Forums, Spotlight and Comments; Oh My! news

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Mod DB has rolled out a lot of changes recently. Your resident Community Manager presents a sweeping overview of all the new goodies and a few hints on how to best use them.

Posted by jacksonj04 on May 15th, 2008

As we promised earlier, Mod DB isn't standing still. Over the past week or so our code monkey INtense! has been rolling out new features and tweaking old ones to be even slicker. As Community Manager, it's my job to make sure everybody knows what's out there and how to best make use of them to promote their mod, their skills, their latest model, or anything else which Mod DB encourages you to promote. I'll kick off with a list of all the changes which directly affect you.

Forums are back, with new v4 goodness.
The WYSIWYG editor has been tweaked and upgraded.
We introduced Spotlight for new and updated mod releases.
You can now edit and manage comments.
Previews are available for news articles, features and comments.
User Icons are now available for use in the forums.
Polls can be created in the forums.

Predictably, the big change of the forums comes first. Whilst Mod DB had the old v3 forums running alongside the rest of the site, they were out of sync with the rest of the site. A different theme, different users, and all-in-all not the best solution. Now we have the brand new forums, with new sections for you to spend more time discussing development of mods including things like coding and 3D modelling. Also recently added is the polls feature, for those questions which need answering. If you have something to pimp, or want some advice from people with experience, the forums are the places to go. Which neatly brings me to my next bit;

You can now select little 'icons' which appear under your name in forum posts to highlight your areas of expertise. Head into the forums and click the 'edit' link next to your name in any of your posts to pick the icons which best describe you. Others, such as the "Pro" and "Helper" icon will be assigned to you by staff to draw attention to things such as being employed in the games industry, or being an all-around nice person.

All we ask is that before diving in you give the rules a quick skim through.

Next up, the WYSIWYG text editor. Introduced with v4 to replace the old [bbcode] style formatting, this has had a few teething troubles which should be mostly resolved. This has since been re-vamped, re-jigged and generally beaten into shape to improve its behaviour on a wider range of browsers as well as to play nicely with the rest of the site.

This has involved some limitations on what the editor can do, including removal of things like custom HTML tags and excessive CSS. Whilst this does limit some creative scope for profiles and news posts for a few web-savvy mod teams, for the vast majority it helps tidy up messy copy/pastes from their own website and so on. However, it's also got some new features such as the new spoiler (like this), code tagging and quote environments, for example:

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

S. wrote: The quote environment looks awesome when you're referring back to something.

along with a nicer list of styles including our drop capital. I'm also going to take this opportunity to remind you that the WYSIWYG editor also includes embedded media options for images, flash, Quicktime/Windows Media/Real video, and flash-based video players such as YouTube and our own Mod Video system.

You asked and we delivered, you can now edit your comments around the site, as well as (if you're a profile's owner) delete individual comments or entire comment trees. When you post a comment you are given five minutes in which you can alter it to clarify your meaning or fix typos, but after those five minutes that's it. No changes. Even the admins aren't exempt from this one, so remember to read through your comments and fix problems before the time is up!

For profile owners (personal and mod), if somebody is constantly coming out with pointless or waste-of-space comments you can now delete them (at any time, no five minute limit) and they will vanish from sight. However, remember that as with all things on Mod DB they are never truly gone and if an admin catches you deleting comments simply because they criticise your mod then we will have no qualms at all with bringing them back from the dead.

As another sort of related change, all comment, news, article and so on forms around the site now have a "Preview" button you can click to see what you're writing exactly as it will appear when posted, without the need to leave the page. Make use of it and save time!

The biggest thing I'm going to talk about is not a new button to push or bug fix, but is our newest regular feature - ModDB TV Spotlight. This is a look at all the new mod releases or big updates (At least a minor point release such as 1.1 to 1.2, a 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 probably isn't enough unless it's full of awesome content) which have made our front page over the past month. It doesn't matter if you're a one-man mod team tweaking a few options or a huge mod with its own PR department, if your release article hits our front page then you get a mention in the video run-down of this month's releases.

Obviously, the key to making it into Spotlight is getting your news onto our front page to start with. Remember that we are the biggest website not just for mod developers, but also for mod players looking for new content so you should always be trying to get your news onto the front page. A couple of excellent screenshots, a brief properly-written paragraph about the changes (No long lists, they just make posts fall flat) and most importantly a direct link to where people can get the mod. We have our own downloads system if you are looking for high-speed mirrors for your release. Try and avoid "read more on our site", as people don't click and you're likely to lose players.

This is a replacement for the 'mod of the month' feature we used to run, as it includes our 'staff selection' for the month.

That wraps it up from me, hope this has been a useful crash course on all the latest changes. If you have any questions, or your own hints and tips, then let me know and I'll include them in a later update!

Nick "jacksonj04" Jackson
Community Manager