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| End of Summer, Progress Report Friday, August 20, 2010 4:35 am — Posted by Livio |
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It was pretty awesome with all the crazy stuff that happened here this summer: the return of a_neezles_a, custom awards and the search for Interbot, the new blogs system, the karma wars, karma nukes, Karmabot, Karmabites, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Koopas, team GREATS, team Judgernauts, and all our other IO shenanigans, the defense against the nezzles-spammings, tons of Aeon artwork progress, imtimi getting added and removed from the staff, D52's breif return, Aeon Demo 3!!, read-topics blowup/recovery, Harumbai getting added to the staff, and making all those last-minute IO entries. Great summer.
About that to-do list, it was clear from the start that it could not be finished. However, I was still able to get a significant amount done, so let's look at each of the major sections of the Interguild and see how well I did in each and how much is left to be done. I tried to express my overall satisfaction with each category using a smiley placed next to the title.
Big Website Features
The biggest items in this category include:
The article system
I got rid of the article system early this summer, and I replaced it with the Blogs system. The idea was kinda weird at first, but it has yielded some great results. The old article system was a constant failure, and we mods used to have at least 2 or 3 articles forever waiting for approval. But now that embarrassing era is behind us. Not only has this new blog system resulted in some great guides such as Harumbai's Creating Lifelike Environments in Knytt Stories and imtimi's SMF Level Design Guide, but also some amazingly creative blog posts such as GF4's The Interguild comic and Yaya's Pwn Dancing: The Lost Art.
However, there still remains some things to be done for this system. The concept is that each user has his/her own "blog" on the Interguild, and even though the posts can be sorted by the staff into various categories of "Noteworthy Blog Posts", the act of following any one user's blog is less than ideal. The user-blog pages (example: jell's blog) are very plain. It would be cool if you could customize your blog page, maybe give it a unique name, and maybe even custom backgrounds and colors (lol hopefully it won't be as disastrous as in the old forums). In fact, perhaps some kind of merge between the user blog pages and profile pages would be a good idea. And I should also set up some RSS feeds so that you could follow individual blogs via RSS, since many real blogs have those.
Or rather than automatically linking everyone's blog posts together by author, as if they were somehow related (which is most likely not the case, given our multi-game nature), perhaps we could let people combine their blog posts together under some kind of "series" system but for blogs, rather than levels. For example, what if you really wanted to follow the State of the Interguild Blog but you couldn't care less about all the other blog posts I write. It would be cooler if this so-called blog had a real blog page, rather than being just another list of noteworthy posts. And allow for Blogs to have multiple contributors to it, as well.
And one final small idea: it would be nice if the news system had some kind of feature where certain blog posts could be displayed on the news page as if it was news. For example, this news post would be a great addition to the State of the Interguild Blog, but I'm posting it as news mainly because it's a follow-up to my Summer To-Do list, which is also a news post but was made before the blog system even existed. I could just post this as a blog post and then make a news post with a big link to it, but that would be very inelegant.
The video archive
Absolutely no progress in this section. But what did you expect? This archive was imported from the old layout, which was imported from the old site, which was programmed by Haily when he was still pretty new at PHP and stuff. After all the waiting and after so much fail, the day that I actually get up and remake the archive will be a miracle to behold. That's not to say I never got close to doing it, though. When I laid out my plan for Level Database Reform, I said one of my goals was to do it swiftly so I could quickly move on to making a better video archive.
Level Database and the Games system
I'm still not done with my current redesigning of the level database, but you can click here to see the work in progress, and you can click here for a more detailed look at the various ideas behind it. The main thing I have left to do before I can release it is to make the "add new game" procedure much easier and more fluid. I was thinking of releasing the new design right after putting this part in, but with the idea of continuing to work on it and get all my ideas implemented. The deadline I set for myself was today, actually, but I decided not to stress myself out and release a rushed system. I also think I may get more things done in the long run if I still feel like I have to get this massive reform done and released sometime soon.
I've been getting plenty of new ideas for the database that I still haven't explained anywhere. However, I will spare you from thinking out loud again, like a few paragraphs ago when I was writing of ways to improve the blog system. But unlike the blog system, hopefully you will see these new ideas implemented in the short term, and there won't be much need for me to explain them so frequently.
Other things around the site:
This section will consist of other site-related issues that are not as big as the previous ones.
Learning Javascript as a Solution for Problems
It turns out Haily bought a JavaScript/Ajax book a year or two ago, so I basically took it from him and started reading it. I didn't learn much javascript, I didn't even get close to doing what I wanted to do with it, but it's something. At least I can say that the new level database will use a bit more javascript (still really simple stuff, though) as well as alternatives for those who do not have it set. It seems, however, that I'm running it all in a deprecated (expired, not recommended) style, but at least it works now.
Here are some of the ideas I would have used javascript for:
- Delaying the mouse-out effect for the top-bar items to make the Games tab more user friendly. I have, however, moved the scrollbar away from the edge, which has helped significantly.
- Make an auto-refreshing chatbox and other member info. Dekudude actually offered to give me his chatbox from his site ApolloMix. He never got around to doing it, but I was still not satisfied with his solution because he offered no non-javascript alternative.
- Make it so when you click on an item under the top bar's Search bar's drop-down menu, it would simply alter the destination of the form, so that you go to the page after you hit "GO", rather than immediately when you click it.
Private Messaging System
The PM system is pretty badly coded and it could use better features. I'm thinking of making it more like a forum topic, where you can see all posts in a conversation at once, rather than just the immediately preceding post. The report-PM system also stinks, but good thing no one cares about that. But of course, none of this was worked on this summer....
Forums
Hey, I got a lot of stuff done in the forums this summer. More than I expected, at least. There was that Forum Reorganization back in June, which turned the forum board setup from a big mess into a very nice and compact layout. There was also those features I added in July: the Read Later button and the URLs for each post (which used javascript in a cool way--but wait a minute, I never added an alternative, did I??
). I also added Preview buttons for new posts and topics and blogs. However, lately I've noticed slight mess-ups with this feature, especially when you use the [code] BBCode tag. I'll have to fix that.The Recent Karma Rates page now lets users track which posts are collecting positive and negative karma. A forum search has also been much needed, and even though I didn't get that done, I at least added a mini-search that looks only through topic titles so that you could search the site with it. It's still needs lots of work, though. And just the other day, I added some new BBCode tags. And don't forget about the massive site-wide upgrade to the new "die" smiley.
Member Profiles
I touched on this idea when rambling about the Blog system at the start of this post. Several things need to be added to the profiles, such as blog posts. There was also an idea a while ago about letting people feature their best levels on their profiles, similar to how in YouTube profiles you can feature your best videos.
Advertising
I've stated elsewhere that I stink at advertising the Interguild and that's why we get so little incoming hits. I've been told that doing link-exchanges with other sites could increase traffic, but it seems like the only site I've discussed the idea with is ApolloMix (but hey! we got like three members from them!) I've also stated elsewhere that it would be helpful if someone else could deal with it. I've tried recruiting Haily, but he's always busy with IceCaves.net and those guys aren't exactly our target audience.
However, I am thinking a lot about this as I work on the level database. It's designed to attract/keep the attention of first-time visitors, and to be optimized for search engines when people look for levels of certain games. Even the URL's of the page are nice and user-friendly now. I've even been adding more Share buttons around the site, so you're encouraged to post cool levels and videos on Facebook and stuff. But none of this changes the fact that I still stink at advertising.
Aeon
I feel like I should've devoted more time to working on Aeon, but I have to remind myself that I made great progress this summer. The latest Aeon demo included two huge additions: the level editor prototype and artwork. I also made great progress into the next demo, as well. Remember my new ridiculous XML design? (sorry for the giant images, I didn't know I would carry out the post for so long
). But the community has also made great strides with the game. There were tons of outstanding artwork, great music, and even sound effects made this summer. And many of us thought we'd never make it this far.Miscellaneous
In response to everything else in my To-Do list that didn't already get mentioned above.
Misc. Things Done
-"write more guides" (even if they were small and simple)
-"delete all the forum topics moved over from the old site, which are just sitting in a secret board, and have been plagued by name-changing glitches. And decide whether we want to move over all those topics again. We may decide that it's not worth it, no one cares, and that it's embarrassing to see how bad our posts used to be."
-"finally reach and hold onto 100 karma. Or just getting past 90 would be good..." (that was some karma war)
-"Create a page that will let the staff edit the Featured Content"
-"Play more levels"
-"Fix all the glitches that are still around from the new layout." (I lost track already of which glitches are a result of this layout, so let's just call this done)
-"make an about-us page" (what? There was actually a time when we didn't even have an about page?)
-"Add email confirmation to the register system." (take that neezles)
-"Add a karma-lock feature that stops people from rating certain users' karma."
Misc. Things Slightly Done
-"fix all the bugs on bug reports" (was this as foolish a dream as the video archive?)
-"Make better, on-time weekly updates" (they got so off-time that we started expecting them on Mondays. But at least they got better.)
-"Make more levels"
-"Make the number of posts per page customizable." (well, I can customize it already, manually? Okay, so maybe this should go in the other category, but I just thought that that list is getting too long......)
-"Add daily post limits on neezles's account." (hey, remember this idea? I guess you could count the staff's neezle-ban leaderboards as limiting)
Misc. Things Not Done
-"Make competition pages look better"
-"Comp-Judging page is just horrible."
-"get the staff to give out awards for those old "Best of 2007" awards, also known as the Caving Elections from the old site." (lol I completely forgot about this)
-"Make a preview generator" for games like FR2, N, SMF, etc.
-"Let staff split topics"
-"Allow forum boards to be locked"
-"Allow forum boards to be semi-locked, where you may post, but not create new topics" (would be good for the Announcements)
-Member Rankings Page needs an upgrade
-"organize to-do list with jell's advice" (sorry jell)
-"Ambitious idea: rebuild the structure of the site with more efficient database tables." (This is such a cool idea, but maybe next summer)
-"Add something that points out upcoming and current birthdays"
-"Make something that will automatically remove the extra spaces at the end of HATPC level codes"
-"Karma-graph to let us see how users' karma has changed over time." (This is quirvy's idea and it's pretty cool. I can't believe I forgot all about it)
-"Make a mobile version of the site."
Okay, this post is big enough now. I think I'll end it.
User Comments
POLL: Did you actually read all of this?
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