THF March Update

Hi everyone, so it's been a very hectic few months for me personally since we launched the new site. In between the launch and now, I've started a new job for a firm out of Boston, which ate up a significant amount of my time. It was an exhaustive hiring process that spanned the course of nearly two full months and about a dozen interviews.

The good news is that Ianded the job and am now finally settling into my position, which is allowing me to return to a more standard daily schedule. With this, I'm happy to say that I'll be available more often, and plan to continue working on bug fixes and new features for the site. Below I've listed a rough outline of things that are on my slate.

Bugfixes and Site performance

  • Look into site performance and page load times. Make improvements where possible.
  • Improve mobile experience, specifically for post and thread creation.

New Features

  • Add support for animated gifs (<3 Al)
  • Add signatures!
  • Comprehensive site search, including forums, threads, posts, etc.
  • Better community contribution tools, article submission, and ability to feature threads on home page.
  • Article and video commenting/discussion.
  • Usergroup promotions for groups like THF Regulars.
  • Usergroup indicators on post profiles.
  • User level customization, such as posts per page.
  • Additional bio information (Gamertag, Social media, etc).
  • Back-to-top button.

This isn't a comprehensive list, and if you have suggestions, please make them known. I realize many of your concerns or requests have been stated previously, and I apologize for not being able to respond or catch all of them. Please, if it's important to you, restate your requests/concerns so I can add them to this list if I feel they are reasonable.

Thanks again to everyone who's made the transition, and I hope to continue a slow progression of improvement in the near future. If you have thoughts or ideas that you think might benefit the community that aren't specific to the website, feel free to talk about them here as well.

- Nv1

our fearless leader coming through in the clutch. :>

we need signatures bb.

our fearless leader coming through in the clutch. :>

we need signatures bb.

Ah, totally forgot that one. Yes we do.

Sounds like a plan, man.

EDIT: Would be nice to have subscription options, I miss the auto-subscribe/no email setting from the old site, was able to bookmark my User CP and stay posted from there.

Can we please have email notifications, I know I'm a fraction as active now because of that, I'm sure others are as well.

A cool feature/icon like the message box with a red notification should be used for when someone quotes/replies to you. 

Assuming of course another icon can be placed in the interface showing this.

Thanks for the post Nv1! Congratulations on your new job!

text only signatures plz

text only signatures plz

eww. curse you.

text only signatures plz

I know people will probably shit on me for this, but I do want to limit what we can do with signatures to some degree, just to keep them from getting out of hand. I don't want to have to have moderators telling people to reduce the size of their sigs or whatever. Haven't made any specific decisions on this yet.

Limit the size. That makes all the sense in the world. I just don't see the harm in people expressing themselves with images. It brings individuality, and has always been a staple of our forum for literally a decade.
Rep?

Crest mentioned not too long ago that the site is "a nightmare to navigate."  I'm not sure if it's quite that horrific but it could be improved. 

The side nav menu is collapsed, but it doesn't have to be.  Is there a way to enable toggle on/off for the user's end?

For mobile users not using a phone/browser with "Tap the title bar to automatically scroll all the way up" feature, a floating "automatically scroll all the way up" button would be pretty dope.
My biggest concern in transitioning was how the forum would be perceived from the front page by new members/possible new members. I still think the front page should show only halo topics. That way new members and potential members don't see shit like gotzeus' family murdering dogs and other topics that literally interest nobody but our faithful COT posters. That thread was up there for like a week straight. I'm sorry but this is still a halo site and we should represent ourselves as such. I can't imagine that COT threads are going to stimulate halo players to check out the forum and sign up and be active.
Excited to see everything as they come!

Reputation is the dumbest shit ever.

My biggest concern in transitioning was how the forum would be perceived from the front page by new members/possible new members. I still think the front page should show only halo topics. That way new members and potential members don't see shit like gotzeus' family murdering dogs and other topics that literally interest nobody but our faithful COT posters. That thread was up there for like a week straight. I'm sorry but this is still a halo site and we should represent ourselves as such. I can't imagine that COT threads are going to stimulate halo players to check out the forum and sign up and be active.

 

gotzeus has got to go. Talk about a champion troll.

Reputation is the dumbest shit ever.

My biggest concern in transitioning was how the forum would be perceived from the front page by new members/possible new members. I still think the front page should show only halo topics. That way new members and potential members don't see shit like gotzeus' family murdering dogs and other topics that literally interest nobody but our faithful COT posters. That thread was up there for like a week straight. I'm sorry but this is still a halo site and we should represent ourselves as such. I can't imagine that COT threads are going to stimulate halo players to check out the forum and sign up and be active.

 

gotzeus has got to go. Talk about a champion troll.

its got nothing to do with gotzeus specifically.

cot is what it is because the cot people are tight with eachother and i respect that.... But a new member seeing 3-4 cot discussions on the homepage his first time is akin to a freshman trying to sit at a seniors table in highschool, hes just going to turn the other way. This forum is only going to grow as a halo forum, and we should advertise ourselves as a halo forum, not a bunch of people who barely play halo/dont play halo at all and just come here to banter about everyday stuff. 

Not coming down on cot or any of the regulars, use the forum how you like. 

Rep can be entertaining, and sometimes useful. Depends on who reps you I guess. I was mostly wondering because I remember Nv1 saying he was working on his own reputation system.
Changes sound good. Good luck with the new job btw.
I agree with skols. it has nothing to do with the COT, but to try to get more active users, it should be advertised as a halo forum. they can venture to the cot later on in their stay

FUCKING FINALLY

 

 

 

FUCK

Instead of a rep feature, maybe when you go to a user's profile it will show something like "likes received" and "likes given."

 

Animated gif support added for avatars. There may be bugs with this, so let me know if you run into them.

Your images will still be scaled and cropped to 220x220, so make sure you upload exactly that resolution if you don't want your image to be altered.

Animated gif support added for avatars. There may be bugs with this, so let me know if you run into them.

Your images will still be scaled and cropped to 220x220, so make sure you upload exactly that resolution if you don't want your image to be altered.

YAY! <3

So funny how people cares so much about Rep over an online forum LOL

You're a fuckin idiot.

 

So funny how people cares so much about Rep over an online forum LOL
It can be entertaining, whats the big dealio?
That guy must have NEVER been apart of a real forum before. No way does somebody think rep isn't important for a forum's life. It keeps shit fun.
I apologize for the downtime this afternoon. I think we should be back up now.

Mod thread is now viewable and post-able to all members. I believe VIP is also, but I am not sure. 

Dante reported that the addition of the YouTube button has messed up all the auto-embedded threads. 

If I catch anything else I will post it in here. 

how the fuck does plat already have 5k posts on here....?
So are you trying to give members access to the regulars section?

I apologize for the downtime this afternoon. I think we should be back up now.

Ayo fam, I'm missin some posts.

I apologize for the downtime this afternoon. I think we should be back up now.

Ayo fam, I'm missin some posts.

I don't miss them.

:3