52 replies to this topic

[Koh]

Let's make an organized, alphabetized list, shall we?

-Allow For Entry Boxes on the Website and Forums to Use Characters Outside of the First 127 ASCII Characters and More Unicode Characters: Because making symbols like ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) (╯°□°) ┻━┻ is more fun than having it show up as &#4314 (ಠ益&# 3232;&#4314 (╯°□°) ┻━┻. Like seriously, what the hell is all of that o.o?

-Download Counters on Submissions of All Kinds: This has already been suggested above, but I am in agreement with this. This allows for users to see how many people are actually making use of their works, or if they're just wasting their time providing resources no one will use.

-Improved Handling of Hidden Topics in a Subforum: Remember this mild issue we have here with the version of Invision Power Board we use, where it always shows the latest replied-to topic on the main board, even if the user doesn't have access to the topic? This would go hand-in-hand with upgrading to the latest Invision, I assume, so read about that below.

-Update the Rating System to be More Accurate: After reading the above posts it seems like increasing the max number of the rating system isn't an idea people are fond of. However, surely you wouldn't contend to the notion to allow users to rate with half stars, would you? 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5 and 5. It's almost like having 10 stars without the 10 stars, thus 2.5 is really at the border of good and bad, while anything over is good/great, and anything below is bad/pathetic.

-Update to the Latest Version of Invision Power Board: As the mods have already said, this is the more likely route to go, and in my opinion, the best option regarding the forums. My reasoning for this is because with Invision, under the control panel it's very easy to allow users to switch to different themes, and thus if people want the old colorization of things as they are now, all they have to do is flip a switch within their control panel. In addition, with the new way Invision handles layout, with coloring and appearance, the forums could keep their green shades while also looking shiny and new, because the shading of the bars have gotten more crisp or whatever else to make them more eye-candy material. In addition, the forums are currently using Invision anyway, so why not just continue the trend and stop being out of date?

That's all that's on my mind at the moment, but I'm sure more will arise later.

[Rambly]

However, surely you wouldn't contend to the notion to allow users to rate with half stars, would you? 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5 and 5. It's almost like having 10 stars

It is like having 10 stars; what would the difference be besides the arbitrarily different numbers? I don't like the idea of complicating our rating system any more. The ratings are just there so users can have something to quickly glance at to get a broad idea of peoples' opinions... and increasing the number of spaces between ratings wouldn't do much to improve our system other than that ensure the differences between different ratings had less weight. The rating isn't really the most important factor of a user's opinion, anyway -- the words are.

If we need a border between good and bad, I think we should just change 2 stars to "Okay" or scrap the rating keywords entirely. I'm of the opinion that rating scales should be top-heavy, anyway; to a reader and prospective quest-player, there's not much difference between a "bad" quest and a "very bad quest", really. If a quest is rated bad, I'm just going to avoid it... but the differences between "good" and "very good" quests let me know which quests to play soon and which quests to play later.

[Koh]

It is like having 10 stars; what would the difference be besides the arbitrarily different numbers? I don't like the idea of complicating our rating system any more. The ratings are just there so users can have something to quickly glance at to get a broad idea of peoples' opinions... and increasing the number of spaces between ratings wouldn't do much to improve our system other than that ensure the differences between different ratings had less weight. The rating isn't really the most important factor of a user's opinion, anyway -- the words are.

If we need a border between good and bad, I think we should just change 2 stars to "Okay" or scrap the rating keywords entirely. I'm of the opinion that rating scales should be top-heavy, anyway; to a reader and prospective quest-player, there's not much difference between a "bad" quest and a "very bad quest", really. If a quest is rated bad, I'm just going to avoid it... but the differences between "good" and "very good" quests let me know which quests to play soon and which quests to play later.

Well by your wording, it sounds like you're saying people would be ok with getting rated 0 or 1 star and being told "It wasn't too bad, but it needs work." Not too bad seriously doesn't equate to 0 or 1 star...those just make it seem like you need to start from the ground up. Especially with spritework. Or for another example being told "It's an alright piece of work." and you get a 2, while someone else is told "This is alright" and gets a 3. What's the underlying difference? Now I'm not saying wars are going to start over ratings, but having a little more accuracy would really clear up this sort of ambiguity.

[nicklegends]

Five stars is enough. There are a couple of cases where I've wanted to rate something between four and five starts, but it's not frequent enough to warrant a new system, in my opinion.

[Koh]

Well then allow me a better question: What harm would it do to make it more accurate? Since there doesn't seem to be any way to convince that it'd make it a bit more visually pleasing and less ambiguous, I'll ask what do you guys think is the worst possible outcome of allowing half-stars? I doubt the work would be too overbearing...all that'd be required is for the half-star images to be created, which is a quick MS Paint or Photoshop job that even I could do for you guys, and for the coding to actually consider them based on the average rating on the entire submission, or the user rating based on what was chosen in the drop-down list, depending on which location the image is drawn at. In other words, it's not that much of a change to what's already present, and would more than likely just be a copy and paste job with minor mathematical changes I'm sure...I've been here before with my own code XD.

So thus, people who want to be truly accurate have the OPTION to use the half-stars, while the oldbies who like things as is can always resort to their whole stars that are still existent. I fail to see what harm this would cause .

[LinktheMaster]

Oftentimes when people are challenged with a larger rating scale with more options, they're less likely to vote. There's a reason the five star system is industry standard and is used by NewEgg, Netflix, Amazon, and many other places.

So yeah. We're sticking with five stars.

[Adem]

To be blunt, there's simply no need for it. Five stars suffices, and there is no need to complicate our rating system anymore. If you really want to use half stars, just post the rating you want to give in the comment section. For example, "It's great but not perfect. 4.5 stars." Other users do it, I don't see why you cannot. All suggestions are appreciated, and it's ultimately the higher staff's decision, but I think we'll probably stick to what we have.

EDIT: Ninja'd by LTM.

[Koh]

Oftentimes when people are challenged with a larger rating scale with more options, they're less likely to vote. There's a reason the five star system is industry standard and is used by NewEgg, Netflix, Amazon, and many other places.

So yeah. We're sticking with five stars.

To be blunt, there's simply no need for it. Five stars suffices, and there is no need to complicate our rating system anymore. If you really want to use half stars, just post the rating you want to give in the comment section. For example, "It's great but not perfect. 4.5 stars." Other users do it, I don't see why you cannot. All suggestions are appreciated, and it's ultimately the higher staff's decision, but I think we'll probably stick to what we have.

EDIT: Ninja'd by LTM.

...I suppose. That's a ghetto way to go about it, just putting 2.5 in your comment, but I see what you mean. Oh well, guess my debating skills weren't enough here ! So have you guys decided on what route to take regarding upgrading the forums? Is Invision 3 (I believe this is the latest) the popular vote? Does it require the purchasing of a new license? If so, I'll have to see what I can donate if anything...don't have much left from the semester, lol.

[Kite]

-Allow For Entry Boxes on the Website and Forums to Use Characters Outside of the First 127 ASCII Characters and More Unicode Characters: Because making symbols like ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) (╯°□°) ┻━┻ is more fun than having it show up as ლ (ಠ益&# 3232;ლ (╯°□°) ┻━┻. Like seriously, what the hell is all of that o.o?

This first point is due solely to the fact that Wild Bill didn't anticipate Unicode characters for comments or member names. This is why junk also shows up in Who's Online and the Shoutbox for member names on the main site sometimes. Adding support for this to the existing site isn't really a priority since it isn't causing any problems other than some members with accented names looking weird on the site. I'm not trying to be offensive when I say that, but how names are being displayed is pretty minor compared to other things that need to be done.

But this will probably be considered with the overhaul. Though I have to admit simply wanting to put in fancy text emoticons is kind of a silly reason for it. We'd pretty much be doing this for the accented member names.

／ 人 ◕ ‿‿ ◕ 人 ＼ Make a contract with me and become a magical girl and we might consider it not as silly of a reason.

Curse my random anime reference!

-Improved Handling of Hidden Topics in a Subforum: Remember this mild issue we have here with the version of Invision Power Board we use, where it always shows the latest replied-to topic on the main board, even if the user doesn't have access to the topic? This would go hand-in-hand with upgrading to the latest Invision, I assume, so read about that below.

I'm just going to put this out here. I'd honestly like to phase out "hidden" topics for anything except the dropboxes and actual post moderation. That feature was never meant for hiding topics. It was meant for moderating individual posts. Of course, we'd definitely be providing a viable alternative to hidden topics for quest development and such if we went this route.

-Update to the Latest Version of Invision Power Board: As the mods have already said, this is the more likely route to go, and in my opinion, the best option regarding the forums. My reasoning for this is because with Invision, under the control panel it's very easy to allow users to switch to different themes, and thus if people want the old colorization of things as they are now, all they have to do is flip a switch within their control panel. In addition, with the new way Invision handles layout, with coloring and appearance, the forums could keep their green shades while also looking shiny and new, because the shading of the bars have gotten more crisp or whatever else to make them more eye-candy material. In addition, the forums are currently using Invision anyway, so why not just continue the trend and stop being out of date?

I admit that upgrading Invision Power Board would be the easiest path regarding the forums. But we haven't finalized which message board software we are going to be using yet since there are some technical aspects we have to work out.

But rest assured, if we do go with the latest IPB, we already have the costs and license covered for the moment. Thanks for offering to help, though.

[Daniel]

But rest assured, if we do go with the latest IPB, we already have the costs and license covered for the moment. Thanks for offering to help, though.

What happened with the donation link anyway? Back when WildBill added it I wasn't working or anything but I'd be more than happy to donate maybe $50 here and there.

[ShadowPC]

Nice if this is coming. However as many are talking about the rating system, couldnt even the average rating which shows up in the list with every downloadable "thing" show 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 and 4.5 ratings. That would help.

[Koh]

Nice if this is coming. However as many are talking about the rating system, couldnt even the average rating which shows up in the list with every downloadable "thing" show 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 and 4.5 ratings. That would help.

Hmm...this makes sense, since it's not giving users the choice to use half-stars, but making the average rating more accurate, thus not actually adding more "stars" per say, just more of a proper-looking meter, but I'm not sure how they'd feel about that either.

[Snarwin]

When I type this:

CODE

[QUOTE]
Blah
[/QUOTE]

It looks like this:
...It'd be nice to edit the forum display code to remove the excess line break that is inserted before the text within the quote.

The line break is there because you hit enter between the [quote] tag and the text being quoted, which, as far as the forum software's concerned, means that the first character of the quoted text is a newline. If you type it like this:

CODE

[quote]Quoted text
[/quote]

The line break you're complaining of goes away.

Sure it has back when I was still lurking the forums I believe they were Phpbb. I could be mistaken though. But I didn't register for a long time but I'm sure a senior citizen like ShadowTiger could correct me.

IIRC, the forums were Invision v1.x when I joined, and have since been upgraded to 2.x. If they were ever phpbb, it was quite a long time ago.

Hmm...this makes sense, since it's not giving users the choice to use half-stars, but making the average rating more accurate, thus not actually adding more "stars" per say, just more of a proper-looking meter, but I'm not sure how they'd feel about that either.

This is basically what IMDB does; I think it's a good idea.

[NoeL]

The line break is there because you hit enter between the [quote] tag and the text being quoted, which, as far as the forum software's concerned, means that the first character of the quoted text is a newline. If you type it like this:

CODE

[quote]Quoted text
[/quote]

The line break you're complaining of goes away.

Yeah, but the line breaks are there by default, which is annoying. I'd prefer the default to be:

CODE

[quote]Quoted text[/quote]

[Old-Skool]

Just do this:

By default, the standard method of 0-5 stars will be available (we'll call this classic.) If you click on some text or a button that reads "Advanced rating", a field will appear where you can rate specific things about the quests, such as graphics, music, gameplay, adventure factor, etc. And that will average up to calculate a general rating between 0 and 5.

Also, and this is very important:

We seriously need to discuss the comments section. There is no way to reply to anything as everything is tied to rating (thus you can only speak once.) In addition, quest ratings should be moderated or reportable,as I've dealt with people who rate quests 1 or 0 because they found them difficult, or because they didn't like the tileset (and only because of one or the other.) Sometimes, people just make false observations or don't even play the quest before rating it, so it would do to find a way to enforce playing a quest before rating it. My suggestion: rating is closed until you click the download. you can comment on ratings, but you can't rate by yourself until you've clicked download.

Also, and maybe I sound like a Nazi here, but is it really acceptable for quests *not* to have screenshots? That's just asking for a misrating.

Edited by King Aquamentus, 18 May 2012 - 12:09 PM.