Young Writers Society

Snoink wrote:

Nate wrote:Fonts issue fixed.

Stori ->> Coffee.

Not Diet Coke?

Nope. Lent. Palm Sunday can't come soon enough.

A few updates:

- New gender icons! The new ones are designed by Cadi, and they look much better.

- BBcode for icons added.

- The points system for reviews has been fiddled with. You can now earn up to 150 points for reviewing a 0/1 review work. It's also easier to earn points by reviewing such works. For the first 250 characters, it's still 0.1 points per each, but then it's 0.2 points per each after that.

So this means that in order to get the maximum points of 150 on a 0/1 review work, your review needs to be only 875 characters. The same review on a 2+ review work would earn you 88 points. This should hopefully encourage more reviewing of works in the Green Room.

- Random review messages. After you write a review, the first paragraph of the Information page will display one of 20 different messages. The rest of the Information page has also been tweaked.

Made some small but quite noticeable changes.

The first is the change to the navigational links that you see on the homepage, your profile, and a few other places. The change is meant to make them more readable, which was important because of the second change.

The second change is an update to the way the Literary area works. I got rid of the "0 / 1 review" since it seems kind of redundant with the Green Room. Plus, the Literary area should be for sifting through YWS' literary works.

With the change, the different types of literary works is now displayed across the top. On the left hand side, you now have the genres listed.

These are small changes, but at the same time, quite big in a way. Please let me know what you think, and if you prefer this way or the old way.

I definitely like having the literary works type across the top. Much quicker to get to all the lovely poetry. Though, I like the 0/1 review filter in literary works as you can do something like find all poetry with 0/1 review while you can't do that in the green room. It also showed a lot of the 0/1 pieces from a while back that didn't make it to the green room for some reason, and I want my shrubbery but lack the patience to shuffle through 100s of early works that have 0/1 reviews.

Good point Ninja. Fortunately, that's an easy enough fix. I can just make the Green Room index similar to what we had in the Literary area. Then add pagination so you can get to the oldest works easily.

I feel awful. So much stuff that I need to do, but I never got the time to do even a quarter of it.

I'm really sorry that a lot of the bug fixes and updates will be put off until mid-March.

Stop fretting! Take your time off and enjoy. We'll all be here when you get back.

Going to second Trident.

An update to profiles!

As many know, the "See this person's posts" link has never worked right on YWS: Apollo. If people would like to know why, I could go into a very technical discussion about the search functionality. But, suffice to say that the search functions YWS long relied upon fell apart beginning about 2 years ago due to the size of the database. That is, the search functions worked great with a small database, but not so great with a large database. Attempts to address this, such as using Sphinx (an open-source search server), largely failed.

So, I've changed the posts search to a custom search I built modeled upon the same one used for reviews. You can't search for specific words, but you can narrow the search by forum category, which should prove somewhat more useful in many cases.

Thus, you can now easily see someone's post history by going to their profile and clicking "Posts" in the profile navigational bar. I hope it helps!

Woohoo

Search functions make my head hurt, so I'm glad you're the one dealing with this one!

Made a lot of improvements to the site's code over the last few days. Managed to reduce the page generation times by a ton for the most popular sections of the site:

- Homepage: Reduced average page generation time from 0.6 seconds to 0.09 seconds
- Clubs: From 0.77 seconds to 0.12 seconds
- Literary: From 0.72 seconds to 0.11 seconds
- Notifications: From 0.33 seconds to 0.12 seconds
- People: From an astounding 1.8 seconds to 0.1 seconds.
- Profiles: From 0.56 seconds to 0.13 seconds

So, you should notice everything loading much faster now!

Added an autosave feature for new posts, topics, and reviews. It may take up to 30 seconds for it to start saving your post after you begin typing, but it'll save every 15 seconds thereafter. In my testing, it works really well, but it's something that people should only rely on as a back-up. Drafts are saved until you delete them; autosaved posts are saved only for a week.

Additionally, fixed two bugs. The first bug related to editing reviews; if your review was past a certain length, it wouldn't work. This should now be fixed. The second bug related to portfolios; if the author didn't have an unsorted folder, then it wouldn't work. This should also now be fixed.

Now working on the update to portfolios I've been talking about for months. Started working on it in late March, but it's a fairly large project. It should, however, be finished soon.

Sorry for the lack of updates over the past couple weeks. Came down with a very nasty flu; it's largely gone now, but I feel completely exhausted.

Anyhow, made a small and simple change that I've been considering for a while, and anyone with a decent sense of observational skill should notice it! Added one tab just for Poetry and another tab just for Short Stories. To avoid some potential confusion, I renamed Literary to All Literary. I may also add a tab for Novels.

This change will stay at least for a week. After that, I'm going to check to see if there was any significant increase in reviews for those two areas. If not, I'll get rid of the extra tabs. If there is though, I'll probably add in the Novels tab at that time.

When I saw it, I was like "Wut!" And almost accidentally clicked "All Literary" while trying to get to the Forums. But ooh! A link to poetry.