1) An "All" filter button on top of New Maps, Contests, and Site News, to collect all of these feeds into one list sorted by date only.

This way, readers don't have to restrict themselves to seeing only one of these things at once. I think they're all very important and interconnected, anyway.

2) A profile setting to determine the default filter button for the portal.

Some people would prefer seeing only new maps, or only contests, or news about a shit game most of us don't care about only site news without having to click it... or all of it, if the above is implemented. (I would set the default setting to All or Site News.)

3) A "New Mods" filter button, similar to "New Maps."

Now, for my speech:

AFAIK, SEN has the only English modding community that remains... not active (but not dead either), except maybe BWAI (although they tend to be strictly AI modders). It would be great to see a bit more attention provided for modding. Modding is on the verge of complete and utter death since the loss of Maplantis, multiple veterans disappearing or retiring, and so on. And yet, I do not believe modding has yet to be fully explored, especially since the great work of some of the people at BWAI who updated FireGraft, BWAPI (or whatever it is called now? I don't know the details, apparently it's been renamed or updated), and the General Plugin Template Project to work with SCBW v1.16.1 has opened up many more opportunities to do great things with StarCraft.

Even asides from the updates on modding tools, I've yet to see extensive mapmods come to fruition. But with plugins and EXE edits in mind, mapmods could probably do extremely sophisticated things. I am really, very, very behind on the mapping scene, but I hear of EUDs and EUD actions doing pretty crazy things too. What would happen if there was a revival in the interest of modding, and all of these techniques were combined?

We're on the cusp of a breakthrough. We just need some talented people to explore modding, to learn that it even exists and is not just some archaic or arcane sorcery. A "New Mods" would help in this increase in interest, maybe enough so that someone dives in and tries to really make something new with both maps and mods.

There still might yet be more to come. Hopefully, I can finish my current project or at least get it to a playable stage that it will inspire other people to do something similar - bringing the worlds of mapping and modding together to create some unholy demonspawn that will cover the lands in a second darkness!

There needs to be attention paid to SC1 mapping before there's attention paid to SC1 modding. There's a reason modding died, it's because no one wants to do it. It's a hassle to make anything and then no one will play with it anyways.

I suppose though, if mapping would also have additional focus on it, then by all means.

Also, I'm completely for the filter assuming it lets me hide everything related to SC2.

We've recently been getting a lot of new members that are interested in modding, though, so shining a little bit of light on it wouldn't be a bad thing. I'm not saying we should have portal threads dedicated to just modding, but we do have a "New Maps" section on the front page, so a "Modding Projects" section or something related would be nice. And Az, please don't say that nobody wants to mod. There are plenty of people who want to do it; probably not so much anymore, but the few modders that we have left on SEN are probably some of the best English-speaking modders out there. Modding actually is really fun; I wish people would give it more of a chance. D;

It's already supposed to let you do that.

They did give it a chance, that's why no one wants to do it anymore.


It doesn't

There's something for the forums to hide SCII, but nothing for the site news. On the maplantis skin it didn't work anyways; I had to manually hide those forums.

Yes it does. If I click on the Wraith and go to the Portal page, the Contests and Maps tabs will then only show me SC1 contests and maps. If you have the "Split forums" box checked in your Settings, then it will also only show whichever game's forums are selected.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 22 2012, 10:21 am by DevliN.

That's not everything.

There's nothing to separate the Site News tab; there's only one forum for that. The tabs are essentially just showing the first post of the newest created topics. I suppose there could be a search function to filter out anything containing "StarCraft II" in it, if you really want to have our awesome search feature firing every time someone looks at the front page.

The other solution is to split the Portal News section into SC1 Portal News and SC2 Portal News sections, though that doesn't make much sense; Portal News is supposed to be what is going on in the SC community and this site's community. Even if you think it would make sense to split SC1 and SC2 news, where would regular site news go? Would we create yet another forum for that, or just throw it in the Staredit Network forum where it'd have no visibility on the front page?

Also, feature requests should go here: http://www.staredit.net/topic/2177/

good joke az, made me laugh

I'm not going to bother sifting through threads that are probably permanently lost to find all of the departure threads in which OPs clearly state that they have other business to do (read: life, moving on). Mesk is probably the only modder who left explicitly due to SC1's restrictions. Many simply faded away, again due to: life.

>hassle
>mapper
okay

No one plays mods because of coincidence. You don't realize how much mapping has shut out modding from the very first. SC.org forbid EXE edits and grafting early on, SEN and Maplantis both used to ban modding. SC comes packaged with StarEdit whereas modding is a lot more obscure due to its very nature. Early mods were largely boring old DAT edits with tools tending to corrupt files evolving to scripting and so on (but still with unstable tools), and there has always been a lack of custom graphics with which to really spruce up modding to make it look fancy and appeasing to the eye. It had a difficult start. However, the tools, assets, and knowledge have come a long way. People should be taking advantage of the resources still available before they disappear entirely in order to produce crazy things.

As Roy said it is everything but News related to SC2, which is the best you're gonna get.

EDIT:
If this is going to turn into a Map versus Mod debate, I'll close it and direct you all to the Contests thread where that debate can take place. Otherwise, as stated prior, this probably should have just been a post in the Bugs/Needed Features thread.

EDIT2:
I guess there's no point in leaving this open to discuss it as that debate is inevitable. Considering we have no active coders to add such a request, I'll just add this to the list of feature requests in the stickied thread. I like the ideas in the OP, though I imagine the News filtering would take a bit of work if it were to be implemented.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 22 2012, 4:10 pm by DevliN.