EvilSeph
Administrator
Over the past few months, amidst the activity explosion courtesy of the TIFF and HEN exclusives, we were still hard at work as always on updates and new features for M for Mature.
As is the M for Mature tradition, we've been listening to each and every bit of feedback we've received from you guys and work really hard to turn it into something we hope you approve of. Thanks again to the TIFF and HEN exclusives, we've not only gotten a burst of activity on the forums but on our IRC too and, as a result, we've been getting more feedback than usual on what changes people feel are necessary for us to improve and a lot of heartfelt compliments from all of you. We are really glad you're happy with everything we have to offer.
Forum Reorganisation
There's not a day that goes by when I haven't received a PM or had someone on IRC ask me where a new thread should go which is clearly not how a forum should present itself. In order to be successful, a site and forum needs to be user friendly and well organised, which is something some that some may point out we lack. Well, with this small reorganisation of the forums, we hope that this will minimise the confusion people are faced with when they want to post a new thread - or, better yet, completely remove it.
Much of the resulting reorganisation is thanks to a lot of feedback we received from our IRC regulars (if you haven't checked our MfM Chat out yet, you should do so now
) so credit (and possibly hate) goes to them. Their constant prodding about this issue has pushed us to really examine our forum's layout and structure closely to determine what changes are necessary to provide all of you with the best and least confusing experience we possibly can.
The first, and possibly the most obvious, forum we took a look at was the Game Discussion forum. At a glance, it is obvious to anyone that our layout would cause problems and it was clear that something needed to be done about this issue. Whenever someone wanted to post a thread about a game they'd like to discuss, they'd have to decide what genre the game falls under and then decide where the thread should go based on this knowledge. While this alone is not a problem, too often do video games fall under more than one genre - where should you post your thread then? That being said, an obvious change we needed to make was to get rid of the genre division in the Game Discussion forum.
Secondly, we decided that Cameras and Photos fall under the Visual aspect of Audio Visual. As such, all discussion that took place in the Cameras and Photos section will be moved to Audio Visual. We felt this change was necessary as there was really no reason to divide the two sections and it seemed to only provide further confusion for people when they wanted to post a thread regarding anything "visual" (most likely because of the vague name of the forum).
Lastly, as one of the many changes we'll be making to further our support of Developers, we'll be adding leveled sections to our programming section, Division by Zero. New developer level discussions will take place in Division by Zero itself, while more advanced discussion will take place in their respective and appropriately leveled sub-forums. This change will enable us to provide friendly and accurate resources and responses to people looking to start developing while allowing us to keep the serious, technical (and often confusing) discussion separate.
New features and updates
There are a few of you in our community that believe that sub-forums are better than prefixes and while we won't get started with a debate on that, we'd like you to give prefixes another chance by trying our new and improved prefix filter chooser that now allows you to select multiple prefixes to filter by.
Along with this new and improved prefix filter for the forums, we've added a comment type filter to the front page. If you haven't noticed that we have a unique type of comment listing yet, we hope this new feature will give you more reason to use it (especially when we start allowing limited guest comments) as it will allow you to quickly and easily see comments of different types on the front page. Don't like guest comments? Hide them! Want to see what the staff have to say about a controversial topic? Untick the rest of the filters! It is that simple.
There's really not much that can be said about either filter, other than that they are really awesome. You'll really only understand why they're so cool when you use them, so go check them out
Much of the current developments on M for Mature are courtesy of Chathurga, x3sphere and myself (which makes up part of a new Development team we'll be adding to MfM), so thanks goes to our new Development team for all of these and future updates.
As always, please feel free to let us know what you think about this update.
As is the M for Mature tradition, we've been listening to each and every bit of feedback we've received from you guys and work really hard to turn it into something we hope you approve of. Thanks again to the TIFF and HEN exclusives, we've not only gotten a burst of activity on the forums but on our IRC too and, as a result, we've been getting more feedback than usual on what changes people feel are necessary for us to improve and a lot of heartfelt compliments from all of you. We are really glad you're happy with everything we have to offer.
Forum Reorganisation
There's not a day that goes by when I haven't received a PM or had someone on IRC ask me where a new thread should go which is clearly not how a forum should present itself. In order to be successful, a site and forum needs to be user friendly and well organised, which is something some that some may point out we lack. Well, with this small reorganisation of the forums, we hope that this will minimise the confusion people are faced with when they want to post a new thread - or, better yet, completely remove it.
Much of the resulting reorganisation is thanks to a lot of feedback we received from our IRC regulars (if you haven't checked our MfM Chat out yet, you should do so now
) so credit (and possibly hate) goes to them. Their constant prodding about this issue has pushed us to really examine our forum's layout and structure closely to determine what changes are necessary to provide all of you with the best and least confusing experience we possibly can.The first, and possibly the most obvious, forum we took a look at was the Game Discussion forum. At a glance, it is obvious to anyone that our layout would cause problems and it was clear that something needed to be done about this issue. Whenever someone wanted to post a thread about a game they'd like to discuss, they'd have to decide what genre the game falls under and then decide where the thread should go based on this knowledge. While this alone is not a problem, too often do video games fall under more than one genre - where should you post your thread then? That being said, an obvious change we needed to make was to get rid of the genre division in the Game Discussion forum.
Secondly, we decided that Cameras and Photos fall under the Visual aspect of Audio Visual. As such, all discussion that took place in the Cameras and Photos section will be moved to Audio Visual. We felt this change was necessary as there was really no reason to divide the two sections and it seemed to only provide further confusion for people when they wanted to post a thread regarding anything "visual" (most likely because of the vague name of the forum).
Lastly, as one of the many changes we'll be making to further our support of Developers, we'll be adding leveled sections to our programming section, Division by Zero. New developer level discussions will take place in Division by Zero itself, while more advanced discussion will take place in their respective and appropriately leveled sub-forums. This change will enable us to provide friendly and accurate resources and responses to people looking to start developing while allowing us to keep the serious, technical (and often confusing) discussion separate.
New features and updates
There are a few of you in our community that believe that sub-forums are better than prefixes and while we won't get started with a debate on that, we'd like you to give prefixes another chance by trying our new and improved prefix filter chooser that now allows you to select multiple prefixes to filter by.
Along with this new and improved prefix filter for the forums, we've added a comment type filter to the front page. If you haven't noticed that we have a unique type of comment listing yet, we hope this new feature will give you more reason to use it (especially when we start allowing limited guest comments) as it will allow you to quickly and easily see comments of different types on the front page. Don't like guest comments? Hide them! Want to see what the staff have to say about a controversial topic? Untick the rest of the filters! It is that simple.
There's really not much that can be said about either filter, other than that they are really awesome. You'll really only understand why they're so cool when you use them, so go check them out
Much of the current developments on M for Mature are courtesy of Chathurga, x3sphere and myself (which makes up part of a new Development team we'll be adding to MfM), so thanks goes to our new Development team for all of these and future updates.
As always, please feel free to let us know what you think about this update.
