Ideas: Polycount Features
polycounter lvl 20
Mi amigos,
We're looking to make the forums as useful to us as game artists, game players, and a great community of like-minded people as possible. Are their features you've seen from other forums - or ones that you haven't but wish you could - you'd like to see here?
Please keep it in context to Polycount. We're a game art forum first before we're a general discussion forum (or thats the idea, anyway) so please keep your ideas in tune with that. Your help on this would be awesome.
Here are some things I'm going to try and integrate over time that we've thought up over the past month.
We're looking to make the forums as useful to us as game artists, game players, and a great community of like-minded people as possible. Are their features you've seen from other forums - or ones that you haven't but wish you could - you'd like to see here?
Please keep it in context to Polycount. We're a game art forum first before we're a general discussion forum (or thats the idea, anyway) so please keep your ideas in tune with that. Your help on this would be awesome.
Here are some things I'm going to try and integrate over time that we've thought up over the past month.
- Proper image scaling. When large images are posted on the "polycount" theme they're resized to fit the forums locked width. The image can be clicked to see it @ 100%, then clicked again to be shrunk back down. We have this working behind the scenes right now but have 1 major bug with it we're ironing out before it goes live.
- RSS feed of your favourite forums. This is something we're definitely going to do but have other, much larger, things in the works and once those go up we'll roll out with the feed.
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Spoiler tags.I finally got this finished last night. [ spoiler] [ /spoiler ], without spaces between the [ & ] to make it work.
- GamerTag and PSN Account right in your profile. I actually have this working atm but haven't rolled it out yet because I am going to have it show up in the user info panel seen in every post. It won't be invasive, as it looks as minimal as your Location & Age info does. We're gamers as well and this feature was asked of me more than once. I should have it working come this weekend.
- Image hosting. As it stands, our bandwidth wouldn't handle the load and until it can, we won't be hosting images. There are tons of free image hosting services out there for the time being. I personally use a Shacknews Mercury account as it comes with unlimited bandwidth to host all my non-portfolio images. It costs money but is VERY reasonable.
- Pimping & Preview thread thumbnails. Too many art communities use this feature and we think it discourages responses & views rather than encourages it. For now, we'll keep it out unless its unanimous that we should have it on Polycount and not join that band wagon.
Replies
Just a thought.
Spoiler tag is great! Nice one.
Image rescaling would be great. Did you already try to just let the offending post break out of the table, but keep the rest of the thread inside the regular table?
I'd like to see custom-size image tags. Like if I'm posting a reference shot from the web, but it's really big and I just want it to show up smaller.
I had my live messenger up on here, but I found I was getting spam since I didn't block unknown users. maybe have the option to limit who can see your contact information to registered users only?
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I'd actually think thumbnails would be cool for pimping threads. As long as there aren't star ratings i think its ok. Maybe there could be a server-side default image for a field you select when creating a thread? The icon/thumbnail could look cool enough so not to be nothing if someone isnt comfortable with a thumb. At that point it may be more clutter than what it is worth though.
Im a forgetful bastard, and would be all for this idea... since i end up clicking on the same thread 4 or 5 times just from random clicking on links
The rest of it sounds awesome, nice work Adam!
Not sure if this is happening already, but I've seen on other boards where if there was a large image in a post it would screw up the formatting of that post, but the rest had the normal width. That way you'd have some sweet images and still read everything easily.
Oh, and we need smilies.
I don't know how hard this idea of mine (concocted by user comments above) would be to implement but just giving some ideas to the possibility of perhaps having this as a custom user option. You would select an option to have the images display at 100% quality or have them scaled automatically by say 50% for easy viewing and of course the option to click and view at 100%.
If you wanted to do the resume thing:
I like what Keg said about having (Special) registered users only have access to resume/contact information ect. Since we see many representatives in the Paid Jobs section those (Special Users) could have said access to our specifics.
The special user category could be sorted out by their registered e-mail addresses.. [Example: @rockstar.com, @gearbox.com, @blizzzard.com] special access is granted to those within the special user category specifically by the e-mail they register with of course those already registered would automatically get updated to avoid re-registering issues.
Hope I have helped in any way!
All of the polycount smilies are there. I haven't hooked up the smilie code to the smilies.
Every time you post, you can easily drop one in.
:poly108::poly139::poly006::snarl::poly117::poly107::poly127:
would be nice to have some more standard shortcuts though, having to remember that poly 120 = :poly120: sucks
But the quick reply doesn't have smileys to drop in. The forum should be able to filter out the text version and convert it to a smiley :P
Most of the authors rally to berate whoever it is doing the selling. Same goes for books, I wouldn't want Polycount to get into any legal battles but I fully support the idea of a mini-craigslist forum for supplies, computer parts, and certain out of print books/DVD's. I hope it doesnt' turn into a "I iz hauck moi modelz here k?"
Just know that certain materials have some heavy hitters who go to bat regularly to protect future sales.
I don't think its as of a big deal for out of print stuff. But considering how much crossover there is between forums I'm sure it would come up pretty quickly =/
Thumbs up from me.
I vote no for this one. I agree with the discouraging factor but it would be cool if the thumbnails were optional, but that could get out of hand tho.
Resize image Feature: Ok by me
View my resume Feature:
Sounds fine but as said before make it optional.
"Garage Sale" forum area? oh I like this Idea too. Yes it will definitely need some sort of rules and regulations on what you can sell.
Nice Ideas
I like the optional resume though...with it converted to code the owner can edit with ease...
XBL Gamertags and PSN Accounts can now be added to your profile! To do this, you must:
- Click on UserCP
- Edit Profile
- Scroll down to the bottom
- Add info if either fields apply to you
It'll show up in the info pane thats made whenever you make a new post. If you take a look to the left of this post, under my avatar, my XBL Gamertag is ready to be added to your XBL!Polycount Garagesale, while a good idea, will not be happening on Polycount. I actually had the forum up today (and public! I'm a ninja, I know...) but there was a mini-meeting and the powers-that-be decided such a forum can cause far too many legal issues for us AND it pulls the focus of our site away from game art. Go to eBay if you want to sell your stuff or make a post in GD if you absolutely must sell it to someone who bleeds black & green.
Image Resizer - It's coming! I promise! The bug we have right now is its installing itself to all of our themes. For Polycount_wide, it isn't needed. For the main polycount theme, the one locked @ 1024px it should be installed. Once we iron out this bug we'll roll it out to the masses.
RSS - same as originally thought.
Resume - mixed feelings. I'll throw it on the backburner for now and move on.
Anyone else have any ideas? Now's the time to speak up...
Avatars, Signature and Images display in the CP, I would like the same for Number of posts, Join date, Location, XBL, PSN, IM, Is Online/Offline, status, and Name.
As a matter of fact I would love to be able to switch many visual elements on and off to streamline my browsing experience. Especially since sometimes these pieces of information take more vertical space than the post themselves :P
Also! Could we have a zip file containing some bogus pages (main, subforom index, thread) to mess with CSS wise? I'd love to be able to submit styles, we could even have a nice library of those!
I remember (this was back in the older forums days) a collegue (FunsharkkxXx!) overriding the forum theme with a default one on his computer. I tried the Stylish extension for FF but can't find a way to properly use it...
As for the ability to turn options on & off, that's something I'll have to look in to and is a fantastic idea. Thanks!
I like the idea of awards, ones that get added to your profile. Like the cg choice awards or the comp awards they have at gameartisians.
Also every page served has inline styles and Javascript. Why don't you link these chunks of code externally so they can cache? It makes for a very heavy page that will tax the polycount bandwidth un-necessarily.
I copied all of the un-necessary code out of a single page serve into a blank text document. It added up to 20k on every page served, or 670 lines that do next to nothing. So that means if polycount is serving 5000 pages a day - for example - thats...
20kb x 5000 = 100000 kb = 100 MB
100 megs a day?! And thats a conservative estimate. You could easily host images for that, giving users a 100k limit per post, or even 200k limit. Once someone has seen an image it is cached, but thats not true for polycounts HEAVY pages.
You complain about not hosting images but you are throwing bandwidth to the wind my friend.
To make matters worse, most of that code is commented out!! madness
Also if you're adding XBL and PSN numbers, please add DS and Wii gamer codes
AS for the code, I'm no wizard so it is likely that theres some waste in there. Would you be willing to help by showing me the code you removed? I can do that immediately after being shown what it is you had done. Thanks in advance.
UPDATE: You can add DS or Wii codes the same way XBL and PNA's can be added. Good idea
I would prefer the post breaking from the thread as many others have said. Conceptart does this with their board and it's win. Last I checked Gameartisans does the image resize thing and I can't say I like it that way, I just want to browse through. Same goes for the use of thumbanils within a thread, although it obviously is useful for slow connection users.
Thanks for all your efforts dude.
Thanks for your hard work Adam.
Good idea, and thanks!
Visual Markers for better crits!
creating visual marker
display's visual markers per layer around originally posted image?