What do you think about the new look?

[El_Exodus]

Mapcore is so slooooow again these days

[Seldoon182]

After Yo Moma! Hurgs present Yo CrapCore!

Yo CrapCore is so slow that it takes faster to compile a vmf full of carves!

 

 

Edited August 1, 2015 by Seldoon182

[Seldoon182]

Yo Crapcore is so slow that Half-life 3 has already been released!

[Vaya]

Would archiving threads from before 2013 help? you could cherry pick the 'best' ones to keep and remove a lot of shite.

[Thrik]

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.

[tomm]

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.

[Thrik]

Oh yeah, I see the reason for that. The forum is no longer redirecting the http:// to the https:// version of the site for some reason. If you ensure that https://www.mapcore.org/ is bookmarked it should be fine, but I'll fix the redirection when I can.

[El Moroes]

Surprisingly everything is running smooth since I'm on Windows 10, aha ^^ 
Thank for your time Thrik, seriously the navigation is better now ! 

Edited August 3, 2015 by El Moroes

[Pampers]

If you have more than one page of unread stuff, it gives you a search cooldown if you click on the next page too quick

[Thrik]

@Pampers should be a bit more lenient now (5 secs).

[Pampers]

[blackdog]

Thanks @Thrik, website is definitely much quicker (posting from mobile atm)

[laminutederire]

There could be a system to say if a post is legit or no (not a spam or anything like that), and you'd need like 5 legit posts on the forum to be allowed to create a thread. This way, there wouldn't be people arriving making their threads and be active only on their threads and not being helpful for other threads. That could help the forum live with more people than just veterans, admins and some regulars. You'll tell me that is probably because of the contest, but I think a contest is pointless if it doesn't help develop the community, that being said I'm not saying the contest is bad, just that it doesn't serve the community as it should.

[Thrik]

Haha, yeah you are right that it is because of the contest. We did have a system in place that allows new threads only after a certain number of replies to existing threads (first five, then just one). It was disabled for the contest because of the obvious requirement of people being able to post their stuff.

With that said, it is possible that with our updated software I can configure this more precisely so that the restriction doesn't apply in the contest forums. The spam is something we've all been battling with, and automated means aren't proving effective because it's actually human beings signing up — so revisiting the earlier system will be a good step I think. I'll look into doing that this week.

Just to give an update on the signatures, I did enable them last week however the forum almost immediately exploded due to all of the old signatures being broken and screwing up threads. I've been discussing with the vendor how to just reset them all, which basically requires some database stuff but I aim to do this week following a cautious backup. So they'll be back soon... I swear!

[jackophant]

Rather than resetting the signatures, would removing all the metadata from them work so that we can reorganise them ourselves?