Need Some "Beta Testers"

(RosOne) #1

Ok, so I’ve finished my little website and I need some people to find bugs :smiley:

Now, for those who do know what a digg-clone is - scroll down and click the link.
For those who don’t know what a digg-clone is here’s a small tutorial:

How it works:
Any registered user can submit a story. Give the link to the story, write a small description and submit it.

Every post lands in the “find” area where users can vote for it. Once a post reaches a certain number of votes it is pushed to the frontpage. This certain number of votes is calculated based on the popularity of the category in which the post was submitted. Which means: To get a post to the front page from a very popular category it needs a lot of votes. More posts in a category mean this category is more popular. But, to get a post from a very unpopular category on the frontpage it only takes a small number of votes.

If let’s say someone would submit a huge number of posts to a certain category it will be pretty much impossible to get enough votes to push it to the frontpage.

That sucks you say? Well, only when the site gets flooded, then it sucks, but with pretty much no news about ETQW there isn’t much to post about.

Geez, I suck in explaining things :bored:

Who gains from the site:

  1. The community - No editor is picking, writing the news, the community is. The community decides if something is interesting or if it’s not.
  2. Content creators - You made a wallpaper? You’re working on a mod? Well, here’s your chance to promote it. Just submit it and people can comment and vote for it.
  3. Webmasters - Notice that TheRedStuff does not copy your news. It’s just telling people to go to your site to read about something. You get the traffic.

Ok, I guess that’s it for now. I will try to explain it some more in the blog… soon…

The URL: http://www.theredstuff.com

I’ve been working on this for a while now. I tried to fix any problems I could find but life is life - something will break for sure :smiley:

So please, Beta testers, please report any bugs.

PS: To the webmasters: please guys, don’t submit all your news posts right away :lol:

ADDED:

Ohhh, yea, I almost forgot… There are many features missing, like comment editing or avatars. I know of those, but I’d like to have a solid base to work on before I will be adding more features.

Yes, contact and about are missing. The contact page will be there soon. For the about page I need to make some screenshots to explain how the system works in detail.

Geez, turned out to be a pretty long post

:bump:

ADDED: I guess it might be a bit confusing so I’ll just point you to the right page: Here is the “find” area - http://www.theredstuff.com/find

(Fab) #2

Im finding it awfully hard to register ive put the right security word in several times but its still not working, great design tho.

edit: tried several browsers still no joy, anyone else having this problem or is it just me?

(RosOne) #3

If you could get back to #splashdamage I’m sure I’d be able to help you out.

ADDED: Ahh, that one…

All caps didn’t work?

(Fab) #4

nope sorry ^^^

(RosOne) #5

Ok, thanks for the first bug report Fab… it seems it’s fixed now :beer:

(datoo) #6

username must be six characters long :frowning:

(RosOne) #7

hehe, 3 registered users - 2 not happy with the “at least 6 characters” username policy… changed to 3. Should be enough :stuck_out_tongue:

(datoo) #8

Quick and EXCELLENT support! A+++ would visit website again!

(Fab) #9

Now you change ti 3 :bored: :bash:

(Ciabs) #10

neat, registering now :slight_smile:

EDIT: I tried to submit an insight on the gamespy article, but when I clicked the submit button the system erased all spaces trying to make it in less bytes, and when it still resulted too long it didn’t let me post it;

how many characters are available for each story?

or even better, is there any way you can let longer stories to be posted?

TIA for the help… :slight_smile:

(jjpron) #11

Fab is mad because he had to register under the only possible alternative: Fabio1

(RosOne) #12

Changed your username to Fab :drink:

@Ciabs: Sorry, I don’t quiet understand what you were trying to do. As for limits and post alterations:

  • Everything you post is (or should be) cleaned from html tags and other unwanted characters
  • All newlines (enter key) are being removed from story descriptions
  • In comments: a greater number of newlines than 1 is reduced to one newline
  • Some simple BBCodes are supported in comments

If you’d like you can join #splashdamage and pm me, I’d be able to help you in real-time then
:smiley:

(Rhoades) #13

This reminds me of shoutwire, except it’s exclusively for W:ET and ET:QW. I like it.

(RosOne) #14

Yea, that’s the plan. Shoutwire, yigg.de, bibilog, wobblog, etc are all digg-clones which work pretty much in the same way. Also, all those sites have a lot in common with del.icio.us since every post you vote on gets bookmarked in your profile.

W:ET? Nah, thought about it but I guess it’s a little bit too late for that. Right now I’ve picked ET:QW and Castle Wolfenstein (even though I’m not really sure what the official name will be). I’m sure I will be adding more games but only those special ones like SD games and id games. Maybe some others too… but before that I’ve gotta do some bug fixing/feature adding.

Thanks guys :smiley:

ADDED: …and for those system to work users have to vote :wink:

(Ciabs) #15

ok RosOne, I kinda got the knack of it (btw yes, I was having problems with newlines… it’s ugly though that you can’t edit a submission so that it is visually clean and instead you get an all-crammed-up wall of text… =/ ), posting the story again asap… :slight_smile:

EDIT: still got a “Description is too long (1608)” error message…

is that number the amount of letters I exceeded from the maximum or is it the maximum number of letters available…?

as before, TIA for the help, I’ll try joining #splashdamage as soon as I log again (quakenet right?)

(RosOne) #16

Well yea, you can’t have newlines in a description. It’s that way because the plan is to keep a nice organized layout. It’s not really a ETQW website where everyone can post news posts, it’s rather a community edited RSS feed with small descriptions. (btw, yea, RSS feeds will be there).

How I’d do it is I’d write a short post in the description and I’d then add the rest I wanned to say in the comments :nod:

EDIT: still got a “Description is too long (1608)” error message…

is that number the amount of letters I exceeded from the maximum or is it the maximum number of letters available…?

It’s the number of characters in your description. And now the bad news… max size: 500. Sorry. That should be around 5-6 lines.

as before, TIA for the help, I’ll try joining #splashdamage as soon as I log again (quakenet right?)

yep, qnet as always

:beer:

(Ciabs) #17

ok then, gonna try to keep characters under that number when submitting…

btw, being there I’m gonna ask this too: is it fine to post insights instead of pure news?

ie: posting thoughts and such.

sorry I’m so noob, this is the first time I’m getting in a digg-clone thingy… :stuck_out_tongue:

(RosOne) #18

You can even post that your fart made a noise that sounded like a strogg nailgun or that you have marked the keys e t q and w in red on your keyboard. It doesn’t really matter.

Everyone can vote for your post or report that it’s lame, spam, etc. There’s a Problem button at every post so it’s up to the community, not me if you should post your thoughts or not.

…and keep voting for interesting posts :bump:

(Ciabs) #19

You can even post that your fart made a noise that sounded like a strogg nailgun

cool! :banana:

gonna farting

:cool:

(RosOne) #20

Yea Ciabs, you do that. Can’t wait for that .wav :eek2:

Anyway, so no more bugs guys? No? Really? I guess that’s a good sign. Gotta start adding some new features soon.

Thanks so far :drink:

Btw, since my explaining sucks pretty much and I know some people don’t know how it works I’ve made a little image to show it in the easiest way possible. Keep voting :wink: