View and vote on the article here: Feedback Digest - July 2005
Feedback Digest - July 2005| Category | | | Summary | Feedback Digest - July 2005
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| | Body | Features
- Publish Skills!: For a while now, the 'skills set' feature has been active in users' command pages. Here you can list skills you'd like to learn, and skills you know - noting your level of competence. However, this skill set is not been viewable to others. In future, these will be viewable via your public plans.
- "Update" Post: A member proposed adding the feature to update posts you have made. However, it is felt that this feature would have similar issues to that of the editing of posts. It is harder to see the flow of conversation, as time stamps would have to be compared (rather than the location of responses in the thread). Additionally, members could reply to posts on the thread without noticing updates in the original post - potentially causing further issues. Therefore, this feature will not be implemented and the current posting system will remain.
- Secret Question: It was suggested that adding a 'secret question' feature could aid those members who forget their password and no longer can access their private email account. It was decided that this feature will not be implemented. One reason being that users are likely to also forget this if they forget their password! Another, more important reason, is the issue of security. While passwords in the database are encrypted, secret question/answer entries would not be. Furthermore, many users use the same question and answer pair on different sites. If the situation arose where the database was compromised, attackers would gain access to this information and could potentially use it to exploit other accounts based on it. Since the likelihood of such occurring is (hopefully) quite remote, this in and of itself may not prohibit such a feature being included. However, we have not actually received many problems with users losing both their passwords and private email accounts. Far more login issues were related to the huge database purge we did back in 2003. As such, the negatives outweigh the positives and this will not be implemented at this time.
- Sticky cMSes: The idea here is to implement a similar feature for your message box as already exists with forum posts. The ability to 'sticky' a cMS will allow you to find messages that still need attention or contain important information. It has been decided that this would be an interesting and useful feature and has been put on the coders' ToDo list.
- Checkboxes in Command Panel: The request was to change the radio buttons on the group command pages to checkboxes, to enable multiple moves/discharges at one time. This has been added to the coders' ToDo list, albeit at low priority, so users may not see this for some time.
- RSS and Firefox: This is a follow up to an older request to add livemark support to CyberArmy pages. This has been added to templatized sections of the site (basically, everywhere except forums, but we are working to templatize these areas as well).
- Searchable Forums: Although some of our forums were searchable, many have had the feature disabled. You should now find all public and non-public general member forums searchable. If you find one which is not, or a non-public one which you feel should be, please let us know.
- 'Reason' Field When Modding: We had a request to add a 'reason' field for when a moderator moves or deletes a post. This feature will is now on the coders' ToDo list.
Other/Miscellaneous
- Spell Check: A user spotted a spelling mistake on the profile page to change your away status. This has now been corrected.
- Public Email: A user recently expressed concern about their email being displayed in Google from being on the CA site. CA allows both a public and a private address to be available, but only the public address is displayed. Please note that if you are concerned about others knowing your email address, or it being put on spam lists, your public address can easily be changed via your profile options. The email can be a nonexistent one, or formatted incorrectly to stop spam bots recognising it. For example, some use 'user [at] place [dot] com'. However, please ensure that you only change your public address, as the private one must be correct for resetting passwords and such.
- Ranking System: A new ranking system was proposed that bases ranks on points. Points would be rewarded for work produced towards CyberArmy. Staff have looked into such a proposal previously and decided not to implement it at this time. The ranks are settling well at the moment and are unlikely to alter until a new challenge system is released. This idea may be revisited at a later time. Of course, there's nothing to stop individual C/Os from using a point system as part of their personal system.
- Banning Of A Few Handles: One submission to feedback suggested banning/restricting use of various usernames such as 'cincname' etc. At this time we don't have a reliable, scalable way to do this yet, so we will handle it on a case-by-case basis for now.
- Gzip The Site: Recently we received a feedback suggesting gzipping the site to make it faster and save bandwidth. It was believed this was already being done, but it was found that the feature was broken. This has now been fixed so all html, text, etc., is compressed before being transferred. This will typically result in faster page-load times for visitors, without the need to change your configuration locally.
Report A Bug
- Preview Doesn't Lop Posts: When you submit a post, it cuts off after so many characters. However, when you go to preview a post, it always shows the whole thing, which makes it impossible to tell when you're going over the limit. This issue has been added to the coders' ToDo list and will be fixed shortly.
- Login Bug: A while ago we received a feedback submission regarding a login bug that took a member to a 404 error. At the time, the error could not be reproduced at that time. Recently, however, there were a few more cases and our coders managed to track it down. Apparently, on occasion, people were being redirected to /login/<random word from wordlist used to check strength of passwords upon logging in. This turned out to be a logic error in the code that caused random pieces of the webserver's memory to be included in the URL to which users were redirected. This has now been fixed.
Thank you for all your feedback - every submission is considered and discussed. Please expect to wait up to several weeks to receive details regarding the outcome of your feedback. If you have yet to hear back regarding a request or report you made, please don't hesitate to cMS me (icklenewt) and I'll chase it up and reply to you with its status.
Remember, if you wish to be contacted in response to your feedback, or are requesting assistance, ensure contact details are enclosed. |
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: icklenewt)
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