I am very proud to welcome you all to the site. I know a lot of you thought it would never happen, so I thank you for your patience. I hope it was worth the wait, or at the very least, that you are all pleasantly surprised.
We are very close to finishing, but how close depends partly on the feedback you guys give us. We still have a bunch of outstanding bugs and tweaks (layout+performance) to finish and I'm sure as you guys play around with the site, this list will grow.
There are still a lot of features on the horizon, but we want to launch as soon as possible. Please let us know if you think we are missing any "must haves".
Alright, have fun :) Feel free to make test posts/uploads/etc but note that this is now the live database that we will be launching with.
Also, all feedback (bug reports, comments, stumbling blocks, questions, flames) should go in this forum.
Max, it is because you logged in on this server yesterday (right?) when the databases weren't finished syncing. Just clear the cookie from your browser and it should be fine.
Is there a plan for the walls/subs others deem to be low quality? I've not removed some subs (low quality type stuff), from the old site because of a post where you said people would be less upset if their walls were not removed.
If you don't mind I could share some ideas I had on how to keep from deleting the subs, but make it so it's not an eyesore for the general populous.
Max, please do share your ideas. Right now the plan is to get the community talking about it and make it a work in progress.
I'm thinking that the front page, Latest Additions, can be changed to Popular Additions, and require a certainly popularity rating to make it. To keep it simple, lets say popularity = # of loves. As time goes on, I think we'll be able to improve this formula. I also think it could be beneficial to keep this formula a secret to make it harder for people to game... it goes against the philosophy of the site, but I think this is an exception where it would cause more benefit than harm.
Anyways, so lets say at first, a sub only makes it to the front page with 5 loves. The flip side of that is if a sub is against site policy (a rip, adult content..), it just gets removed. If it is really terrible but not 'illegal', we could make it so these subs essentially get taken out of the network -- they won't show up when browsing, or for matches. However, they will show up in that user's gallery so they can still show it to their friends, etc.
We could also make it so when browsing, there are different levels (again, like digg/slashdot). The default could be subs with more than 5 loves.
Do you think this would work? What are your ideas?
I defintely like the idea of popular additions, I think as soon as we've got votes into the system we should get that going. Flickr has "interestingness" which is a similar concept, in that they don't moderate what is posted there but just allow the "best" to float to the top. I think that's a good approach for us to take, it allows the newbs to submit early attempts and get feedback without compromising our ideal scenario of making sure casual users only see the best quality submissions.
It's also kind of like the digg model in this way, we could possibly have an "upcoming submissions" page where the new un-voted for subs are placed, that is separate from the main "popular additions" which is only for those that have achieved a certain amount of votes/other criteria.
The digg model will certainly favor showing what people want to see while burying what they don't and there'll be no one to blame except the old hive mind.
First of all, thanks for the beta invite. It's great to see EVO finally coming together. I'm testing in Firefox and IE7 (via IEtab extension).
Upon the first glance of EVO, there was no initial 'wow' factor for me. That was until I logged in and got stuck into the thick of it.
An error I ran into just was when making a blog post.
"Application error (Apache)
Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html"
I'm pretty sure you'll know about that one.
I think I've come across a bug in IE7. The top tabs don't render the rounded corners.
The colour picker feature doesn't seem to work correctly in FF. When you pick a colour, it displays it in 'my palette' but it doesn't show the colour you picked it's just a white box.
That's all I've had time to test so far and comment on.
Thanks spr33, that is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for. I'm glad that you like it. I'm trying to fix the color picker bug right now, and the rounded tabs are on the TODO. Keep it coming :)
About the wow factor, that is interesting. Our goal was to keep the site simple, to focus on usability and as a showcase for the submissions -- so hopefully those will be the "wow". I will put a new featured up to try and catch people's eye a bit better.
Another quick thing I've noticed, when clicking the black customize.org logo, the drop shadow behind the thumbnails still appears and makes the thumbnail look really weird.
Ah yeah we need to make a dark shadow image for that. Does anyone know of any better drop shadow CSS btw? You can't center the thumbs with the code we're currently using, I keep meaning to investigate a better solution
I think I mentioned this before but white subs tend to fade into the bg on the light style, dark subs on the dark. If the shadow was more top down I think it'd look a little better.
In my opninion, this stuff is the shit! Haven't run into any problems yet, only that i can't view/edit/see some of my submissions, but i guess that is a database issue. Been playing around this afternoon, and i will some more when i have the time, but for now, whooooooooo...
k had a little play over lunch, works great. only suggestion (and this might be me being retarded), but the approval screen for friends should be more obvious, i only stumbled across it by mistake! if you have an approval pending there should be an alert or something like messages :)
I should elaborate - right now if I go into browse then tags then "3d" the thumb for "Chelsea Heights" by royaltoon shows up as a photo of a sunset, not the image he submitted.
Hmm it is definitely strange tho cus it shouldn't happen in the first place, whether or not it has been cached by your browser or ISP. It could have been something mark was doing with the subs, I know some still have a few issues left over from the porting that he's working on. I'm sure he'll see this and comment :)
