New Awards and Profile Pages

Announcement and feedback

[jimsthoughts]

We are excited to announce that we're launching some great new awards for WebmasterWorld members in good standing. Members contributing significantly to WebmasterWorld have the potential to win one, or more of our awards. This is a big thank you for members contributing towards our community today, or for some of those extra special Members that have been so generous in the past.

Members simply need to be of good standing, and to participate and to contribute with quality posts over time, and may become eligible for one or more award at a time. In addition, new badges will show more clearly our Moderators and Administrators.

Here's a quick description of the WebmasterWorld Members awards.

Top 100 All Time Posters Award: This award is for those members achieving a position in the top 100 contributors on WebmasterWorld, since its creation.

Ten Year Members Award: Awarded to Senior Members, or any Member in good standing, that have continuously contributed for ten or more years. To maintain eligibility for this membership award, non-Senior Members must continue to participate.

Five Year Members Award: Awarded to Senior Members, or any Member in good standing, that have continuously contributed for five or more years. To maintain eligibility for this membership award, non-Senior Members must continue to participate.

Top Contributor Of The Month Award: This award is earned by being one of the top 25 contributors for the past calendar month. This award remains while a member is on the top 25 of the previous month.

Post Of The Month Award: This award is earned by any Member in good standing that starts a quality or newsworthy story selected for WebmasterWorld's front page. This award remains as long as the story is current on the WebmasterWorld's front page.

Senior Members Award. This award is for all Senior members in good standing reaching Senior Member status.

Moderators Badge. This award recognizes WebmasterWorld's moderators, and only applies to current, active Moderators.

Administrators Badge. This award recognizes WebmasterWorld's Administrators, and only applies to current, active Administrators.

We'll be rolling these awards out in the next 24-hours.

In addition to our new awards, we've significantly improved the WebmasterWorld Profile pages which make it easier to find information about the members. For example, if you're a developer looking for work it'd be worth your while making sure you have all your details up-to-date. Now would be a great time to check your own profile and to update it with additional information about you, your company, and the services you offer. We hope you find it useful.

Thank you for your continued participation in this WebmasterWorld Community.

We're Feeling Lucky!
Jim, Neil, Bill, and the DeveloperShed team.

PS, and of course, we welcome your feedback below.

[penders]

Interesting the new link to message that appeared today...

Unfortunately that (what looks like a link-to-message link) is a "report message" link. IMO there should be a separate "report message" link that clearly states "report message" and the link that identifies the message ID should simply link to the message (which is a useful feature).

[engine]

Thanks Penders and Leosghost.

We're making enhancements on-the-fly.

Linking direct to a post is a little tougher to achieve on this system, but it does work for parts of the system, such as the report.
In general, it's on our list of wants, too.

[Fotiman]

1. I agree, "Msg#: nnnnnnn" shouldn't be bold. At first glance, I thought ever message in this thread was unread. There's no semantic reason for that to be bold that I can think of.

2. I don't like that the "Msg#: nnnnnnn" link is where the report message moved. It's not clear that clicking on that would bring you to the report message page. Relying on mouseovers to tell the user what a link does is bad for User Experience (UX). In addition, I would rather this was just a link to this particular message, which could then easily be bookmarked, copied, etc. For example:
<a href="/postv5.cgi?action=report&forum=19&discussion=4713725&id=4714057">Report</a> <a href="#msg4714057" name="msg4714057">Msg#: 4714057</a>

3. The smaller badges are better.

Linking direct to a post is a little tougher to achieve on this system

Why is that? The msg id is obviously known, so all that's needed is a link that points to #msgnnnnnnn (see my example above).

[penders]

Why is that? The msg id is obviously known, so all that's needed is a link that points to #msgnnnnnnn (see my example above).

I thought this too at first (and to be honest is what I have always done manually in the past), however, this does not always seem to work... it depends on the users pagination (specifically the "Messages per thread" option under System Preferences in the users control panel). I think if there are more than 30 messages in a thread (such as this one), then this method is unpredictable.

(ASIDE: Closer look... Changing the pagination potentially changes the URL for page numbers 2+. However, the pagination setting that the user has set kind of takes priority over the URL and attempting to specify a different pagination in the URL - which you could easily do by simply appending the message ID to the URL - appears to break the pagination/thread! Which raises another query... what is the canonical URL for a page?!)

[Fotiman]

I just tried playing around with this some. At 30 messages per thread, the URL for the current page I'm on is:
/webmasterworld/4713725-3-30.htm

That first 3 seems to indicate the page number, and the 30 seems to indicate the number of messages to show. If I change my preferences to 60 messages per thread, then the URL for the current page is:
/webmasterworld/4713725-2-60.htm

Unfortunately, it does seem that my preferences prevent me from being able to visit the link to the 3-30 page when my setting it 60. That is, if I visit the first URL above when my setting is 60 messages per thread, I see only the original post and the page links. Ideally, the URL itself should still have worked correctly (showing me page 3 with 30 messages per page, regardless of what my setting was). As it is now, if I was to share the first URL with someone who's setting was 60 messages per thread, they would get basically an empty page (only the original post would be displayed). To me, that seems like a bug. I would expect it to work more like this:
1. Check to see if a page number and number of messages is included in the URL. If so, ignore preferences and use those values to determine what to show, and how to generate the page links.
2. If no page number was specified in the URL (ie - the first page of a thread), then use the user preferences to determine how many to show, and how to generate the page links.

With that said, even the way it is now *should* still work for the majority of links and use cases. The only case where those links would NOT work would be if the user changed that setting, or if they tried to share a link with another use that had different preferences. For example, if I bookmark a message that's on page 3 of a thread, and then I later change the preferences to show more messages per thread (causing the original message to move to page 2, for example), then yes, my bookmarked link would be broken (though as I described above, I would expect that link to still work and ignore my preferences).

[Leosghost]

I'd just remove the "number of messages per page" option from the "options"..set it a 30..( after all "badges" are default..with no "option" of "no badges", the workaround see "no badges" requires a 3rd party script ) ..Do the same with max threads on forum list set it at 50..

Then Robert becomes the sibling of one of your parents :)

"Options" in control panel used to have many more ways to "skin"..they have gone ( AFAICS ) ..getting rid of those two "options" would solve the "link to specific message" problem in one go..anyone currently not using those default settings would need their cookie reading and if so, re-writing..

The recent threads list also resets every 24 hours to last 300..which is not an "option"..allowing number of messages per page and number of threads per page to be member "options" seems to be making more difficulties ( preventing easily linking to specific messages, which very many of us would love to be able to do, particularly in long threads..those over 30 messages long ) than it is worth..

[RedBar]

Interesting, my previous monicker here now has a Top100 badge. I'm going to start collecting all my posts together and publish an ebook:-))

[Fotiman]

allowing number of messages per page and number of threads per page to be member "options" seems to be making more difficulties ( preventing easily linking to specific messages, which very many of us would love to be able to do, particularly in long threads..those over 30 messages long ) than it is worth..

I'm inclined to agree, though in theory this should not be too difficult of a problem to solve, while still allowing users to have some preference (but which could be ignored by linking to a specific page + number of message as I described above).

[Andem]

Hmm, after a couple of weeks with these badges, I still can't get used to them. They just don't fit with this place at all.

Please, please no avatars!

[RedBar]

Am I seeing two different versions of WebmasterWorld, one the old version and a new responsive-style version?

[Leosghost]

I think it is more of a "liquid layout"..works down to 1024px lansdcape, but "breaks" ( only just, the edit post buttons vanish ) at 800px landscape..
My suggestion would be to put the "edit" buttons back under or alongside the sticky mail buttons..

Then it would work at 800px landscape :)

[RedBar]

The bizarre thing is that I see a different homepage layout using FF 33.1 on a Win Vista v FF 33.1 on a Win 7. On Vista "Join The Conversation" is below Highlighted Posts whereas on 7 it is to the right.

On both machines it is to the right with Opera, K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, MSIE, Chrome, Safari and even Netscape Navigator. My Lumia browser also shows it like this!

What's happened to my FF on Vista? Cache and cookies have been cleaned out.

[Leosghost]

I see what you see on FF33.1 on win7..( liquid layout )
I'm using FF28 on linux mint 13..maya..

Your FF on Vista appears to be possibly more broken than Vista was already when it was released..;)

Unless WebmasterWorld has begun sniffing for browser / OS combos ?

[incrediBILL]

The layout probably moves due to text size differences on the various browsers making it move as it floats left.

Just increase your font size in the browser and it'll move back to the right side.

There's some new changes coming that will probably change this behavior soon.

[RedBar]

Vista broken? I prefer it way ahead of Win 7 and never knowing where the damned folders are going to open and at what size!

@incrediBILL - That worked!

[jimsthoughts]

1. We should have a "turn off badges" ...possibly even by the end of the day today inside your control panel, under "System Preferences", so if you're logged in, and you don't want to see the banners, you can just turn them off and never see them again.

2. the profile pages are getting edited to only show fields that are filled in (possibly updated today).

3. We're also close to releasing the site on bootstrap...it looks Really nice! and looks great in mobile too...it also has a new nav...some nice changes...

4. We're listening to all of you and talking about things...and doing edits based on your feedback...

[Leosghost]

Thank you Jim, and Bill and the others working on this :)) all much appreciated ..

[incrediBILL]

t should be a proper webmaster community where we can recommend stuff, say what products are good and what is bad. Let us talk about other websites and designs, Let us have a page where we can tell people what we do for a living and what we've worked on. Its more like a secret community at the moment, where you have to hint about things without mentioning them by name

When members do all that it's fine until the spammers and shills start to pump their junk on WebmasterWorld and the next thing you know the forums is overloaded with garbage. There's a thin line between discussing products and spamming products which we try to tread.

We now allow a lot of what you mention as long as it's not links to content that's temporary, or outing sites, site reviews, etc. because none of that adds long term value and when future readers look at those links they don't see the same thing as the original thread posters and now it's all useless junk.

Many of those other sites that allow all of these things have a lot of useless threads that I run into all the time. You end up with a one like post about some problem "look here <link>" which no longer exists today which we try to avoid as it has no value for anyone other than the original poster.

In the pro members forums we're a lot looser because it's not in the public record.

[ken_b]

Thanks for the ability to turn off the badges.

Like others have said, if the "Msg #: nnn" could be changed to "Report Msg#: nnn" it would be clearer.

Also I noticed that the "print" link is gone.

I miss that. I didn't actually print many threads, but did use that link to see a whole thread on one page which sometimes made searching for specific comments easier than clicking through a bunch of pages looking for something, especially on long threads.

Using the print link was a lot easier than trying to find the same info using site search for info in a specific thread.

.

[jimsthoughts]

Print Link Gone.... the Print pages have always caused little issues when it comes to SEO of the site... we were wondering if people would miss it if we removed it...I see you did ken...if a bunch of people also say they miss it, we'd be happy to bring it back.

[ken_b]

the Print pages have always caused little issues when it comes to SEO of the site

Thanks for the insight.

I've pretty much resolved the issue for myself just by setting comments displayed to 70.

That covers all but the longest threads and even with those it vastly reuces clicking from page to page.

[Avilti]

I do like the idea of avatars. Maybe the job of policing could be solved if the avatars were customizable from a preset list of colors/stuff?