that meant I lost a lot of work, including a bunch of code I was working on for user journals, and tbh I didn't have the heart to redo it all. Will take a look at it again though.

For 'star maps' there is an extra icon above the rating in the map info section. I did that instead of the banner because on the full map page I thought adding banners would just be obscuring the pictures when people have clicked to get a full view of the map.

Dumdiuu...

Download section:
The thumbnail images should lead to bigger ones. Also the discussion topics are non-existent for all entries. The link to the discussion topic should either be optional or be replaced by an actual comment section.

User profiles:
I find the 4 maps per page layout to be slightly irritating. Mostly because it puts my least fruitful mapping attempt at the top and my second-favorite map to page two. An option to manually rank your own maps would be awesome. Of course, simply displaying more maps per page (IMO even 10 wouldn't hurt) or being able to arrange them by rating would be nice, too.

User journals:
Hell, yes! I loved the ability to pimp maps as frontpage-news (with an admin-check in-between, of course). Also a blog-like feature for your personal page would be a very nice idea in general (basically, that feature was already very prominent on the oldest Snarkpit). It would also keep the front page more alive with content specifically written to show up there (instead just dry, chronological update information a la FPS-banana). I would even consider dropping some of the update sections for more space for news posts (like displaying the last 3 news items in full text).

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Why snark works.

reaper47 said:
I remember feeling intimidated the first time I visited the Snarkpit, not knowing wth a "pit" or "map profile" was, whether I needed to have frontpage-worthy maps to join and the whole theme had an "underground club" feel to it, like you needed to go through an initialization rite in order to join. Interlopers is just a big forum.

Well, perhaps we need a "new to the Pit?" Link on the front page to help any new members get acquainted. It only shows for anyone not logged in. BTW, thanks for the response on that question reaper. Very informative!

reaper47 said:
I would even consider dropping some of the update sections for more space for news posts (like displaying the last 3 news items in full text).

Yea, I'm for that idea! Let's say we didn't remove anything from the front page and only pushed it down (because of the news posts on the front page) would that make the front page too long? I mean, are there any negative things to arise from that kind of design? Three sounds like a good number. About the Maps new menu page:

RedWood said:
I'd like to see a line or divider of some kind in-between the featured games.

I added two games to the featured list, and the way it formatted it was by grouping them to the left. Is that a bug? When I first checked it out, I was a little confused about the layout. Because everything is modular, I think it might be a good idea to group things via bounding boxes of some sort. I recognize that the TF2 maps belong with the TF2 banner because I know what the maps should look like. But if you get 4 featured games listed on the page, then I can see it getting a little confusing. Was it not made for more than 2 to be listed at any one time? If there were to be a little theme specific colored box grouping the featured games with their two maps listed under them then it might make it a little more understandable more quickly.

[EDIT]: Oh, one other thing before I forget: I liked how you aligned the profile stats under that avatar on profile pages. On Posts, I don't think they need to be aligned, but if the title was bold-ed and the actual info grayed out a little (or vise versa), it would read better I think.

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

I'm still working on the new map page and still need to look at the layout with additional games... obviously it's bugged right now and the elements are out of position If the css is out by a couple of pixels it knocks everything down...

I'm all for revamping the main page, the only question is exactly where to put everything.

Making a page longer isn't really an issue, but content lower down does tend to be less viewed.

How about if I move the latest maps section so it's along the left hand side under the spotlight stuff, extend the news posts, then have the recent posts/updates boxes and then under that have a news section for user journal updates?

Or would journal updates maybe go in the recent updates box?

The main reason for moving the latest maps would be to equal out the length of the content in each column if we add journals to the bottom... if we could just maybe add them to the updates box then I think it'd probably be better to keep the latest maps where they are as it kinda spreads the images around the page a bit better, rather than making one column overly text-heavy.

larchy said:
Making a page longer isn't really an issue, but content lower down does tend to be less viewed.

How about if I move the latest maps section so it's along the left hand side under the spotlight stuff, extend the news posts, then have the recent posts/updates boxes and then under that have a news section for user journal updates?

Generally, moving more stuff to the left, maybe sacrificing some larger thumbnails would be a good idea, IMO.

How about only displaying the latest spotlight/map-update with a thumbnail and arranging the last 4 beneath it with text only? Kinda like the news are done now. That way there would be more room on the left, also.

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Why snark works.

hmmm, well now... how about this!

User Journals should become part of the main news items. Then we can show more than 3!

Like it might say before the title of a User Journal:

User Journal Entry from "Riven"

Place Title Here

bla blablablablablabla

-And so on.

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

That is a definite improvement on the home page in my opinion.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Can the "upload a map" button be made more accessible? It's kinda hidden in the control panel. Maybe place a "upload map" button next to the "new topic" in the map form.

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Reality has become a commodity.

When u upload images for a new map the text for the directory is barely visible. For a few seconds i thought it hadn't worked. I use the black theam if it makes a difference.

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Reality has become a commodity.

I like the new layout! I think that would also be a good position for journal updates.

It also made me curious about trying a few more changes, too:

First, I don't see why there are 2 spotlights now. There should only be one (maybe with an option to search an archive of previous entries). The two take up so much space and feel a little redundant.

I also don't like the small, red [map] tags to identify different entry types. To make it less distracting and more in line with the yellow/white text layout, I would replace them by simple, white, non-bold text of the same size with a colon in the end.

Example:

Map: Dm_Sadists_Pit

instead of:

[map] Dm_Sadists_Pit

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Why snark works.

reaper47 said:
Also the discussion topics are non-existent for all entries.

Database is just incomplete, will be fixed when we move everything over.

reaper47 said:
User profiles:
An option to manually rank your own maps would be awesome.

Added to the edit profile page - do let me know of any bugs.. I think I've covered any problems with the sorting order but it wasn't the simplest of systems and I may have made some mistakes that I haven't found.

It would be nice if after a page refresh it brought you back to where you were at on the page.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Any page you're thinking of in particular?

The forums do this when you make a post, but it requires the placing of anchors on the page that the redirect url can link to.

larchy, the ranking system works perfectly for me! Very nice that abandoned maps are now hidden from the official list.

Also, to make sure you don't have enough time to breathe, I think we should try and come up with a better way to update and maintain those "official map threads".

First, I think you should be sent to the most recent post rather than the first page of the thread. That would solve a lot of the initial confusion.

Then (and this is of no priority for now, just an idea), I think that the map-thread should re-start with every new release. For example a beta2 map should start with a changelog about what is new, then the feedback posts about the changes. Beta3, the same... For the final release, you should just use the comments (in fact, direct comments should be disabled for beta maps, I don't know if they are right now).

Now I have no idea of how to implement this elegantly, but I generally liked the system of the old-old Snarkpit, where you could have "thread chapters" for each release (sadly usability of that feature was not-so great and few people used it). The main flaw of that system was that people didn't recognize what chapter was the latest and just posted randomly. This could easily be solved by locking outdated ones (just keeping them as an archive).

I think that the map forum is still one of the most important features of this site, and would deserve some extra thought.

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Why snark works.

Arhar, the larch is a busy larch. I like this!

re: domain. Bleh, I haven't got anywhere yet - contact between me and Lep has dropped again. If it becomes too much of a headache to get it sorted we may just roll with the contingency plan of using snarkpit.net to redirect.

I have thought a little bit about how to handle map versions reaper...

I was thinking that we could have tabs... like we have on the user control panel for instance... with the latest version displayed by default and older versions accessible via tabs. Could tab the forum discussion thread too.

I haven't fully thought that through though so not sure how practical it is or exactly how everything would be arranged... I mean... what content would be different between versions? Would a whole new set of screenshots be required for instance? Would older version dl links be removed? Bleh

I'd say that's a definite future thing to think about though as there is so much changed with v6 that I'm starting to get a little concerned with moving all the content over and don't want to complicate things any more than they already are 'cos my brains will melt.

larchy said:
'cos my brains will melt.

Well, it seems you are human at last!

I know this is quite a headache-topic, because it would require a few additional functions for managing forum threads.

I don't think you need a complete archive of old map versions (downloads, screenshots, etc.), if that is what you mean.

I just always liked to start a new thread for each version of a map (I often had 5 betas or so) and, at the same time, make sure that old threads are both locked and that it is clear that they are outdated.

Tabs sound like a nice idea for structuring. Where would you put them? It's hard for me to imagine. I think they would only serve as an archive (it's always nice to follow how feedback transformed the map over time). I don't think old versions have to be too prominent. Just one small option to look how the map has changed over time, only interesting for people who really look for that historical info.

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Why snark works.

now on the new "send PM" page where you now can type the name of the user you want to send a pm to, there should be a (memberlist) link to I think to help look for members if you want to find members via the filter on that page.

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

It looks like you have corrected the spacing throughout the site. The whole thing looks better. It's stunning how such a small change can make a huge difference.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Does anyone els think if the number of votes casted were show next to the stars in the maps section, instead of only when hovered over, it would increase the number of people that vote?

Or maybe simply voting could earn you snark points? only after downloading the said map of course.

Just a thought.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Any word on when we can make the move? im getting impatient.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Not up to me!

Been working on the journals as you can probably see! Plus some CP changes... not had much time this past week though. Need to do a little more work on the journals yet too... but yeah, can move whenever.

I have noticed sometimes this host seems to timeout occasionally, but refresh the page and it works fine after 5secs or so... odd. I'll take that over globat though

Journals work great so far!

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Why snark works.

I've gotta figure out where to jimmy them in to the profile pages, and I'm probably going to add a 'latest journals' page somewhere... but that's just minor bits and pieces.

So, any word on the move, or am I just too anxious? Also, We absolutely must have a front page post about it, but I don't want the honors as I'll probably be jumping the gun. So someone like Gwil or Larchy should make a post about it after it occurs (since you guys I assume will be working on the Pit when the transfer actually does take place) I might try and make a graphic for it though

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

Well all that actually needs doing is to point the domain at the new host, and I think Gwil has the details for that. That sort of change normally takes 72hrs to fully propagate.

Once that's been done and snarkpit.net comes here instead of globat I'll have to dump the globat database and some of the more recent content and get everything converted to the new db format... then upload... might take a day or so depending on what time I've got free.

I'm just waiting for that tho, can't do owt else until then.

I'll update when I have something to share - as larchy says it takes a while for DNS to propagate and even before that I need to liaise with Leperous to get some documents..

Once I have the keys for ignition i'll let larchy know (as to be database ready) then post over on the old site when we change the DNS.

Is something up with the active SnarkPit? Is there something brewing in the kitchen?!? It's giving me a: "Lost connection to MySQL server during query" error. I'm hoping it's because the transition has begun, and not some stupid Globat error...

-Now I'm all excited!

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

No, sorry, globat

Don't get too excited, that will be the ever reliable Globat :P

I just got through fixing an issue where, Juim submitted an updated version of his map "dm_stinger". He called the updated version: "dm_ff_stinger_b7" and he created a whole new profile for it in the database. He accidentally clicked the "create a new thread for this map" option without wanting to. Thus, he ended up deleting the original map profile: "dm_stinger" and leaving dm_ff_stinger_b7 as the new latest version. The problem it caused was that it left behind an orphaned "dm_stinger" for a profile that no longer existed. And it also (accidentally) created an extra thread linking to the new map. But all Juim wanted was for the profile to be updated with the current thread and link. I was able to fix the problem and updated everything and also deleted the accidental thread, but I figured on the new pit this could become an avoidable problem if we were to implement a new system! The old pit, had "chapters" where members could add entire new threads all listed under the same thread in the map's forum in order to reference new versions of their map. I'd like to bring back this idea, but improve it a bit more. Make it more user friendly and obvious.

I think might be a useful feature on the new Pit where the original poster of a map's thread to have options in his reply box (perhaps underneath the smilies section) to add a tag to the map's thread listing as "Alpha 1" near the map's title. That tag would link an anchor to the start of where that map began that version in the thread. There could be a dropdown box that allows a user to set a map from Alpha1-5 and then Beta1-10, then 'final' or 'released'. Selecting one of those options for that post would add a bright-colored bar above that post denoting the start of the updated version of that map. That way, people interested in following the path that the latest version of the map has taken, they wouldn't want to click the "view latest post in this thread" no, they'd want to click the last tag in the thread 'version history' that would bring them to the first post of that version.

-Does it sound too complicated? It makes perfect sense in my head, so if you want a better explanation, I'll be more than happy to make some images or diagrams explaining myself!

BTW, too bad about the lagg on the current Pit. Was there an issue with not being able to cross over last weekend? If you guys need any help, let me know; I'll do whatever I can to help get the ball rolling (even if it means antagonizing Lep)

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

I think I mentioned in one of the threads a while back that I was thinking about adding tabs to the threads, so you could actually have a tab for each version of a map.

Your method would work as well though, can't see any reason why it couldn't be implemented!

I've held off adding any more new features until we move though because the more changes I make to the backed the more I have to rewrite/add the scripts that copy everything over, and things are already pretty complicated. Will certainly look at it once we've moved though, and I do have some rough ideas written down about how to let people handle different versions more elegantly.

Spent quite a bit of time working on getting an upload progress bar for when you upload a map. Been a bit of an arse because you normally need to load an extension (even with the latest php version) which I don't have enough access to the server to do... but finally found a way of doing it that I can plug into the current upload page. Actually have the working code up here already on a hidden test page Just need to do some layout/styling work and modify the way the backend handles the files a little bit. Hopefully anyway

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As far as the move goes I've got no control over anything to do with the domain, so I've just been waiting until I hear something. AFAIK Gwil has been trying to get in touch with lep as he has the account details for the domain, but I think Gwil has said he can't get any reply... but he contacted the registrar and can get access somehow? Maybe?