| #1 by Yorhel 2008-02-01 at 11:46 | < report >It's been almost two months since you last heard anything of me and you have most likely given up all hope that there will ever be a new version. But don't worry! I have been working on VNDB at a steady pace for the last two months, this version just took me a bit longer than usual. So here I am to finally announce VNDB 1.9: A large update with some major changes! First of all, I wanted to fix the indistinct way the releases were displayed on the visual novel pages. Instead of displaying all information about all releases we have on one page, all individual releases now have their own page on the website, and the visual novel pages now have a simple and clarifying list of related releases, showing only the minimum information necessary to give a small overview. If you want to know more about a specific release, just click on the title and you will be directed to the release page. While I was thinking about how to present the releases on the website, I decided that the old "relation" field didn't really work the way I wanted, and replaced it with a "type" field to specify whether the release is the entire game or just a section or trial version of it. This should give an easy indication which release(s) to get if you want the complete game or just a part of it. The next major change in this version is the new editing system: VNDB.org is now a wiki! Requested changes do not have to be accepted by a moderator anymore - all changes will be committed to the database immediately. This would obviously be a risk for the integrity of the database if a malicious edit could go by without anyone noticing, so like any other good wiki system, VNDB has history pages, diffs, and methods to revert back to older revisions of a page. There are also RSS feeds available to keep track of specific changes while you are not browsing the website. I also made some changes which affects registered users. First of all, the URL's of user pages were rewritten to /u[id] instead of the old /u/[username] as this is more consistent with the rest of the URL's (v for visual novels, r for releases and p for producers). Secondly, a handy new mass-update feature was added to the "My visual novel list" pages, you can now easily change the status of visual novels in your list by checking a few checkboxes and selecting the action you want to perform. Also, because of the nature of an open editing system, the feature to exclude yourself from the user list was deprecated and has thus been removed - you can't hide that you are a user here anymore. However, I do care about privacy, and in order to prevent VNDB from showing up in the google results on your name, tags to prevent search engines from indexing content were added to all pages that contain usernames. Another noteworthy update is that the way the titles for releases are stored has changed a little: The normal "title" field should always be in the latin alphabet, and the second "original title" should be used for the official title. Of course, if the official title already is in the latin alphabet, the second field can be left empty. This change also applies to the name fields for producers. There are many other changes: The home page layout has been updated with some basic statistics about what's currently happening on the site, ID-gaps for producers and releases will now also be automatically filled, the url bbcode tag is now also allowed at the notes fields for producers and releases, the FAQ has been rewritten, the layout of visual novel pages has been updated to be more clarifying, and many, many more changes. I'm sure you'll get tired of reading all details of every single change, so I'll keep it at this for now. You'll probably notice the changes while browsing and editing the site. Happy browsing!Last modified on 1970-01-01 at 00:00 |
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