This is something I've actually wanted to do for a while. The hold-up is the fact that I'm not quite sure of a good way to go about letting people pick what work they're deriving from. it's more of a user interface issue than anything else, and any way I go about it is going to take some coding, so I need to know I'm getting it right from the outset so I don't waste a bunch of time writing code I eventually have to throw away.
How would you imagine a user selecting what works they're deriving from? The easiest thing to do would be to have an autocomplete field where you can start typing the title and then select it from the list, but a lot of art titles are confusingly similar, if not outright duplicates. This would be extremely error-prone.
Another possibility would be to have images appear along with the search results, but at this point we're leaving Drupal's built in behavior and getting into something that would be somewhat difficult to code cleanly.
Ideally, if would be nice if we had a way to do this that would be easy to code and not prone to errors. How do you guys imagine this actually working from the user side?
But don't you know that Thier MMORPG Is Going To Be Awesome And They'll Totally Give You A Cut Of The Profits? :)
So, on the user profile page, you'd also like a box for a bio or something?
@TheAncientGoat
That's an interesting thought. The main problem is that the art pages already feel pretty complicated, and adding embed code to that would make it moreso, for something that I'm not certain would see a lot of use. If I were convinced that a lot of people would use it, I'd do it.
@Scrittl
Two things:
To do it well in a cross-browser way (avoiding blurriness) you'd need to use an html canvas, which is a lot more involved.
I'm already using an outside lightbox script for preview images that I'm not really prepared to get rid of. I don't have time to reimplement it from scratch, and it doesn't support zooming.
Any suggestions for dealing with the above issues?
That sounds good in theory, but in practice there are several things that would need to be addressed, the biggest one being the potential for abuse. Any time you give someone the ability to add a link back to their own site, spammers show up in droves. This would necessitate some sort of manual approval system for the project links people submit.
Let me propose a potential alternative that would be easier to implement. We can allow registered users to mark art with an "I'm using this!" flag. The art would then include a list of users who are using the art. If the user defined a project page in their profile, the list would include a link to that project page. The upshot here would be that we manually approve all user accounts anyway, so the project links will have already been verified by a human to be non-spam, and the entire process on the user side takes a single click.
Improved formatting for people browsing at 1280+ pixels wide (including wider searchg results, a right sidebar on the home page, and better formatting of the forums list)
I apologize if you ran into something today and it looked horrible. Some of these changes have a bigger impact than it would seem, so it's easy to miss them in testing. If you happen to see any obviously broken styling, please let me know here, as it's probably due to the changes I made this evening.
1) I like that idea, and it's probably easy to do. I'll look into it.
2) I like that idea, and it's probably hard to do. I'm guessing this will have to wait.
3) We have something in the works that's kind of like that, but not exactly. There are some details that still need to be worked out, though. On the whole, this one is non-trivial and it may be a while before it happens.
A "Suggested Attribution" section on the user profile page with a "how do I give attribution?" link on each submission's page
Done, to the extent that I can. I can't just put it on the user profile page, because some people want to be attributed differently depending on what works they submit. I was trying to come up with a way to allow for a default set of attribution instructions, but even then, if someone is submitting a work by someone else, some users will skip past already filled in fields and leave the default value there, which would mean that the art would come with erroneous instructions to attribute the submitter as opposed to the author. Anyway, the art submission page now contains an "attribution instructions" box, which users can fill in if they like.
"Project Website"/"Project Description" changed to a more general Website/Description-or-bio-or-something (submitters aren't necessarily working on a project)
Done.
Make more of the headings on the front page and in the sidebars into links (same as the "more" links below, some of the headings already are links), "Latest Art", "Recent Comments", etc.
I added what I could, but the most popular and most submissions boxes aren't views, they're custom code, which means I'd have to code up a whole other page to handle those. This isn't a huge deal, but it's harder than the other stuff, so it'll have to wait for a bit.
As I was looking at the front page, though, I noticed that some of the space there was poorly utilized. For instance, active topics and new topics seem to contain a lot of the same items, so I made the active topics box contain more items and removed the new topics box. I also filtered forum comments out of the Recent Comments box, since active topics are essentially exactly the same thing.
Here are some things that have been brought up already. If you'd like to discuss them in detail, please start another thread.
A fluid layout. This sounds nice in theory, but in reality it's a lot more difficult than it would appear. The problem is that the same main column we use for art views is also used for text, and when you widen text much more than the main column is at the moment, it starts requiring a lot of horizontal eye movement, which makes the page very awkward to read. I actually had a fluid layout at one time, and the complaints came in fast and fierce. Furthermore, having additional art pop up when room is made for it is a good bit harder than it sounds. Verdict: Barring a major redesign, which I don't have the resources for at the moment, this isn't going to happen.
Centering OGA in the page to make it look nicer: This is a nice idea, but the payoff is frankly pretty low, and messing with and testing CSS on a site like OGA with a bunch of different sub-pages is harder than people would think. Verdict: Low priority, unless a lot of people feel strongly about it.
Allowing NC licenses: There are plenty of other sites that do this, and a large part of OGA's popularity stems from the fact that we're consistent on this issue. Verdict: No.
Extra content on very wide screens: I like this idea, but we'll have to do some mockups. Verdict: Probably.
A sound samples section like the new textures section: A good idea. Verdict: Probably, if we can get enough sound samples to make it worthwhile.
A special section for tutuorials: We definitely need this.
We've already got more text boxes on the page than I'm comfortable with. If we're just doing that, people may as well enter it in the description.
This is something I've actually wanted to do for a while. The hold-up is the fact that I'm not quite sure of a good way to go about letting people pick what work they're deriving from. it's more of a user interface issue than anything else, and any way I go about it is going to take some coding, so I need to know I'm getting it right from the outset so I don't waste a bunch of time writing code I eventually have to throw away.
How would you imagine a user selecting what works they're deriving from? The easiest thing to do would be to have an autocomplete field where you can start typing the title and then select it from the list, but a lot of art titles are confusingly similar, if not outright duplicates. This would be extremely error-prone.
Another possibility would be to have images appear along with the search results, but at this point we're leaving Drupal's built in behavior and getting into something that would be somewhat difficult to code cleanly.
Ideally, if would be nice if we had a way to do this that would be easy to code and not prone to errors. How do you guys imagine this actually working from the user side?
@surt
But don't you know that Thier MMORPG Is Going To Be Awesome And They'll Totally Give You A Cut Of The Profits? :)
So, on the user profile page, you'd also like a box for a bio or something?
@TheAncientGoat
That's an interesting thought. The main problem is that the art pages already feel pretty complicated, and adding embed code to that would make it moreso, for something that I'm not certain would see a lot of use. If I were convinced that a lot of people would use it, I'd do it.
@Scrittl
Two things:
Any suggestions for dealing with the above issues?
@TheAncientGoat
That sounds good in theory, but in practice there are several things that would need to be addressed, the biggest one being the potential for abuse. Any time you give someone the ability to add a link back to their own site, spammers show up in droves. This would necessitate some sort of manual approval system for the project links people submit.
Let me propose a potential alternative that would be easier to implement. We can allow registered users to mark art with an "I'm using this!" flag. The art would then include a list of users who are using the art. If the user defined a project page in their profile, the list would include a link to that project page. The upshot here would be that we manually approve all user accounts anyway, so the project links will have already been verified by a human to be non-spam, and the entire process on the user side takes a single click.
Thoughts?
I've done a bunch of other stuff today:
I apologize if you ran into something today and it looked horrible. Some of these changes have a bigger impact than it would seem, so it's easy to miss them in testing. If you happen to see any obviously broken styling, please let me know here, as it's probably due to the changes I made this evening.
1) I like that idea, and it's probably easy to do. I'll look into it.
2) I like that idea, and it's probably hard to do. I'm guessing this will have to wait.
3) We have something in the works that's kind of like that, but not exactly. There are some details that still need to be worked out, though. On the whole, this one is non-trivial and it may be a while before it happens.
@surt:
Done, to the extent that I can. I can't just put it on the user profile page, because some people want to be attributed differently depending on what works they submit. I was trying to come up with a way to allow for a default set of attribution instructions, but even then, if someone is submitting a work by someone else, some users will skip past already filled in fields and leave the default value there, which would mean that the art would come with erroneous instructions to attribute the submitter as opposed to the author. Anyway, the art submission page now contains an "attribution instructions" box, which users can fill in if they like.
Done.
I added what I could, but the most popular and most submissions boxes aren't views, they're custom code, which means I'd have to code up a whole other page to handle those. This isn't a huge deal, but it's harder than the other stuff, so it'll have to wait for a bit.
As I was looking at the front page, though, I noticed that some of the space there was poorly utilized. For instance, active topics and new topics seem to contain a lot of the same items, so I made the active topics box contain more items and removed the new topics box. I also filtered forum comments out of the Recent Comments box, since active topics are essentially exactly the same thing.
Here are some things that have been brought up already. If you'd like to discuss them in detail, please start another thread.
Well, I feel like a jerk. :)
This whole time I thought everyone could see the comment notify checkbox, but only admins could. It should be fixed now.
Bart
Because when the slime moves, the top part moves first, kind of like a slug. That doesn't work if we use the same sprites for up and down movement. :)
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