A progress report.

VuTales v3 is coming along nicely.

I've recently started the basic framework for commenting, blogs now have comments, which can be edited, quoted and deleted. No mod tools as of yet.

I've mentioned in a frag before that rating system is also up. I've mentioned publicly before that it will change, but not how. So I will now, along with some of the other changes. VuTales has had been running for over a year now, and some of the features and design elements haven't quite gone to plan. To address some of these issues, various parts of VuTales have been radically changed.

Rating

VuTales follows MMOTales' like only rating system, likes can be removed or added at any time. This system has a few flaws, the main in my eyes is that there isn't a real agreed upon way of rating. At one point simply commenting "dislike" was deemed acceptable. Another flaw is that it's unable to reflect controversy, blogs you like get a like; blogs you don't… get a comment.

v3 has up/ down voting. You can either give -1, 0 (not voting) or 1. After you cast a vote, you have a 15 minute window to change your vote; after that it's locked and you must report it if you have a valid reason to retract your vote. E.g. someone who isn't you accesses your account and uses it to vote. Myself and the moderation team will pen a set of guidelines on when to vote, of course we can't enforce them. But they'll be the suggested rules, and blatent disgard of them will not be ignored 😉

Categorys and tags

I consider categories in their current form to be a failed feature, while they may have worked better in MMOTales where there was a specific focus on categories (ie, games), they do not work here. As such, they will be removed and replaced by tags. All blogs can be tagged with as many tags as you really want, seperated by commas. There should be a search function coming up, to allow searching by tags. This should result in a better way to sort though the hundreds of blogs here.

Dashboard

Currently, most of the settings, message and other user specific features are dotted in various places around the site. Pings are on the bottom right of your ID, settings are in the botton left, mail is its own page on the header, new blogs have their own page, new threads are linked from the forum, frags are on the top right of your ID. In short, it's a mess.

The dashboard provides a central hub for all these things to be, or be linked from. It provides three main forms: new blogs, new threads and new fragments; as well as prominent counters of all your mail, ping and quotes. Each of these counters links to the relevant page, which is styled the same as the dashboard. Same with all the settings pages, and links to show your content, namely blog management, threads and posts.

Blog management

Blog management is a new page where you can see all your blogs and their status at a quick glance. It lets you edit the title, tags and if links to social media sites are shown. There are also links to go to the full editor, or delete a blog.
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Drafts

New blogs can be saved to drafts, which as the name suggests, stores the blog so only you can see it and work on it. It should save you from keeping local copies while you work on something. Currently, once published, blogs can't be pulled back into draft state. This may change depending on feedback.