Ways and Ideas To Improve Comicvine 2.0

Brand new site, brand new thread. If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see changed or added to the site please post them here.

I've tried a little wiki-ing around and here are a few observations and suggestions.

First, in general I love the redesign. I think the Recommended Reading section is cool, and I like that I can follow a character's page (I assume that alerts me if there are any changes to its wiki?) and also that I can "watch" threads.

I deal with images a lot. I noticed that now, when we go through the Images in our own personal page, or on a Character page, we have to do it entirely by scrolling down, and we can't do it by clicking on, say, page 13 out of 30 images for a particular character. This is fine when a character (or a folder of my own) has only a certain number of images, but if I want to see the last images for a character who has 3000 images, then it becomes a very inefficient process. It would be very helpful if the multiple pages structure was still there, so I could just immediately go to the end of the images (or the middle or anywhere else). (This goes for both my personal images and the characters' images.)

I love that I can now upload images by drag-and-drop.

Based on my one recent attempt, it looks like you don't get wiki points for adding Images to a character any more, is that correct?

As more of a bug, I had a very hard time adding images to different characters' pages. When I went to add images, then clicked on Previous uploads, the window with my pics popped up. But it only showed the top 16 images, and never loaded any others (I waited for more than 5 minutes). There was no "loading" icon or anything. But if I went to one of my image folders, instead of "all images," then it did show all the images in that folder (and showed the "loading" icon when appropriate). Once, when I went to one of my folders, and then went back to All images, it then suddenly allowed me to scroll down. But every other time I tried this (going to another folder, then back to All images), it said "Error occurred while searching. Please try again." I tried it many times, including logging out, quitting my browser, etc., and it won't show any of the other images under All Images. So basically I can't add any images unless they're in folders. This may be a temporary bug, I don't know, but hopefully it works soon.

As one final recommendation, the new way we add captions seems more difficult than it used to be. Previously, I could start the edit mode, and then add captions to every picture I wanted, then click once to have all the captions accepted at once. It was pretty quick. Now, it seems like I have to start edit mode, add a caption, and have it accepted, for every individual image. This takes a fair amount of time. It would be nice if I could keep the edit mode on until I did all the captions I wanted, then have them all accepted at once. Also, this is another situation where multiple pages within the images page would be helpful. Let's say I want to edit a bunch of captions that are way down in the images page. I would have to edit one caption, then when it's accepted, I am brought all the way back to the top of the page. I would then have to potentially scroll hundreds of images down the page again to do the next caption, etc.

Sorry to be so wordy! Once again I like the new site a lot. These are just things I ran into trying to wiki today. (The text-based wiki-ing I did all seemed to work fine.)

I think the main profile pictures on character and other pages are way too small and cropped, you can barely make some of them out. On the old site, a character's main image was a pretty important part of the page, now they're just cropped thumbnails at the top left hand corner.

Great additions to the new site would be:

• Being able to see who created a thread, before you enter it, on the mobile site.
• A feature that allows us to see who's online.
• Ability to unfollow multiple users at a time, rather than going to each individual profile.

• Who's online. Need it, want it, gotta have it.

@owie: any bugs you find please post them in the Bug Reporting forum. Also image loading is slow right now because of the odd size for the thumbnails, as the thumbnails are created through users viewing them the loading time will improve.

@the_tree: being able to see who is online is coming back soon, it isn't available yet because of performance issues. As for the following stuff I'm told this is coming soon as well.

@quintus_knightfall: see my last response to the_tree

Ability to log out from the mobile site (and access full site from the mobile site)

Need to know whose online. <----

That thing I said about the lists on the old site.

This is coming next week.

I miss the "History" tab at the top of the forum list and I said this in my own thread but I'll say it here to...I want to be able to filter the forums more

@ellie_knightfall: But I don't wanna wait :/

I miss the list of gallery links that images had. It was very useful to see which characters were in an image that way, and could also let you immediately link to their gallery.

As someone who primarily does issue editing my most annoying problem is extremely wordy and excessive plot summaries (example). In a few cases editors might not actually know what a plot summary is, but the only way to prevent spamming or "summaries" that take up an entire screen is to implement a word or character count.

If you can rewrite it better and shorter go right ahead and do so we just don't like it when stuff gets full on deleted :)

To some it.s 3.0

There may already be a way to do it and I don't realize it yet, in which case I would appreciate a heads up from anyone, but is there a way to filter through the forums similar to old CV layout? For me it was automatically set to block out RPG and Off Topic from every other forum, unless I manually visited those two sections, which was good, because I like talking, discussing and reading about comics, and Off Topic and RPG apart from not really being geared towards those topics are incredibly popular, so they tend to bump to top often. Anyway a way to filter out Off Topic and RPG would be nice if possible?

Thank you all magical faery people who do hard work fixing up site!

Yeah, unless it's really bad, I try to reduce them to about 200-250 words max. Any longer and it's not really a plot summary, it's a synopsis or outline.

@pikahyper Before I say anything else - let me say thanks for the changes because I do like what ya'll have done and it is much appreciated. Thank you for all the hard work. That said - I do have a few suggestions.

- I definitely agree with this thought above. Even if there is just a little more creative control over how your page is displayed would be okay.

- Are there no more quests/levels/achievements? I gotta admit - those are fun to have.

- The 'Add to List' features are a bit cumbersome. Before, when I navigated to an issue page there was an 'add to list' icon for the issue or artist etc...Having that icon on the page is handy dandy.

- Thank you again folks !

I just came to the new design today, so I am still assessing it. However, on the whole I am quite pleased. I especially love the ability to darken the background from white to gray. Still, it saddens me that you have deleted the Battle Game and the Power Rankings. Personally, I was hoping you would keep them, but wipe the slate clean and start all of them over again every 12-18 months.

A way to got to a page at the top of an article/thread/PM.

BB

Main pictures should be larger. It's way too small; these are not avatars.

Make the text smaller. Looking through wiki pages is quite annoying; I don't see why the average text should be bigger than the text in posts, aside from headlines.

The size of comic covers in the "Appearances" section near the top is too large.

Essentially, the overall size of... stuff is off.

Also, consider putting the brief summary directly beneath the main picture, rather than slightly to the right.

Oh, and the size of "Small" images should be much, much smaller.

Again, the size thing.

Could we maybe get pagination at the top of PMs in addition to the bottom?

Also, since we no longer have online bars, maybe there could be some kind of indicator in the box that appears when hovering over a user's icon?

@ragdollpurps: online stuff comes back next week, performance issues.

We need to have issues added back to the Publishers page. I used it when editing on occasion to see if a volume was already added. Sometimes what I'm searching for isn't the name it was originally added under. Odd that every page except publisher has associated issues.

@wmwadeii: associated issues is actually missing from three other page types as well, they were not included for a reason but I believe minds were changed cause of people asking for them back so I'm pretty sure they will come back. Until they do though just go Wiki>Volumes and in the "sort by" select Alpha and then below type in your publisher and then submit the query and you will get the same results as we used to have on publisher pages to view volumes.

The ability to indicate a two-month period of publication for bimonthly (or 8 times a year) books to avoid confusion. It would address the type of contradiction found in old DC books that contain two months in the indicia (e.g. "Mar-Apr.") but only the second on the cover (Apr. in this example), as well as being more specific which is always a good thing.

A way to search galleries with pages, seriously...

BB

The ability to add multiple publishers to a page but also have a primary publisher that shows at the top. There are multiple characters and teams that have changed publishers over the years (such as Star Wars, Transformers and G.I. Joe).

The most annoying thing for me was deleting images. I could never multi-delete. Now I can, so am very happy with the 3.0

More awesomeness.

Improve the search function when you're editing a wiki and trying to link things. I just spent quite a bit trying to link movies. Eventually I had to search for them in the search bar at the top, then copy the link and paste it in. I tried putting in "Iron Man" and Doctor Doom popped up on the first page. Not to mention all the comics, some that appeared to be weird choices to show up.

Just a small thing, not sure if this is already noted but wanted to throw out there in case hadn't. Just a small spelling error "invloved" here, on the submission wiki adding page thing mah jing.

@guttridgeb said:

This would be nice, but I did notice that if you go to a Publishers page now, that characters show up if they appeared in an issue that involved that publisher.

I agree it would be nice to be able to use the advanced search options like "person: Stan Lee", or "concept: Star Trek" in the link attachment option.

Two features I'd like to see added, is more Publishers added to the New Comics dropdown, big companies like IDW, DarkHorse, Dynamite, etc should be there, while Wildstorm should probably be deleted. Second an option that allows you to add multiple items to a character, or person. This could be a high point option say 5000+. Basically I want to pick a artist or illustrator and add all the issues they worked on w/o having to search for each issue individually. When you have somebody that has hundreds of issues that need to be added this would expedite the process.

I want the backgrounds to be see through.

I also like to change the font color on our web page.

you should report that in the bug reporting forum.

@wmwadeii:

Two features I'd like to see added, is more Publishers added to the New Comics dropdown, big companies like IDW, DarkHorse, Dynamite, etc should be there, while Wildstorm should probably be deleted.

I've asked the engineers for this.

@pikahyper: @the_tree: @quintus_knightfall: In order to view people who are online:

1. Go the Users

2. Click on "Top Users"

3. Click "Filter Users By"

4. Select "Currently Online"

@xxxddd: that doesn't work, it's part of the online system and is disabled.

@pikahyper:I didn't read EVERYTHING, so sorry if I missed this, but when someone replies or quotes me, I don't get a notification. Why is that?

@xxxddd: quote system is finicky, if the reply is in bold it is set up correctly and you should get the notification, if the reply isn't bold they won't get a notification, hitting backspace on an empty line unbolds it.

@pikahyper: Did you correctly quote me? Because I didn't receive your reply.

Is the reply system the same for PM's? Because my PM's work fine.

One thing that could come back is the way when you received a reply from a user in an existing thread, you not only received the notification, you received a link where the user replied to you. Now, I just receive some "Clark El mentions you" but not when or where.

@xxxddd: I dunno, quirky like I said, also see the word "comments" after so and so mentions you, it's a link to the thread you were mentioned in.

Issues now have the ability to add a cover date and a street date. Would that street date not usually be the first month in that indicia?

@digifiend: On sale/street date should be two to three months before the cover date and isn't usually given in the indicia (for monthly titles, at least). What I am referring to is when an issue has one month on the cover, but another in the indicia. Example:

Hopefully that is big enough to read. But the cover says "Dec." while the indicia reads "Nov.-Dec." In these cases I use the date in the indicia because the indicia generally trumps all. The ability to just select "Nov.-Dec." rather than one or the other would remove this ambiguity and be more accurate. It's a pretty minor thing, admittedly, but after all the name of the thread is "Ideas to improve Comicvine."

@jinxuandi said:

That would be an excellent addition, good suggestion.