What do you think about the new look?

    Quote from Sprony

    What do you mean by this?

    In retrospect, it may cheapen the generally more professional atmosphere of mapcore, but gamification is quite popular and a good way to encourage people to be more involved. I'm sure a lot of people here probably wouldn't care for it and the community may be too small or not active enough, but since I've suggested it now I may as well provide examples:

    gamebanana medals (couldn't find an exhaustive list of what they offer)

    stack overflow badges

    This may also really need to be planned for in advance rather than shoehorned in at a later date...

    Quote from jackophant

    In retrospect, it may cheapen the generally more professional atmosphere of mapcore, but gamification is quite popular and a good way to encourage people to be more involved. I'm sure a lot of people here probably wouldn't care for it and the community may be too small or not active enough, but since I've suggested it now I may as well provide examples:

    gamebanana medals (couldn't find an exhaustive list of what they offer)

    stack overflow badges

    This may also really need to be planned for in advance rather than shoehorned in at a later date...

    This was proposed earlier and in different forms but it all got shot down. Even displaying the amount of likes or community reputation is removed. Honestly, I can't remember why, I would have to ask. Personally I would like to see some more titles, especially Staff titles because it's easier for people to identify who they should approach with questions. But community reputation or similar things like that are fair game as far as I'm concerned. I suppose the reasoning behind this was to avoid elitism. Personally, I find it easier to judge people this way but that's probably the exact reason why others don't like it.


    Quote from will2k

    I see; hope they get restored soon :)

    In another issue, I'm not getting emails when someone quotes or mentions me in a post. The "notification" and "email" are both checked in my settings and I double checked just to make sure. You quoted me here in this post but i did not get any email to notify me; only when I logged in i got the red notification (in the old mapcore system, i used to get email notification normally).

    Is this a bug?

    We need @Thrik to answer this.

    This new software dislikes typing prediction and correction. The @functionality isn't working when prediction arrives, and it arrives fast when you use it with the same person a few times. That's a shame, but quotes are working, that's what really important in my opinion.

    What Jackophant maybe wanted to say that a part of the community isn't very active, especially with the contest going on. Meaning that as one of the few giving feedback about almost everything on the contest, (these few people are mainly people who were there before the contest) he may feel like his movement to help other isn't as followed as it should, and that vivifying the community could reasonably be a good thing, and what he proposed was one way to do it, and surely not the only one.

    That being said, I may have misinterpreted what he was saying, but it could be a base idea for the future of the community.

    Quote from laminutederire

    What Jackophant maybe wanted to say that a part of the community isn't very active, especially with the contest going on. Meaning that as one of the few giving feedback about almost everything on the contest, (these few people are mainly people who were there before the contest) he may feel like his movement to help other isn't as followed as it should, and that vivifying the community could reasonably be a good thing, and what he proposed was one way to do it, and surely not the only one.

    That being said, I may have misinterpreted what he was saying, but it could be a base idea for the future of the community.

    I didn't look at it that way but it's an interesting and very valid point even if you misinterpreted it. I constantly see the same people giving feedback. Not only in the contest forum, but overall. I also see some people producing a ton of worthwhile content (I'm looking at you @Castle). I think it's something that should be applauded and recognized. I'll propose this to the others.

    @laminutederire you're on the money with your interpretation, I didn't fully explain my idea but that was the end result I was envisioning when I mentioned "gamification": Giving people small achievements to stride for, for meaningless internet points! It could give what some people say more weight, but ofc the dark flipside as @Sprony mentioned is elitism, and some of the more senior people here don't post very regularly so it wouldn't necessarily work out for them (but when they do post it often garners a lot of attention).

    maybe something as simple as a like and thanks system, one for lolz one for genuine help. There could be hidden goals for each type and they change the appearance of your avatar or a star system?

    EDIT: Just to drive my point home, I've been working on my LinkedIn profile to try and hit the "All-Star" profile status (which I just got today). I don't even use that bloody website properly yet, but I wanted that achievement! :D

    Didn't even know that LinkedIn has achievements… that's ridiculous.

    Anyway @Sprony not sure what you mean about the likes… they're visible on a profile, was it displayed under the avatar in the old version?

    Quote from blackdog

    Didn't even know that LinkedIn has achievements… that's ridiculous.

    Anyway @Sprony not sure what you mean about the likes… they're visible on a profile, was it displayed under the avatar in the old version?

    LinkedIn just has the profile rating:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/lCVCOnc.png]

    It's very basic, but you have to meet a few requirements to reach it such as 50 connections, and having 2 entries for past employment and education... BUT I WANTED IT, lol.

    Also, regarding likes, they were previously displayed below avatar but are still available on profiles and if you hover over someone's name/avatar.

    You guys might have picked up on this from the announcements at the top of the page, but since getting back from France at the weekend I've been working on the slowness issues. There was a weird issue occurring with the external server that handles things such as anti-spam and chat, which was causing all page loads to slow down as a result. This has been rectified for now and I'm (strongly) encouraging the software vendor to patch it so that such connectivity problems don't result in such slowdown.

    I also installed several general maintenance patches. I couldn't tell you what exactly they fixed or changed, but I do know that a whole bunch of things were in there so it's possible that some stuff previously mentioned in this thread has been resolved. Things such as the typing auto-correct are sure to annoy a lot of people so I expect that if they haven't been fixed already, they will be soon.

    Regarding signatures, during the next week I'll be reactivating them at last as well as implementing some simple tagging so that it's easier to see who is staff and also who is a donator (i.e. store purchases and/or other methods). I'll put more info about this up separately somewhere soon.

    As for achievements, I would like to revisit our old concept from years ago of having particularly well-received community work recognised with a badge and featured in a monthly spotlight, and it'd also be nice to recognise article contributors with one. These in addition to the staff/donator badges would provide a simple but meaningful way of distinguishing people without it becoming elitist as Sprony mentioned.

    I have given the spotlight feature thought on various occasions but I've wanted to get other things working smoothly first. I currently envision it being an article that runs every month, highlighting a few works in the 3D and 2D forums (i.e. maps, models, scenes, concept art). A shortlist would probably be produced from which posts have the most likes, and then staff would choose a few favourites and write a little about each piece, also awarding a badge to the author.

    What I don't want to do is start doling out badges based on longevity, post count, likes, or anything like that. I've implemented exactly that kind of thing on forums before, and it has inevitably led to junk posting and/or resentment because they're not really worth anything when you truly think about it; even when I've accidentally enabled post counts and reputations on MapCore when doing updates, I've had public or private complaints almost immediately. Likes are probably more meaningful than the others, but you can still see those via people's profiles, and I see those as more for allowing you to see which posts are considered high-quality while reading threads rather than as a way of judging people.

    @Vaya Probably not actually, we already have older threads automatically moved into a different database table which is read-only so those threads can no longer be modified. That all works pretty efficiently, and becomes more so as those old threads are accessed as they're also cached.

    I've noticed a missing favicon for anonymous users and signing in doesn't work even if I enter the correct credentials.. but works fine on the second try + forum won't remember me and I have to sign in each time I close the browser window.

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login