When Freddy and I accepted Vern's plead for admin responsibilities at this MM forum, one of our concern was how to present custom mansions to forum readers and MM players.  Freddy came up with the idea which we have used for more than 2 years now:

1. Organizing the CM's by a) Author, b) Release date and c) CM name

2. Creating a CM "sub"category in such a way that when a user clicks on a link in one of the boards in 1. above, he is taken to a category where the CM's are named by their checksum as it is calculated when the CM zipfile is run through the command "openssl -sha " in the Unix Terminal program found in the ~/Application/Utilities folder.  The idea was that the user would then be able to check whether the CM zipfile had downloaded correctly.

3. We also laid out a few rules of numbering CM versions in order to make it easier for users to check whether they had the newest version.

As most of you know my computer's hard disk crashed badly in last autumn and I just got my computer back a few days ago.  For a few months only Freddy could upload new CM's or new updates of older CM's since there are a few things we look into before uploading and without a working MM program I was unable to do proper CM uploads.

And then Freddy had to attend to personal matters and has been away for a while now, making it impossible to upload new CM's (and updates) the proper way.

(I know that Freddy will be back eventually, so don't worry).

Meanwhile I have had a few new CM's to upload and the only way to do it was to ask the authors to upload them themselves in the "Talk" board.  Then I made a new board for the uploaded CM and moved it to that board for downloading and discussing purposes in order to keep the same system that we have now:  One CM in one discussion board.

I hope you are still following my storyline  ::)

Now we have most of our CM's in a special board for downloads where they are sorted according to authors, names or dates.  Then we have a few mansions that can only be downloaded in their special boards.

My question is:

Do we want to keep the old system (and then I will move the most recent CM's to the download board),

OR

Do we want to be able to download the CM's from the CM discussion boards (in which case we will NOT make them available for download in the old system as well)?

I vote for the old system. That way you can see which are the newest (and updates on old ones), you can search by name, builder, etc. I think it's less confusing that way.

I prefer the old system: it's more clear for me

indeed, old it is

Yep, the old system!

I like the old system.

And happy for you to finally get your Mac back. ;D

Yeah, I also like the old system [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]

I always liked the old system, too.

And I'm sure I will always like it in the future.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it...... as they say.   :D   ;)

One thing I, personally, really do not like is the caption for each alphabetical group of mansions, "This category contains new posts". Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but some of those groups have the newest post months and months old. I tried clicking on every post, but that "new posts" message still appears. I would guess it is hard to do, but it seems that "new" posts should be no more than a month old at the most. Perhaps I don't understand if it is "new to me" or just some definition of "new" or maybe I don't get it at all   :).  

sherryl199 wrote on 07.02.2009 at 11:03:15:

One thing I, personally, really do not like is the caption for each alphabetical group of mansions, "This category contains new posts". Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but some of those groups have the newest post months and months old. I tried clicking on every post, but that "new posts" message still appears. I would guess it is hard to do, but it seems that "new" posts should be no more than a month old at the most. Perhaps I don't understand if it is "new to me" or just some definition of "new" or maybe I don't get it at all   :).

Sherryl, I really do not understand why you have this problem.  Do you mean that the same posts are marked as new everytime you log in to the system although you have already read them?  Or do you mean that you never have read the posts?

If you have read them and they still appear as new then you are propably using the back button at the toolbar of your browser to go back to where you were.  If you do that the YaBB software does NOT mark the post as read.  You need to go back by clicking a link on the board, like "Home", "Midnight Mansion Forums" etc.  You can also click the links at the bottom of each page ("Home" and "Board").

If you never read the post you need to do that so the system knows you have read it and thus marks it as read by you.

There is also the possibility to mark posts as read (or unread) at the top and bottom right corner of each page.

We cannot change how the system marks posts as read.

Thanks, Brell, I was using the back button to go from alphabetical listing to alphabetical listing. Hey, I'm blonde, what can I say?! :)

lol sherryl XD

sherryl199 wrote on 07.02.2009 at 11:03:15:

One thing I, personally, really do not like is the caption for each alphabetical group of mansions, "This category contains new posts". Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but some of those groups have the newest post months and months old. I tried clicking on every post, but that "new posts" message still appears. I would guess it is hard to do, but it seems that "new" posts should be no more than a month old at the most. Perhaps I don't understand if it is "new to me" or just some definition of "new" or maybe I don't get it at all   :).

I do often have that same problem.... and I remeber having reported it here about a year ago.
But that seems to be a problem of the YaBB software, not of the structure of the MM-forums.