We're going to try something new here. As many of you know, I like to write volumes of text whenever a new feature is added to the site, in hopes that everyone will see it and be as excited about it as I am. While that is not always the case, I still enjoy writing volumes of text just because it's fun... and I'm proud of the site.

This thread will serve as a sort of blog where myself and other admins will post site updates (relating to features, tech issues, layout changes, etc). Most will be minor; if something major is happening (i.e. the addition of the Arcade), it will get its own thread. This thread is intentionally closed to replies for two reasons: less clutter and easier reading. It will also provide a single place where you can go to see what's new on the site, if you're interesting in knowing that sort of stuff.

How can you provide input? If you have a suggestion, opinion, or experience an error related to something mentioned in this thread, please send feedback. This is the way of the future. In fact, a high priority task on my personal to-do list is creating a separate form for error reporting that will give you the option of attaching an image (i.e. screencap) to accompany the error message.

So.. what's going on with the site?

• A while back, I made a little 'What's New?' page (currently linked from the front page), but I quickly realized that it sucks announcing the same thing in 2 or 3 places (that page, the forums, and sometimes a news announcement). So, 'What's New?' page: your days are numbered.
  
  
• We will soon be spicing up the front page, making it more photoshop-orientated (thanks to Brian O'Blivion for offering up several good ideas). The header and right sidebar (Graffiti leaders) will stay, but the News box will be nuked, and the latest winners area will be moved up a bit. The left sidebar throughout the entire site will also be changed, to resemble the forums sidebar (with active contest links).
  
  
• Other layout changes will be made to improve site navigation, in order to make things easier to find. The forums are dandy, but some areas throughout the rest of the site contain a clusterbork of links, particularly the sub-links when you click on the Photoshops button. It's tough to find (or even notice) some of the many features we offer, and a mini-overhaul is long overdue. So um, watch out for that.
  
  
• It has been brought to my attention that it's confusing to have two places to go when you want to change user options. Well... there are currently no plans to fully integrate the options page (found in your history), and control panel (found in the forums), since it would be a logistical nightmare. However, some things will be moved around such that the only things located in your forums control panel are personal details (email address, password, location, gender etc), and everything else (site options/preferences) will be located on your history page.
  
  
• Volleybattles are still on the way. I'll be blunt: their priority dropped a bit, and I haven't touched the code in a few weeks. However, now that things are settling down and my emotions are starting to slowly transition from national disaster empathy back to general apathy, I'll be tackling it again soon.

# END TRANSMISSION
 

Graffiti voting results now shows the actual place the entry is in... look for a new column over towards the right. Example.

Additionally, graffiti entries have been added to the entry history page... and a shiny new orange boxcutter award is born. Click here to view your complete entry history.
 

FAQ updates:

I made some major revisions to the Volleybattle FAQ, including new information on the voting scales, voting requirements, and so on.

The "How do you handle ties?" section has also been amended. It now covers how we deal with ties in Graffiti and Volleybattle contests.
 

Quick note - as some of you noticed, the site was unavailable from about 9:45 to 10:30 PM, just minutes ago. You may have experienced difficulties connecting to the site off and on earlier today as well; that is because our host is working on the network and upgrading some hardware this evening.

However, the poo obviously hit the fan just now, so I asked them what was up. They said that one of their machines was being udp flooded, and it slowed down the whole network. So, my guess is some bungasaurus machine is taking advantage of their upgrade. I'm keeping an eye on it, and will be nagging the host for updates and asking what their plans are to prevent future attacks.

Also, here are some site changes I intended on posting earlier:

I'm working on improving the user history pages. I added a search box, so you can now essentially jump from one profile to another without having to go to the members page.

More preferences are being added to your Options tab, and I'm debating adding an optional built-in profile counter (that you can enable if you wish, and set it to be public -or- for your eyes only).

Volleybattles have now been fully integrated into the site, from the entry history to the Top 30 to the main contests page.

I think the only major thing left to do regarding contests is adding scrapbook/email capabilities to Graffiti entries

Oh, and if you have Mecha+ and missed my post earlier, some updates were made to the Stash manager.

That's all for now! I'm looking forward to watching Exquisite Corpse 2 unfold, and the strong potential for holiday-themed slags in the near future.
 

Just got an answer to the network issues we're experiencing tonight. Sounds promising!


 

The site was down for a little over an hour this morning; around 10:48 AM - 12:19 PM CST. A technician went in and rebooted it, and I'm currently trying to find out why it went down. I just might get that information too, as soon as I learn to speak Dippoo, or as soon as I can get a tech to tell me something other than "It was rebooted, that fixed it!" to any question I ask.

BTW

When the server was rebooted it threw the time off by an hour. It's fixed now, but some posts will be in the twilight zone for a bit.... the order of posts made over the past hour (12:50-1:50 pm) will look a little funny.
 

Texas seems to be having connection issues. It's not just the host as sometimes we're having problems getting anywhere.

There will also be a small upgrade sometime this weekend, but it shouldn't take long.
 

Ok, the connection problem appears to be in Houston. Everyone is aware of the problem and it's being worked on.

 

Favorites have finally been added to Graffiti contests! The links to view and add favorites are located under the comments for each entry. The script will add the favorite without reloading the whole page, and it should work with all version 4.0 (or higher) browsers (though IE might need to be 5.5+).

If this feature does not work for you, please let us know! Send feedback, and include your browser, version, and OS. If some people have trouble with it and essentially can't use it, I'll make a popup window or some other way to add faves.

I also added a new section to your scrapbook to house Graffiti favorites. Be sure to go back and scrapbook entries that you really enjoyed in the past.

Have fun!
 

The main contests page and all 4 contest listing pages (Slag/Graffiti/Face/Volley) have been overhauled a bit.

What's new:

- The main photoshop contests page is more condensed now. It was kind of redundant to have Upcoming and Live contests repeated on the page, so the color boxes now just have a few Ended contests, and all of the active contests are listed below, as usual.

- You can now sort the contests on each of the 4 listing pages, by clicking on the column header. For example, to see when the latest Graffiti entry was submitted in any contest, click the top of the "Last Entry" column.

- Slags and Faceoffs are now blue instead of green. Green was done away with, due to conflicting green (i.e. "live" contest) on the left sidebar. Thank you, saufnase, for bringing that point up and suggesting a change a couple of weeks ago.

- It's not your eyes.. Graffiti's orange now has a slightly reddish tint, and Volleybattles are now a bit more magenta-y.


I can't tell you how manly it makes me feel to be posting about color.


Oh, and if you didn't catch the mention in the Mecha v3.0 announcement thread, you can now customize the contest-related links on the left sidebar! To add or remove links, go to your history/profile, and the Options tab. This only works when you are logged-in ... it's not cookie based.
 

A new tab has been added to the member history pages! Your complete entry and contest comment history can be viewed, and sorted/filtered in a variety of ways.

http://mechapixel.com/history.php?na...&mode=comments (you must be a logged-in member to view this page)


The scrapbook tab has been tweaked a bit too; now entries of all contest types are displayed together, and you can sort 'em.
 

A sidebar link to the Trophy Room is now available. It won't show up by default; you can enable it in your options.

Speaking of the trophy room, I added a drop-down menu to let you jump from month to month. March's page will be accessible on March 5th.

A few of you have already opted to recieve late comment/favorite notifications, but as previously stated on the options page, it has been under development for a while. Well, it is now ready! If you have either option enabled, an email will be sent to you whenever someone shows you some love in contests that have ended (over 3 days after they end, actually).

That's all for now.
 

"Vote saving" is now available in Slags and Faceoffs! You will now need to save your votes, in order for them to count, once you are done voting on all possible entries. This will allow you to change your votes up until the time they are saved.

I hope this new feature will be useful and easy to get used to. It takes effect with voting in tonight's weekly contest.

Also:

If you have late comment notification enabled, there was a glitch that has been sending notifications for comments made during upcoming and live contests, as well as closed contests. This should now be fixed across the board.
 

Minor forums addition for Xbox folks:

You can now add your Gamercard to your forums sig, and you'll soon be able to add it to your MechaSpecs profile, if you wish.

All you need to do to display your card is use the new BBcode provided in this post.


Just a reminder: If you don't want to see any signatures in posts, you can turn them off in your forums options (thread display options).
 

Quick change to the Graffiti contests:

Once you vote on an entry, the checkbox will be grayed out, not allowing you to check it. This wasn't a problem or anything before, it would simply reject a vote if you had already placed it.

Hopefully this will help make voting on late entries easier, for those that do it.

On another and completely unrelated note, you can now use BBcode in your profile (MechaSpecs).
 

Contests:

I've added a useful little navigation tool in Slag and Faceoff contests: Related Contests. This yellow drop-down box allows you to quickly jump to all contests found in the same category as the contest you are currently viewing.

For example, the drop-down in a Mate a Movie contest will show all other "Wollyhood" contests, and the previous/next arrows allow you to browse through all instances of a theme from the very beginning of the site.



Note:

The weird little _ƒ thing at the end of some contests means it's a Faceoff.

Also, the actual titles for the contests are not numbered (Mate a Movie 8, Mate a Movie 9, etc). The number is only added in the drop-down list to offer a point of reference while you're browsing through them.


Arcade:

In addition to the category sorting, I've added a couple of things to the leaderboard page. The list is still sorted by number of championships, but it also shows the total number of scores/games played by the user, and the user's best category -- the category in which s(he) has the most wins.

Arcade leaderboard
 

Due to the tournament, I haven't had much time to work on the site, but here are a couple things I did do in the past few days:

The Graffiti listing page has been overhauled. If you have mouseover popups enabled (which everyone does by default), you will see a thumbnail preview of the original image when you hover over the contest link. I also added popups to the "Last entry" column and changed the date to "X hours ago", if the latest entry is under 24 hours old.

Your entry history page was overhauled yesterday; I combined the "Slag/Faceoff/Volley" and Graffiti listings into one, and added a filter to let you only view entries of a certain type of contest.


That's all for now! More contest-related changes are on the way this month, so stay tuned!
 

Most of these updates were made in July, but they are fairly related, and I wanted to point them out all together.

• You can now view entry comments inline on any entry history page. Clicking the "show" link next to the number of comments will expand a box under the entry line to show a minimized version of the comments. (Note: it might take a second or two for the comments to appear, as it loads them on the fly). Click the "hide" link to hide the comments. Logged-in members can view their entry history here.
  
  
• The Volleybattle listing now displays thumbnails for the 4 latest entries uploaded. Click on the thumbnail to go directly to the entry.
  
  
• A "Mecha Toolbox" was added to your profile, to the right of your avatar/basic info. This area displays each contest award you have won on the site (1st/2nd/3rd place in a Slag, Faceoff win, Graffiti win, or Volleybattle match/round win). It's just a way for you (or your stalker) to go look at your profile and say, "Hot damn! I do believe some congratulations are in order, you sexy bastard."
  
  
• A voting jury system has been implemented in Slag and Faceoff contests. More information here
  
  
• Your voting statistics page has a new feature: your voting extremes. This page displays users which you have voted the furthest away from their entry averages. More information is available on the page itself.

 

Have you ever been offline for a few days, come back to Mechapixel and wondered what daily pictures you missed on the front page? Was one of them perhaps yours, and you had forgotten all about the notification email you got a couple of weeks back?

Well even if this hasn't happened to you, it might be fun to scroll down through a gallery of some really nice entries, no?

The Recent Daily Pictures page has been born, and it's linked on the right side of the front page. Enjoy!