Would you like more features on the RND Files Archive?

[Zomis]

Lately, there has been a couple of new signups to the RND Files Archive, 5 more users have joined so far this year!!

I have planned to do more features on the archive, but I feel that it'd be better to ask some users of it instead of asking myself, even though I'm probably the one using it most often (you should just know how many hidden files I've uploaded for myself )

Features I have been planning to add includes the following:

- Search function for finding files, users, votes, filenames, etc.

- Sorting of the member list in almost all possible ways

- Downloading a complete category, or all user levels at once (with additional information added in a generated file included in the .tar.gz file)

- News Subscriptions, so users can be notified (optional, of course) about how much their files are downloaded, and information about any new users, files or votes

- Customized HTML user pages, so a user can upload a HTML page which will be shown as the info about that user.

Let me know what you think, Ok?
And if you don't know which "RND Files Archive" I'm talking about, here's the link: http://www.zomis.net/rnd

[Holger]

Maybe the possibility to vote levels (maybe even levels and sets from the Artsoft site) would be a nice thing, although I don't know how one could prevent the uploaders from voring their own levels up to the sky... ;-)

[Zomis]

Maybe the possibility to vote levels (maybe even levels and sets from the Artsoft site) would be a nice thing, although I don't know how one could prevent the uploaders from voring their own levels up to the sky...

Well, voting/rating levels/files is already possible, but one needs to be registred and to log in in that case. When logging in, there's no problem at all to allow users to only rate their own files once (excluding their own, which shouldn't be rated by themselves at all).

Rating sets from the artsoft site, however, would be a little more tricky. Since they don't exists in the archive themselves, but this could be solvable...

[Zomis]

NEWS: Searching for files (title, filename, comment) is now possible using http://www.zomis.net/rnd/search.php

[Daniel H.]

• I wish that one could set the time zone used for showing times on one's account on the R&D File Archive.
• E-mail notifications for downloads and votes would be very nice.
• Maybe there could be a "links" column so that for each download, you could put a Discussion link, for example.

[HerzAusGold]

Martijn groups are very nice!
May be you can provide something like this.

[Martijn]

Martijn groups are very nice!
May be you can provide something like this.

But what kind of groups do you exactly mean here? Of course I want to add it if it is useful. But currently I'm working on the mega mega long c64 boulder dash games download list, which should be finished soon.

[Zomis]

Martijn groups are very nice!
May be you can provide something like this.

I'm also curious about what kind of groups you mean here. I have "Categories" where users (registred only) can put their files into, but would you like more Categories maybe? Then which categories would you like?

Daniel:
time zone - good idea! I'll try to implement this!
E-mail notifications - I've been working on it a bit, I'm just curious how many would use it... But I'll continue to implement it when I have time.
"links" column - theoretically already possible, just haven't fixed a way for users to choose the link yet But this will come.

[HerzAusGold]

I mean this structure:

Additional Classic Levels
Additional Player Levels
Classic Games
Contributions
Examples
Multiplayer Levels
Tutorials

And for the levels I want "beginner","easy","middle","hard","very hard"
or something like this for the degree of difficulty.

[Zomis]

I mean this structure:

Additional Classic Levels
Additional Player Levels
Classic Games
Contributions
Examples
Multiplayer Levels
Tutorials

And for the levels I want "beginner","easy","middle","hard","very hard"
or something like this for the degree of difficulty.

Take a look at http://www.zomis.net/rnd/catlist.php. There you can see that some of these already exists. And I don't think I will add all of those categories. "Tutorials", however, I will add.
But maintaining such a structure would be too much work. The RNDFA is meant to be pretty much self-maintaining. So that users themselves can choose categories and stuff.
And the difficulty level probably won't happen. That's too hard for me to judge. If users would like then I could make it so that they optionally can choose a difficulty level for their sets, but I'm not sure how many that would use them, and something which is "very hard" for someone might be "middle" for someone else.

[Zomis]

• I wish that one could set the time zone used for showing times on one's account on the R&D File Archive.
• E-mail notifications for downloads and votes would be very nice.
• Maybe there could be a "links" column so that for each download, you could put a Discussion link, for example.

Time Zone has now been added, please test that feature though! I'm not sure if it works correctly...
And as you probably have seen, there is now a "Referer" link for files which has a specified referer.

Still have to work more with the e-mail notification and e-mail report stuff though...
(Not that I make a distinction between notification and report, a report is something which happens on a regular basis, like once a week or so. Notification is something triggered by an action - like "New file uploaded" or "One of your files has been rated").

[Francesco]

I should have missed this topic... I voted for "The sooner, the better!"

As I told you in a PM, Zomis, it would be nice if you add some small level preview images directly in the FA pages, since you are able to create images server side - just like the resume that appears in the footer of all of your posts.

It would be also really nice if you could manage to extract the graphics from the archives, to match the actual appearance of CEs in the big previews, as well as in the small automated previews that I mentioned above.

[Zomis]

Ah, yes... sorry for not replying to your pm. I tend to forget about those sometimes once I read them...

Anyway... what you suggest is not that easy to implement. Even though the ideas are nice, I have to think about some things... like how big the preview image will be... and how to shrink it down to that size... what method to use and so on...

And yeah... custom graphics would be very nice to see, but I need to know how to load that custom graphics in PHP, and how to cut it and paste it somewhere else and so on...
I haven't fixed this for Delphi either yet, but I hope that I'll do that one day... (if anyone ever will use RNDDB...)

[Francesco]

I would suggest you to use 4px as tile size for the image previews, just like the RnD preview, and each preview will be as big as necessary.

Since having a lot of those images in a page could mess it up, you could make another one, whose size will be, let's say so, no more than 80px in height or width.

In this way, you'll have the smaller previews directly put on the page. Those smaller previews would turn into the "4px tile" ones when hovered (the frame would enlarge overlapping the text around) and finally, when clicked, the existing "32px tile" page would be loaded.

Quite a lot of work, isn't it? But that would be really nice.

The issue about the hover-on in-page previews will be solved by a couple of CSS rules, and my contribution will stop there, sorry, I would like to help in the automatic creation of the previews, but I haven't got the knowledge to do so.

By the way, I would like to know which tools you are using to make the image on your signature.

[Daniel H.]

By the way, I would like to know which tools you are using to make the image on your signature.

It's just PHP code, isn't it?