Development Update (v2.1)

[Gary]

Hey guys, I know it's been a while, we've both been super busy at work (such has life always been here at the vault) and not had too much spare time recently. I thought I'd just give you a quick update on where we are with the currently promised upgrade to both MTG Vault and WoW TCG Vault.

• Rating system (done, wow only)
• User profiles (done, mtg only, but only basic info atm - more of a "base" for user's decks, activity stream, etc)
• Friends system (done, mtg only)
• Activity stream (done, mtg only)
• Private messaging (database work done, no interface)
• Improved deck search (done, wow only)
• Improved card search (done, wow only)
• Bulk importer (done, both, but with a few issues)
• Nested comments (done, mtg only)

As well as our old favourites:

• Ability to delete decks (done, wow only)
• Ability to delete your own comments (done, wow only)
• Ability to report abusive users (done, wow only)

Now, bear in mind both sites use teh same code so where you see "mtg only" or "wow only" it's not much to worry about, at most it would take an hour to "port" a feature over to the other site.

Anyway, hopefully this gives an indication of where we are, what we've been doing and how far we've got to go. We've both now finished a massive project at work so should have a bit more time to work on the Vaults!

[Gary]

So I've been working a bit over the weekend, boy it's tough to get back into a project after so long away! I'm trying to get to grips with what we've done, how we've done it and what we still need to do.

This update is a bit tricky to be honest as it's hard to really know if we're taking this in the right direction until we actually do it. I've been working on trying to make the system more social so you can follow what your friends are doing; what decks they're making, what decks they're commenting on, etc. But I feel like I've got myself in a bit of a mess. What should people see when they login? What do people want to "do" when they login and use MTG Vault? All these questions are in the back of my mind as I look at the half-built update we're running in the dev area and I ask myself how long this thing is going to take before we can launch it. At the moment it doesn't even look half ready... Maybe I should roll stuff out gradually, I don't know right now.

On the plus side I've managed to get the news system pretty much there, we can now view any news article (or indeed any forum post if we want to) on the main website which when launched will hopefully allow us to provide a much wider audience with related news and articles than just the people using the forums.

Sorry for the slightly depressing post, I'll try and keep you updated with the progress of the update as and when I have any news!

[NightLoki]

Thanks for all the hard work Gary!

[Gary]

I've been working on a few new cardsearch options today, have I forgotten anything?

http://twitpic.com/11qm67

And yes, I *may* have got a little inspiration from Gatherer. But like they say; "If it ain't broke..."

EDIT: While I'm here, does anybody have any suggestions for the deck search page, I'm going to be working on that tomorrow probably and if there's anything you'd like to see in the descksearch options, let me know!

[Danokozmo]

A suggestion for the MTG deck search would be to add a type of deck search.

For example: Search for type, discard

[reeeech]

Newbie here...

On that note - scrolling through all these decks can get a bit overwhelming.

Can we have the option to display more per page than it does now? - beats having to load up each page just for a few results, and some results bring back hundreds of pages.

Also, I know you can sort decks by color and such, but can we do refine searches?

I.E. - you type in a search word, then from there keep narrowing down the list.

Or you want to make deck, but with only specific cards from specific expansions. Like if I see great elf or goblin decks, but I don't have a lot of cards from older expansions to make them. So it would be nice to refine that to just cards that I have and see if it comes up.

I just got a ton of cards and want to look through made decks for ideas, but with such a ton of results coming back, it's hard to search through all of them.

Just an idea.

[Gary]

I may have gone a bit off track today, not only did I not work on the decksearch options, I worked on something we didn't even have on the list for this update.

http://twitpic.com/11xy9a

I welcome critisism...

[Gary]

As some of you know I'm not entirely convinced we've got the social side of things right at the moment (activity stream, friends system, messaging, etc) so I'm considering finishing off all the other updates and launching them seperately first and then once they're all up and out the way working on the social tools next. I'm assuming everyone would you like to see these fixes/upgrades sooner rather than the "having to wait for Gary to create better social tools" later? :P

I'm thinking I could possibly start rolling at least a couple of the updates out this weekend.

[Snowball]

Seems sensible, release early, release often

[Gary]

Ok, I've been working this morning and we're pretty much good to go with the following items; deck stats, nested comments, new card search options, ability to delete decks, delete your own comments, report other user's offensive comments, popup confirmation to replace old two-page-refresh deleting of cards.

I'm having a slight problem with what happens if you delete a parent comment that has child comments at the moment and I have to go out for the rest of the day now. The plan is to finish of the comment deleting tomorrow morning then start to roll out the features I've listed above.

See you tomorrow! :P