Bay 12 Games Forum

No Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters for me thanks. I like my brain *inside* my head.

In other news: I have recovered a few days ago and have been making steady progress since. An update will be posted somewhere this week. A couple of nice new features and refinements have been made.

It's slow, but steady progress.

No, not really. At the time of writing, the distance noise from workshops and the like will travel is 4 squares in all directions. Basic counting skills will give you the answer to the question of 'Where to put bedrooms' in 2 seconds:
Anywhere further away than 4 squares

It's really that simple.

Include the following once you get to the nobles stage:

You have the right to be tossed from a drawbrigde into a magma chamber if you impose taxes on your fellow dwarves,
You have the right to be splattered all over the walls of a death chambers if you mandate an impossible (or even possible, these are dwarves after all) item.
You have the right to be chained to a silk rope and left for dead for whining about the lack of office/bedroom/dining room.

Add these and i'm sold!

Getting somewhere now... Administration interface is underway, and a few changed have been made to the user page. I am also rebuilding the voting system to, as requested, show item details when clicking on a list item, rather than having to drag it.

This should make it easier to select the things you want, with as few interactions as possible. Changes have been mostly added to SVN, so I'll update the online version to reflect the new version somewhere this weekend.

My votes don't stick, although I'm logged in. Using Opera on XP.

Looking at it I have two that stick (the same two regardless of what I voted).  Logged in, FireFox 3.

As noted in my last update: votes do not stick because even though you are logged into the DF forums, you are _not_ logged into _my_ forums which is what it's linked to. I could probably ask Toady to add a copy to these forums but it's not production ready yet.

Again: this is known and is at the moment correct behaviour.

Looks good.  But how are you planning on displaying the voters' general preferences?  By displaying the number of votes next to the topic, by color, something else?

Well the simplest way is exactly the same as the current system: popular items float to the top as people vote for them. I have added the number of votes in parentheses after the title, but I agree it should be a bit clearer.
Also the background colour changes according to the rankings: starting with a very light background and turning progressively darker up to a cutoff. Currently the top 5 items are highlighted in this way but it can be any number of items and any combination of colours that I can write into an expression easily. Changing colours like that is a fancy bit of math but it worked out allright like this.

Any suggestions?

Hm, the current system is very user friendly and simple, what is the problem with it? 

Well, purely from my point of view:

The current site is one *huge* list, which works but has the (AFAIC) major drawback that only the first 30 or so items get any attention. Very few people actually look even halfway down the list. Resulting in a lot of good ideas that don't get the attention they deserve.

Aditionally, selecting the issues you want is laborious; I sometimes forget which items I selected and scrolling through the massive page trying to find the one thing you may not want in lieu of something more interesting you came across a few minutes later is a chore I'd rather avoid. (Yes that is a proper sentence, read it again if you didn't get it the first time round )

Huge lists are not user friendly, at all. One way to work around this is to work with pagination, which raises it's own issues (forgetfulness again), another is to minimize the amount of text displayed, shorten the list, and find other ways to give people the info they need for decisions.

I chose to always display your chosen items in a separate list. Thereby always keeping them in plain view and reducing the amount of scrolling and reading back the current system has.

I am not an usability expert, but that is what bugs me about the current system.

And finally, as mentioned above: I always had an idea like this in my head, the current voting system just was the spark of inspiration I needed to start the actual building.
I am building this in my free time, building code that will probably be GPL'd in the future and Toady or anyone else is in no way obliged to use it. If the users here reject it that is fine: i'll finish it anyway and put it on SF for anyone who wants it.

Until that time though, I'll build it specifically for here, so that we may enjoy a simple and user-friendly graphical system for making our wishes known to Toady and Three-Toe.

Do we use our Bay12 usernames/passwords?  Seeing as how I tried mine and I couldn't login, I was wondering.

Sorry, the app is not quite usable yet, and has not been tied into the forum yet.
At the moment it's not possible to log into it unless you have a login to the simplemachines forum that resides on my server (and only I have that to test the login routines).

For now use the old voting site! It's still there and works just fine.

What I mean (and I can't check, can't login) is that I add one and it increase, then add a second it increases, then a third it increases again, but disallows a fourth.

Ahh I see what you mean. yes I changed that last night but haven't updated the preview yet. Rest assured that is fixed

[edit]I'll make a separate thread about my development efforts on this voting system. So as not to clutter up this thread.[/edit]

Personally I'd like to see a scroll bar just for that panel.  If you had to scroll the whole page, then you'd have to anchor at least the middle section so you don't have to keep scrolling up and down.

Done.

I'm currently busy with the user login system (and I might have to install the forum software so I can work on integration therewith).
Still working on it.