Cubed3 Site Suggestions Thread

I think it would prove popular enough among most of the 3DS owners here. I might consider getting Mario Kart 7 now that I have one, seeing as I was mad for the online on MKWii, although I got the most fun out of having a mate next to me playing too. But it should be a laugh.

Online events through the site should be encouraged for sure. I remember we had the odd tournament with sign ups too. Need to do those again, with rewards (stars, I guess lol).

( Edited 19.08.2011 20:37 by Azuardo )

A few other guys would agree with me on this one - Marzy, bornforthis, SirLink.

Can we have it so that off-topic forums (and blogs) will show up in the feed on the left without having the need to manually click the Off-Topic (and Blogs) buttons to view recently-posted-in topics?

My Name That Tune contest was intended to bring up the activity on Cubed3 and provide some fun for everyone, but I'm thinking one of the reasons that's it's not picked up pace is because it's in the Off Topic section of the forums, thus not automatically being shown on the left when it's posted in. In a thread which encourages user activity and fun, it would help a lot more if it was being shown to catch people's attention. Not enough people bother clicking the Off Topic button.

As it is, I've moved the contest into the General Discussion forum so it will get more views.

Hope you consider changing it!

I would definitely agree with you on that one - with blogs perhaps getting its own tab and combining OT with General OR having it above one another. Same with reviews/previews and features - they could be combined as often previews are left hidden.

May consider scrapping the site feed from the left bar to accommodate the change, not sure!

New C3 should be a bit better streamlined me-hopes!

Definitely pondering how to bring back that chat without being too resource intensive really.

Making a bit of progress with it, but it's really slow going at the moment.

( Edited 21.08.2011 23:12 by jb )

Good point - the same thing happens with previews being left out in the cold!

tbh, I use the Site Feed more than the other ones, but I could live with it if you replaced it with an Off Topic feed instead, maybe. Or just change the whole forum setup so that we don't have the General and Off Topic subsections at all - just combine it into one?

On the subject of the site feed, do you think it's possible for you to implement a Staff forum site feed? I'm trying to get into the habit of going into the forum to see if anyone's posted in the Mod or Staff forums, but I often forget, and miss out on replies for a while. Would be very handy if we had a feed for new posts in those two forums.

Since when were you staff, Az? You've risen the ranks very swiftly. Well done.

Hmm, asked me to do some previews in around March I think? Then about a month ago upped to forum mod. Cheers.

Well, we met in a London hotel and the rest is history...

I see. He's a good fuck. Who received?

I've got an idea that came to my mind while I was thinking about my next reader review. The scores in reader reviews are really small and very easy to overlook and compared to offical reviews, where you have a perfect summary with each of the scores and a small bit of text added to them, there's plenty of room for improvement here. Would the template used in C3 reviews (or a similar one) be hard/time-consuming to implement? If it would be, just making them a fair bit more visible would already be nice. A little summary for each score would be perfect though.

Just throwing this idea out there. Maybe something to consider for the almighty "new" C3?

( Edited 17.09.2011 23:13 by SirLink )

Could you not create and highlight the summary bits at the end yourself just using tags? Experiment with sizes and colours.

Graphics - 9
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

Sound - 8
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text

Just in case your suggestion doesn't go through, you could always just do this for any future reviews for now.

Yeah sure, that would be no big deal for me but it's just another thing that would be good to have if we ever manage to encourage reader reviews on here. Not many would make the extra effort and do that with tags and having a general, easy to use template for that would be better. Now that I wrote that, I remember how I often saw user reviews on a few other sites only consisting of the summary, which is better than no extra opinion about a game at all.

( Edited 17.09.2011 23:35 by SirLink )

Yep - in the redesign reader reviews will have the same breakdown/bigger scores J

http://www.cubed3.com/blogs/?op=all

Show All Blogs page doesn't seem to work. Clicking any page number displays the same blogs.

It'll be cool if there was some sort of alert feature to show you when someone has replied to you in the forums or news comments. I know some other sites that have this implementation. Plus it could boost site activity.

Balls, I actually meant to post that last message in the issues/fixes thread. Nvm.

L, do you mean like a thread subscription email perhaps?

Also, do you think we could have our user titles displayed in our profiles too? Would be handy for users when they view a profile to see if that person is a mod/staff etc. Reminds me that my Mod user title hasn't been fixed either >_>

( Edited 26.09.2011 01:57 by Azuardo )

Azuardo said:

L, do you mean like a thread subscription email perhaps?

Nah I mean something along the terms of you receiving a pm when someone quotes you or the thread title has a little icon near it meaning someone has quoted you.

The PM idea crossed my mind instead of email actually. Maybe you could set it so that you could subscribe to a thread and receive PMs if someone replies to it. The icon thing is a good idea too, but not sure if it could be implemented for quoting. jb would probably know if it's possible in some way.

I've been using Reddit a lot and one thing that I really like is their use of the open source Markdown for commenting.

The syntax is much easier to write and read. For instance:

*italics* == [ i] italics [ /i]
**bold** == [ b] bold [ /b
_underline_ == [ u]underline[ /u]
[link](http://url.com) == [ url=http://url.com]link[ /url]
[spoil text](/spoiler) == [ spoiler] spoil text [ /spoiler]
>quoted text == [ quote]quoted text[ /quote]

>nested
>> quote == [ quote] nested [ quote] quote [ /quote][ /quote]

I'm not sure how tricky it'd be to implement Markdown, but I think it might be worth considering! Its biggest advantage really comes when you're writing a lengthy post. Things can get a bit difficult to read when there's BB-style [tags] floating around all over the place.

Was just using the site games directory (Games tab at the top), and think it could do with a little alteration. Instead of a Retro section, I think it would be much better to have all consoles available to choose from. It would make things easier for a couple of reasons if we were to have NES games in their own list for example. Furthermore, many old console games don't show up in the Retro list, like Game Boy or NES games, so the list isn't fully functioning anyway. A drop-down menu with the list of consoles would probably be the easiest solution than having links for all of them (just links for the main ones though). Being able to see all available titles we've got in our database for one specific console would help me a great deal when looking to update/add games, rather than having to search constantly, and it would benefit others too.

Something to hopefully consider!

Hi guys,

All great ideas I'll hopefully try to incorporate into the new C3.

I like the format dropdown Az for reviews/games directories - in the new C3 you can select a console then filter by genre, publisher and number of players simultaneously within the selected format. Can also add a format drop down too, so you can pick older consoles

L/Az - reply alerting is something I've been pondering for a while - might work like this: Person 1,2,3 click a button to subscribe to a topic. Person 4 comes along later and replies - a few minutes later person 1,2,3 get an email and/or PM (depending on the preference you've selected). Alternatively we can also have it sending emails once a day with all the newly replied to topics if that's what people have selected.

keith - may use some of those tags, but BBcode/HTML is, imo.

I think the other thing as well is that atm, you don't have a console tab for DSiWare games or other games on say the eShop in the Games section. As current formats, that might need updating. You could have those main recent formats linked in that section like you have 3DS, Wii etc, then a dropdown next to it with all the formats in. Then of course A-Z links for all those consoles.

I was also wondering, you have a console format of Other when adding games to the DB. I use this for arcade games, but do you think it might be better to have an actual Arcade format too?

What about adding Game & Watch games to the DB? Is that going a bit OTT?

Lol, other was for Arcade, portable gadgets, PC etc - might dig through and see what's actually listed. New version of C3 does incoporate DSiWare, need to introduce eShop too.

Fair enough, so if I were to add G&W games, I could put them in Other. I guess that would include old Nintendo-developed Atari games or whatever they used to develop on too.

L/Az - reply alerting is something I've been pondering for a while - might work like this: Person 1,2,3 click a button to subscribe to a topic. Person 4 comes along later and replies - a few minutes later person 1,2,3 get an email and/or PM (depending on the preference you've selected). Alternatively we can also have it sending emails once a day with all the newly replied to topics if that's what people have selected.

Any chance of having it kind of facebook/google+ style? That would be really cool.

Also, Gadgets is really cool, I can incorporate that into features (e.g. Onlive)

( Edited 04.10.2011 00:57 by Echoes221 )