by Jiyambi
You may have noticed some changes around the site. In this post I’ll discuss the changes, and also make everyone aware of some issues the site is having which will hopefully soon be fixed.
Search Feature
- There is now a search field available in the upper right corner of the site! This feature isn’t very sophisticated, but may help you locate information within the many guides here on WoW-Pro. I hope it’s helpful!
Blogs
- Up until now we’ve been using guides as make-shift blogs for those who want them. Those who are already doing this can continue if you like, but we now have actual blogs available. You can create them in the same way you create guides. Simply select “Create Content” from the menu on the left side of your screen, and select “Blog entry” on the next page. You can see user’s blog posts from their profiles. New blog posts are promoted to the front page of the site just like new guides are. In the future I’ll be adding a link to browse through all blogs more easily.
Karma and Rank Issues
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- I attempted to add some automated features to the Karma system. Unfortunately the system has been extremely buggy the last few weeks, and adding these features seems to have made things worse. Bugs include:
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- Occasionally seeing a white screen with just a “1” on it after posting. This should now be fixed.
- Occasionally being stripped of you rank for no apparent reason. Please send me a PM if this happens to you – I think this should be fixed now, but I don’t know who it affected and I will need to fix the problem automatically.
- The rankings page, where you were once able to see the Karma numbers for everyone, is completely broken and has been for a while. No ETA on a fix, I’m basically waiting to hear back from Snowflake about it.
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The end result of all this is that, aside from not being able to look up everyone’s Karma, you as users should no longer have any issues. The bad news is I had to remove all of the automation to get things to stop being buggy, so it will take me longer to moderate comments and award points.
Guide Category Pages
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- Older users may remember a time when guide category pages showed a nice table with a pretty list of guides, authors, and ratings, instead of just a bulleted list of titles. Well, that type of view is on the way back! See the
- page to see what I mean. It will be a while before I get this view set up for every category page, but I will get it done eventually!
Guide Ratings
- Speaking of guide ratings, I just fixed up some things with this feature too. Ratings are now displayed at the top of guides, rather then at the bottom. They are also shown on the guide teasers on the front page. Additionally, there is now a feature by which you can rate guides when leaving a comment – just be aware that the rating you choose will be displayed to everyone who looks at the guide. I want to encourage everyone to please rate any guides you read – guide ratings are an important way to keep the quality of WoW-Pro guides high!
Guide Update and Purge
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- I’m roughly halfway done with the guide update and purge. Once it is completed, I’ll be doing a
massive
- overhaul of the needed guides page. There are a LOT of guides around the site that need to be updated. For many of these, their authors have not been online in a very long time. If you would like to adopt any of these guides, please comment on them or send me a PM. I’ve already had several people step up to help improve these guides, and I really appreciate it!
Keep up the good work everyone, I’ll do my best to get this site running even more smoothly as we move forward!
Since you can all see thisSince you can all see this post, I’ll comment here.
Snowflake is working on a site update, which I think will eventually be quite awesome. Everything is REALLY broken right now, though. I’ve already bugged her about the various issues pointed out by the comments below – I will forward any other issues you guys find so feel free to post them.
Unfortunately I am unable to fix the permissions issue because, while I can still do most things (like see the guides that you guys can’t), my ability to change permissions is currently unavailable 🙁 I’ve emailed her about this but she’s in a different time zone than I am (I think) and may not be able to fix it for a bit.
For now just sit tight – your guides ARE still there (I can see them), and your ranks ARE still there (I can see them but can’t currently edit them).
To kayeich – karma has always been in categories, but we usually just displayed the total. Unfortunately in the rankings page it does not give the OPTION to display the total at the moment, which is annoying >_<
I would post this as a new news item but Snowflake already did that and you guys aren't able to view it for some reason, so we'll just use this old one for now.
Not sure, but that was sureNot sure, but that was sure one heck of a 10 minute maintenance! Why, it felt more like 7 hours, I’d say… ;p)
I’m assuming it’s a new site layout, although it’s missing a lot of the features it used to have.
Right now, we’re forbidden access to guides though, which is pretty lame, and I can’t even see blog entries or my WiP guides. There’s also no sight of recent events or online members.
Also don’t see Bitsem’s durotar paper guide, which I remember posting to like 5 minutes before site went on maintenance, so I hope that didn’t get lost in the transition.
Karma points seem a bit more fancy now though, since they seem categorized by where you got them from (comments, guides, etc).
Actually, I’d almost suspect this was an -old- layout, but I’m so used to the one we had before this being up for ages that it’s kind of hard to imagine this being an old layout.
But it does currently have a little bit more retro feel to it.
I kind of like the little 3d-painted pandaren on this logo, but I honestly think I preferred the old one more, it was more friendly looking.
This layout is also much smaller width-wise (used to be able to take 620~ px width pictures, right now a lot of banners look cropped since it’s gone down to exactly 575px).
Edit: I seem to have gotten some karma for what I assume is the comment I left on bitsem’s guide, so I’m suspecting current missing features is just an issue of permissions for ranks still needing to be set.
WoahhhhhhhhhWhat the hell happened to the site?
The wonderful SnowflakeThe wonderful Snowflake stopped by and fixed some technical issues with the site, including the problems with the [url=https://wow-pro.com/userpoints/list/all]Karma listings page[/url]! The page is back, so you can now see where you stand with Karma! Awesome!
In other news, we are currently experiencing some problems with ability to attach files to guides. Hopefully this will be solved relatively soon, I’ll keep you all posted!
More ratings features:
IMore ratings features:
I moved the ratings back to the top of pages, enabled them on the front page, AND added a new feature which allows you to attach a rating when you comment. This does mean what you rated the guide as is visible to everyone, though. But it might encourage people who are commenting on guides to also rate them.
I’ll add this to the post above as well.