If GWJ is an Office, We're the Custodians

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Update: Sat., Aug 11

We've rolled out the responsive design, and also added a link to the popular forum tags to the left sidebar. To try out the responsive design, simply resize your browser or visit the site on a phone or tablet device. Please note that there will likely be some areas that need improvement with behavior on various devices, so if you run into any issues, please let us know!

Original post

It's hard to believe, but I've been helping keep the Gamers With Jobs site running and functional for over five years now. In that time, we've rolled out new features, made improvements to the server and application architecture, and fixed lots of bugs. We usually keep discussion about changes to the site relegated to a thread in the forums, and we don't make a big deal about changes we roll out. But, it's been a while since we've told the community as a whole what we're up to, and tonight's new feature release provides a good opporunity to do some looking back.

First, a quick run-down of what we're rolling out tonight. No matter the site, finding the content you care about on a highly active, large community forum like ours can be really challenging. A long-standing request to help with this problem has been that we provide some sort of thread tagging mechanism. Tonight, with some help from Pyroman[FO] we're doing just that.

IMAGE(http://img.skitch.com/20120809-kxdnnhtqrx3u6herus6mnsxx3w.jpg)

Below every thread in the forums, you'll see an area that allows you to tag the thread with a comma-delimited list of tags. Click on one of those tags, and you can see all posts tagged with that same term. Are you looking at a thread about Baldur's Gate?, tag it with "RPG" so that anyone browsing RPGs can find it. We've seeded the site by tagging existing "Catch-all" threads with the term, so that you can easily find the catch-all thread about the game you're looking for. There's also a tag cloud that allows you to see the top tags on the site. We think that over time this functionality will help you find new content that you otherwise may not have stumbled upon.

IMAGE(http://img.skitch.com/20120809-ebc1ee86572jmbrard43wdfegk.jpg)

Next, I've got to call out a few community members who have helped grow the site's functionality over the past year. These folks have donated their time to fixing up and improving our home here, and they've done so without much recognition for their efforts. Late last year, we rolled out the Favorites functionality, built by Kosars. This has been an invaluable tool in my personal day-to-day use of the site and I'm so thankful we have it. If you haven't tried it out yet, give it a shot by simply clicking "add to favorites" while you're reading a forum thread. Kosars also provided some bug fixes to quoting behavior. We've also had help from Bonus_Eruptus, who provided a YouTube button for while you're composing a post, and provided other nice improvements to YouTube video handling (e.g. support for timecodes). Finally, trueheart78 provided improvements to spoiler tag handling and other YouTube improvements (HD and fullscreen playback). Buy these guys a beer and / or gift them a game during the next Steam sale!

I'm missing here a whole slew of folks who have participated in our issues and features thread, reporting bugs and giving us great ideas for what to do next. Please swing by that thread and give props or help us discuss what we're doing next.

Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about what's coming next for the GWJ site. In the short term, I'm working on creating a responsive stylesheet for the site. This will mean that GWJ looks great no matter what device you're reading it from. I've been testing on my iPhone and iPad, in both portrait and landscape modes, and it's really great to read the site in a fluid format. This work is nearly done, and should be ready for Certis to review any day now.

In the long-term, we're working on upgrading the site's platform from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7. This is a big undertaking, requiring rebuilding many site features from scratch, migrating data, and all the fun stuff that goes with that process. However, it provides us the opportunity to do some amazingly cool things with the site, as well as address some long-standing feature requests. You can expect to see far better site performance and stability; a powerful site search; cool user points functionality; and better profiles, spam control, and much more. We're aiming for the initial Drupal 7 migration to maintain feature parity with what we have now on the site, but it will open the door to all kinds of cool potential features for our writers and community members.

I hope you all really enjoy the tagging functionality, and look forward to our responsive design and Drupal 7 migration!

Comments

Nice! I can't wait to tag all the TV threads I visit!

You guys have done a great job and it's much appreciated, can't wait to get tagging.

Kosars especially will get a big sloppy kiss, with tongue, for 'favourites' which has really benefited me.

Looking forward to the future and wishing you a smooth migration.

Wow. Nice work.

Gaald wrote:

Nice! I can't wait to tag all the TV threads I visit!

Me too!

AWESOME.

Thanks for all the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting. Can't wait for the new features.

Thanks to everyone for their hard work. This site is a big part of my life, and I really appreciate all you do!

Ah, Drupal upgrades. How I don't miss you.

Great work with the site.

Great work. And thanks to all involved. I've been loving Favorites, and can't wait to start tagging.

Very exciting. Thanks, everyone!

Great! Thanks for all the hard work!

I'm really excited about the tagging, so far I've been tagging everything I can find. It's been increasingly hard to figure out what's happening on the forums, and I think the fact that almost every thread is a year old catch-all post is a testament to that. People have just been favoriting, or using the tracker, and watching new posts that way.

Tags lets us break the site down into reddit-style chunks and watch them that way. I really hope people feel less intimidated by this system. I've been here since the beginning and sometimes it's even hard for me to jump into the middle of a 300 page catch-all thread

When I first saw the title I expected it to be an article by Certis talking about spam bot controls. Instead, I found some very awesome news. Thanks everyone for the hard work!

Also, I learned from the tag cloud that this site used to have a robust UT2k4 community. We should get a server up again!

More features, thanks guys!

A big personal thank you from me to the crew that works on the site functionality so that I can just sit around and spin in my chair thinking of pretty words -- not that you actually would want me working on the site, that it a special kind of Armageddon. Doogie has been an invaluable addition, and Pyro's sticky, musty fingerprints are still all over the site to this day (no matter what cleaning solution we try to use). But, it's great to see some of the other names up in lights of those who have helped keep us going.

Stand up, and take a bow guys. You deserve it!

Very cool. Thanks, guys.

If we find a new thread from a spammer would it be easier to tag it "spam" or continue to PM Certis?

Thanks for all the work. We're all better off for it.

I tried to favorite the Minecraft Multiplayer thread, but it threw me to an "access denied" page...

I'm going to obsessively tag until JRPG is the biggest node in that cloud.

For Elysium's sake, so he knows what not to read.

Awesome work guys! It's very much appreciated all you all do for the site!

garion333 wrote:

Very cool. Thanks, guys.

If we find a new thread from a spammer would it be easier to tag it "spam" or continue to PM Certis?

That's what I think. If we just tag new threads as spam, it should (in theory) be trivial for Certis to banhammer them every so often by going through the tag.

So appreciated! Love the tagging feature! Thank you.

Lots of new shinies incoming. Thanks for all the hard work you hard workers. Your drippy sweat is appreciated as well as being gross.

IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-SwJhKXM_SuI/UCPjVjUELbI/AAAAAAAAAhA/Q6re4qHpq3Q/s325/you_re_the_best-f5135160294150b4686640c7fa8007ea.gif)

Very nice to see the changes. I can't wait to see what the future brings.

Cynical gamer comment: Gee, you only introduce new features right before it's donation time!

I can see the tags other have created but I can't figure out where to tag things myself.

I need someone to explain this to me like I'm a 4 year old.

Yes, I tried tagging something and it seems to be a tag for myself, as when I looked at the thread when not logged in the tag wasn't there. Is there a threshold tags have to pass before they're public?

Cool! Good work all of you! Now, let me send you a nice sandwich through the mail just to let you all know how much I appreciate you.

Where I come from Egg and Cress is a popular one....

Okay, I see what I did there. The list is comma-delimited.

This is awesome work guys.

TrashiDawa wrote:

I can see the tags other have created but I can't figure out where to tag things myself.

This. I don't see the thing shown in the first image at all. I only see "Tags: None" with no apparent way of adding a tag.

Some experimenting with tags reveals a bug to squish, and perhaps some clarification that could be done.

There's the tags tab at the top of the page, and below the article. The tab seems to be for public viewing, and below the article is private to the person logged in, this isn't really clear and I'm not sure how many people would be in the habit of looking for the tab. If you add a personal tag, and then add a public one with the tab, all tags are private.

Also, when you're starting a thread, would it be possible to automatically suggest some tags or remind the thread creator to add a few.

The tags I've added at the bottom of the OP seem to show up for other people. Are you hitting "save" after you've added them?

MeatMan wrote:

I don't see the thing shown in the first image at all. I only see "Tags: None" with no apparent way of adding a tag.

Looks like it was a bug that is now resolved. Click the 'tags' tab at the top of a thread then there is a '(add tags)' link at the end of the existing tags.