[Old] New Features and Updates for TL.net

Saro

United States852 Posts

July 25 2004 05:16 GMT

Note: I'll leave this post as a sticky for a day or two, just so everyone has a chance to see it.

Over the past several weeks I've slowly been working on some updates for the site, when I have the spare time and feel like working on this sort of stuff. Finally all the updates I planned on working on are finished, and now uploaded and live on the site. Here's a rundown of the new features and updates.

User Icons
Everyone has an icon now! But, you don't get to pick your own. The icons reflect sort of a pseudo-"rank" that each user is at, which is calculated by a combination of your total posts, and how long you've been a member here at TL.net. Also, the Admin/Moderators have the ability to override the default formula and specifically set a user's rank as they see fit. There are 33 different SC unit icons, 11 for each race. Although you don't get to choose your rank, you do get to pick your race, in your Profile page. Here are what all of the icons look like:

Terrran
Protoss
Zerg

Aside from those, staff-type users will have a special TL.net icon, and eventually as time permits, Newsposters and Mods will get a unique individual icon like Wax's or Rek's.

Public Profiles
Each post a user makes will have a link to their public profile. Of course you don't have to participate, but if you'd like to, your public profile is editable in your Profile page. The public profile page will first list some general information about the user; when they joined, their average posts per day/week, how many posts they've made in the last week, and other info. Then, if the user chose to make a public profile, that will be listed also.

You can also upload an image file, to be included on your public profile page. The interface for this is also on the "Edit profile" page. The files are restricted to .jpg, .gif, .png, or .bmp types, and 250K in size. Please only use small to midsize images, as large ones will distort the layout. You may upload a new image as many times as you'd like, but it will overwrite your previous file.

Whatever you'd like to include in your public profile is up to you. Your hobbies, interests, misc info about yourself, whatever. You can use UBB code, have links, and embed outside images (Photobucket.com and ImageShack are recommended if you want to include your own photos). As usual however, the normal rules apply here to, and obscenities or offensive material will not be tolerated and could end up getting you banned.

Also new to the edit profile page is a place to put your birthday. You can only do this once however, as later we might give people a birthday hat icon for the day, or send them a happy birthday PM. Anyway, for now it will just show up on your public profile, if you choose to include it.

Current Mood Icons
If you'd like, you can now share with the rest of us what type of mood you're currently in. If enabled, A small smiley icon will appear below your post, either to the right of your quote if you have one, or to the left. You can enable this feature at the bottom of your Profile page, and choose from about 25 different smiley icons. Once enabled, changing your mood icon is easy. At the bottom of any post you made, "Mood" will be a little popup link to pick a new icon. You can also change the icon in your profile, or disable it at any time. It's just a little "for fun" feature, and later we might make something that lets you see a chart of your moods over time, or see the average mood of all of TL.net.

Liquibet Updates
The Liquibet page is now broken down into pages listing 20 liquibets per page. There's also some changes in the layout, most noticable is the new pictures for most of the players. The closing times for each bet will now be shown too (in ~~Korean time~~ changed to TL.net time). There is now a page for player stats, and your own liquibet stats also. Rather than explain everything here, I'll just let you guys go check it all out for yourselves. Another small change is an actual "Vote" button, so hopefully we'll have less "I clicked the wrong one!!" complaints

Article Section Update
For anyone who hasn't checked out the Article Section in awhile, X)Benny has been doing a really great job in there. But, that section has long needed a different method of displaying and organizing articles, and not have them get bumped every time someone replies. So, it has a new layout now, similar to what the main forum page looks like. I'm sure it will continue to be a great resource for us.

PM Updates
Pretty much just some small updates here, nothing major, mostly stuff I should've done when I originally made the system. Here's a quick rundown:
      - now shows the PM date when viewing a specific PM
      - now has pages, listing 15 PM's per page
      - viewing a message in the Sent folder now shows "To: the person you sent it to"
            rather than "From: yourself"
      - total number of messages listed at the bottom
      - number of new PM's now gets immediately updated, so when you're viewing that
            new PM, it doesn't still show you have a new one
      - when you reply to a PM, if the subject already starts with "Re:" it won't add it again
            (so we don't have a bunch of "Re: Re: Re: Re: ... " subjects).
Maybe some other little things, but that's mostly it.

Search Updates
You can now search by "Title + Content", just "Title", or just "Content" from the main Search page. Also, similar to Google, you can search for exact phrases by "putting your search in double quotes", or use any combination of quotes and words. Also, there's now the ability to search all of the forums at once, by choosing "All Forums". However, I would still strongly encourage and recommend that you try searching in a specific forum first, if you remember or have a good idea where what you're looking for might be. It will be quicker for you, and less intensive for the server. Searching through a subset is much easier on the server than searching through all 435,000+ posts. If this becomes a detriment to our gracious host, it might have to be removed. And lastly, when the search results come back, it will have a link to the topic, but also a direct link to each specific post where a match was found.

UBB page updates
Nothing big. Go ahead and check out the few updates. Most people already know about having colored text, but now you can make
\[list\]

\[*\]unordered
\[*\]or ordered
\[*\]lists

\[/list\] and [indent\]Indent text.

Misc Stuff
Just some other small stuff, IE users can now use "alt-s" to automatically post a reply, instead of actually clicking the "Post" button. This was an easy thing for IE, other browser users however will just have to keep doing whatever you're used to for now.

The "Jump to the last page" > links now show up when you're viewing a specific forum too. Also, Meat implemented a feature a long time ago, but I'm not sure how many people know about it or make use of it. In your profile, you can set an option that let's you view the last 20 posts in a thread, as opposed to how many posts would naturally show up on the last page. So now, if you have that option set, clicking the little > link will show you the last 20 posts in that thread. Without the option, it will show the last page of the thread as normal.

Starting off a link with www should now work, www.yahoo.com .

Because of many requests, and concern that the Strategy section isn't very active, it now has it's own sidebar on the menu at the left of each page. However, having the sidebar menus show up on every single page is a good deal of extra work for the server, and we certainly don't want to burden our kind host. So, if activity in the Strategy section doesn't pick up as a result, the sidebar will mostly like disappear. Hopefully I'll have some time later, whenever that is, to make that whole thing more efficient.

Well, that's about it as far as the updates. Might be some other small stuff I didn't mention, but that's the gist of it. On a personal note, starting this week I've been a whole lot busier and will continue to be for a long time to come. So sadly, I'll have considerably less free time for viewing or working on stuff for TL.net. Not that I appear very active to regular users anyway! ^^ Anyway, I'll still try to work on little stuff here and there, but no guarantees of course.

Anyway, hope you guys like the new stuff. Any bugs, you can post about it here or in the Feedback forum. Also as usual, other suggestions for new features or updates can also be posted in the Feedback forum.

Ebenol

Sweden1983 Posts

July 25 2004 05:18 GMT

Nifty.

Slaughter

United States20255 Posts

July 25 2004 05:19 GMT

Nice updates :D maybe now people will pay more attention to stratagy forum :D

Refrain[FriZ]

Canada4337 Posts

July 25 2004 05:23 GMT

ownage =] btw how does the ranking stuff work? like what's higher/what's lower?

Malmis

Sweden1569 Posts

July 25 2004 05:23 GMT

good work--b

STIMEY d okgm fish

Canada6140 Posts

July 25 2004 05:24 GMT

my sig has disappeared?

i was trying to enable current mood... and it disappeared. my sig lost bug.. 18 18

it says javascript error on page ><

my country reset too?

Meat

Netherlands3751 Posts

July 25 2004 05:26 GMT

oops, just like country