I was wondering if you guys were planning on continuing the awards (e.g. hall of fame etc), it worked so well on the nwvault.ign.com which is sadly now closed...
The Old Vault awards were based on both download count and votes. Nowadays, there's nearly impossible to have any project voted on or commented, so only the download count remains. Not a very good criteria - does tell how many people were interested in the project enough to download it, doesn'n tell if it was good or bad.
So, I don't think it's possible or even likely to have some award system here.
The culture has to change first before you can proceed. So sure work at encouraging more voting, commenting etc... We can revisit this when things change.
Simply driving people to vote on your own works however is not what we are tlaking about here. We need a broad trend of increased voting and commenting - increased overall participation - before the old-style, vault-wide awards have any meaning.
There are a few which very well could be given awards since Neverwinter Vault opened. Swordflight Chapter 3 is an example, perhaps reaching 10 or more votes. I do believe the old vault automatically gave Hall of Fame award to a series of modules if the previous received them as well.
Demonheart has been well received with downloads and voting.
Tales from the Lake of Sorrows, The Soul Cages, Al Andalus to name a few for NWN2 that have also been well received since opening.
Hakpaks too! Places from Witcher 1, Barbarian's NWN Heads, Eyrgiga's Robe-Based Armors are some newer content uploaded since the place went live.
Elven Treetop City Tileset is another new addition, highly voted on and downloaded, as is Mountainous Forest for NWN1.
NWN2 tileset and hakpaks do have less votes compared to NWN1, but new content is still being created and uploaded too. PJ's Placeable Cornucopia and City-Stat Project, Volume 1.
Potential is there.
NWVault had a tracking system that would post a news item on the front page, saying what content required 1, 2, 3 more votes to reach Hall of Fame status, showing the name of the content, along with a clickable link. This fueled visitors to push said content into HoF status quicker.
A realistic minimum number of downloads and votes would be required, and much lower than the 25 votes and whatever # of downloads it was at NWVault, as both games have aged and the community is that much smaller. Or the # of downloads is axed and Hall of Fame is issued by the number of votes - again a set minimum. Perhaps 12 or 15, as an example.
I disagree, FP. We should still maintain the old thresholds. It doesn't matter that the community is smaller. Until you have a large enough pool of votes the score will deviate with each new vote. Its just basic statistics. We need decent sample sizes. If we don't meet them, thats too bad. Perhaps come up with a different way of honoring projects. But that ultimately becomes a cliquish thing and of little value since it does not allow content that say you and I overlooked to be raised to the top of the pack.
Honestly I don't think the scope of the NWN community allows for a working competetive awards/rating system. During the last years of the old IGN vault new content already had a hard time of being noticed at all, not to mention properly discusses and rated - and that was half a decade ago.
To grow a larger fanbase that reaches beyond the 50 people who are responsible for 80% of the whole activity of this site and the additional 100 people who visit and actually leave some comment from time to time (instead of just downloading without any feedback ever) we'd have to come up with quite some effort. The fanbase is potentially there because old-school always has its fans and after all NWN/NWN2 still sells.
Actually there is a lot of work that each individual who loves NWN and the vault can do here. I try to give review/feedback on one module each week and I started to take screenshots from modules that have none/too few/imo bad ones, so they can be added to the entry. It's more work than working on the toolset and not half as fun but what's the use of making my own mod to be finished in 6 months when no one will be there to play it?
I have a lot more ideas how to promote this site and how to make it more attractive but I won't tell anybody else to spend even more time on the new vault than it (obviously) already takes. For my part, over the holidays I will start to revamp my blog (see signature) to spotlight my favorite modules and projects there which will hopefully generate a little more traffic for the vault.
Personally I would like to see a consolidated sticky thread where we could discuss how to promote NWN/NWN2 and epecially this site because I think we have to if all that hard work that is put into projects shouldn't go to waste within the next years.
I don't see any value in adding more restrictions and hurdles to making use of content or trying to change how people behave. I also think that trying to force people to vote and comment etc... would reduce involvement rather than increase it.
If all of this is for having an award system, then perhaps starting a reviewer guild or golden dragon award or something would be worth while. I think there is the danger of those sorts of things being cliquish, but in all honesty for the time being its probably the best way to give projects more visibility via awards and recognition.
::chinscratch:: I think I'd put it out there that "rewarding (something) is pointless because there aren't enough people doing (it)" isn't usually how it works - people generally start doing something when they see a reason to do it (and stroking the ego of some stranger on the internet is only an incentive for a very small amount of people whose logic I find fascinating if bewildering but I love them all the same, strange creatures that they are). I don't think I've voted or commented on... nearly anything, so far. Is it weird if I think that a bunch of creators cheering on eachother's content and handing eachother awards for it is a bit of a circlejerk? >_> I've had really good experiences with rewarding commenters by taking requests, and would not claim to have cause to complain about the amount of attention and ego-stroking I've received. Plus there's the download count. Who needs votes, comments, or award badges, when you've got the download count? I was rather fond of watching the page views go up, too. Where'd those go? :-(
I'd fully expect the implementation of a vote-based award system to increase (regular-)user participation in voting - at least, as a present non-voter, that would motivate me to go around voting and commenting. If it's just about handing out awards to bring joy to the creators (rather than about trying to get more people to vote and comment to bring joy to the creators), maybe a "Nominate for Award" button on project pages which, if enough people click on it ("This project needs X more clicks to be nominated for THE SUPER EPIC AMAZING COMMUNITY'S CHOICE AWARD 2017 KEKEKE"-text label), automatically puts the content on a regularly-reoccurring poll - like the CCC poll, but maybe people can pick up to three options - could be an idea. A spotlight blog would require somebody to maintain it - which means more unpaid work for somebody, and, as henesua very rightly noted, singling out a small amount of people whom others might feel a need to schmooze up to so they'll promote their content, which isn't really a pleasant addition to any community.
If it's about giving good content more exposure, I really like "Most Downloaded(all time/last year/last month/last week)" pages. :O Those are a pretty surefire way to find the good stuff, and simply being at the top of those pages is a reward. Also, it doesn't make so much of a competition of it, so nobody would have cause to feel bummed out about not getting an award, or about "only" getting bronze or silver.
It bears noting that it is already possible to view projects ranked by amount of votes received, so "Most Voted (all time)". The option is just a tad well-hidden at the moment; users have to actually go looking for it to find it. Maybe making that way of displaying content the default setting would be satisfactory - it's basically the HoF page on the old Vault already.
But that doesn't account for potential content with a large amount of low votes. Hence why Most Downloaded seems preferable to Most Voted - that way, votes can serve their intended purpose of recommending people whether or not to bother downloading in the first place, and the entire system kind of regulates itself.
But then again, there's content that is updated and re-downloaded, while other excellent content might be uploaded and downloaded only once, so depending on how the download count is handled, that may not work as intended either. o_ô
...
I'm definitely opposed to any attempts to punish not-voting or restrict anonymous user access to (non-XXX) content, in any case. The entire point of websites like this is to make content available to people - decreasing the exposure the content gets is not in anybody's interest, certainly not in the creators'.
... also, is this a club? I didn't sign up for any club. I AM AN INDIVIDUAL! FIERCE AND PROUD AND FREE! AHHHHHH INVISIBLE CHAINS... PEER PRESSURE... X_x ::bolts::
I'd like to see continuos download count (if you choose "update" and after that it adds new downloads to existing ones, instead of starting a new count). I also miss "page views" info.
Awards are something I personally don't care - I prefer some feedback instead. And that's the point I disagree with TheBarbarian. As I stated in my previous comment - download count alone and only doesn't give me any info - was my work good or bad? What needs to be fixed? How can I make it better?
Still, "click the button if you like the project" - great idea! And it's more likely to be actually used, that Voting.
Dude, yes. Criticism is way more helpful than pure ego-stroking. I'm pretty sure simply getting people to vote more wouldn't improve that issue all too much, though.
The problem here is really that being critical is largely considered "unfriendly" and "discouraging", so most of the people that don't only have nice things to say opt not to say anything at all. If the point of the exercise is to facilitate creators getting more feedback from their downloaders, and more critical feedback, what you'd really wanna do is give unregistered users the option to comment anonymously.
This might be nice as an opt-in for creators to turn on on their project pages. If turned on, have an additional comment box below the download links, above the normal comments, labeled something like "This creator desires honest and critical feedback to help them improve, and has enabled anonymous comments."
::chinscratch:: If the resulting comments are only displayed to the creator, who can delete them at will and/or turn the feature off again if they're getting harrassed through it, site moderation wouldn't have to check that stuff over to remove profanity from it either. It'd be an "at your own risk" kind of thing, and every creator could decide individually whether or not it's their cup of tea.
Great point TheBarbarian, well said, but it's not really about ego-stroking, but comments / criticism helps too! Indeed how would we know we had a bug / issue, if nobody ever commented? I mean largely it's more about user interraction than ego-stroking as you pointed out above. (I loved the long dissertation, it was comical, entertaining, and thoughtful, for sure.)
I do like the idea of a button to vote for awards & possible content highlights, e.g. most downloaded content this week/month/etc...
The button would be a way of saying, good job, & I think it deserves to be recognized...
(I mean hell if they don't wanna vote & comment, at least they can press one button, right? :)
I know exactly what you mean on the bugs/issues. Valiant commenter Belleirophon recently pointed out some lighting and shadow issues on one of my models, and it turns out that a bunch of others are affected too because I reused the mesh for the base faces, so now there are several heads with that same problem and I have to fix them all individually. X_x This could have been avoided, had people been "ungrateful" enough to point out the flaws in free-of-charge amateur-crafted content.
::further chinscratching; chin now starting to bleed::
If encouraging more user interaction is the goal, how about a page where site members can offer to mentor others in their skills? Get mentors to work on a little project together with a student - with the mentors offering an array of potential projects that aren't too big (perhaps stuff related to the upcoming or ongoing CCC, to which they could contribute together); newbies aren't usually able to judge the amount of work and effort that goes into a particular project, and if they're allowed to choose the project, you're liable to attract the people that don't actually want to learn how to do something but rather want somebody else to do it for them. The listed mentor gets attention (if they want it... if not, they just don't volunteer to mentor), the community possibly gets all-new content creators, the students gain new skills and get an invitation to "join the community" (butting into an existing "group" as a newcomer can be scary as *expletive*! Especially when you're a new "artist" and think your work is infinitely subpar to what everybody else in the group is making), the CCC has new life breathed into it. If it works, anyway.
::further facial mutilation:: Perhaps the forum would be suitable for this. But then again, if you want more active people communicating and interacting on the site, you want to catch the attention of the people that don't currently frequent the forums, so that'd be my argument in favor of erecting a separate page, possibly with a link button in the side menu column. Or a little front-page "Want to learn? These site members are offering to mentor:"-notice.
Yeah, I think the whole forum section thing has that covered, the topic is awards, but mainly I started this topic because I think having awards would result in two things, some creators having their great work highlighted / spotlighted which would help us all weed through the bad stuff to find the good stuff faster, encouraging more interraction, and secondly it would give people wanting to remain anonymous a way to say, this is awesome, without voting & commenting... (As a lot of people may prefer not to interract publicly for whatever reason)
I dunno, maybe we all inheritingly distrust the internet & websites? Who knows? Anyway, it was just an idea, and hopefully someone can find a reason to say yes and get any kind of award system impelemented, that way we can all benefit from it in some meaningful way, no matter who agrees with said reward system or what it actually accomplishes in the end.
Having no reward system or only highlighting Old Awards / Hall of Fame content, which may not be on par with new content, leaves little incentitive to new content creators, and if you can take away anything from this entire post, let it be this point, that SOMETHING is needed. (Otherwise the site will more or less fail to deliver something of real value to NWN Buliders, sure content downloaders mean something, but let's get real, it's the builders who need the incentitive here, not downloaders!)
I'm assuming of course the entire point of this website is to upload stuff to share, so why not give people a great reason to share new content?
I really am not a big fan of a lot of old content, much of the stuff was created many years ago, so it's not going to be what long time experienced builders can create, and therefore it will not be par with the new content in many ways. Also, that old content required older versions of CEP, a bit of work to download & install, and some of it used far too many haks, making download time insane for low bandwidth users. (I think we need some standards there, where most builders need to use like CEP v2.3 or higher, or they just get the low vote right off the bat...)
If we can put our heads together to come up with a better award system, then that would make this a better forum topic, otherwise people may view pessimistic comments as those wanting to stick with the "Old way", which may not be as good or better than the new way... I think NWN is an old game, but it needs new ideas & new content being released to keep it alive, and that's the entire point of this entire topic.
If it's about giving good content more exposure, I really like "Most Downloaded(all time/last year/last month/last week)" pages. :O Those are a pretty surefire way to find the good stuff, and simply being at the top of those pages is a reward.
Modified the Top Downloads to Weekly. Let's see how that plays out. If it starts to generate a new list outside of what was listed for All Time Downloads, I'll generate a new block for weekly downloads and find a spot for its display.
Black Hole - Front Page, footer. Castle Vault - Front Page, right side-bar. Garland - Front Page, right side-bar. NWN7 - Front Page, right side-bar. NWN7 Zen - Front Page, right side-bar. Stark - Front Page, right side-bar. Twisted Vault - Front Page, right side-bar. Zen Vault - Front Page, right side-bar.
Although it does say Top File Downloads, it is currently set for weekly resets. I'm not sure if it requires some sort of reset, as I can see already it's not picking up Demo Mountainous Forest Seamless Area Transitions - which already has 32 downloads - but it's not on the list at the moment, and is only 3 days old.
The current list displayed now is: (weekly) (all time)
It seems to also be picking up the all-time count and showing that list, but displaying how often the all-time list has been downloaded on a weekly basis based on the double value of download counts displayed.
I'll fiddle around with the settings and see what I can bring up.
EDIT:
So I've been fooling around with some new sort critera and this has been generated. Sadly, I can't get the duplicates to only show once:
Critera searches NWN1 modules, haks and scripts for download counts. I'm unable thus far to get it to search >= 1 day and <= 7 days of download count. Doing that just ends up with a blank search result.
I know the public id dl counter keeps track of each project's weekly download count, as seen above, but that option is not available using sorting criteria as shown below.
Pretty exhausted from doing this and for now, I'm done trying to figure it out.
Since we are already talking about finding modules in the vault, I want to bring up that it's nearly impossible to search the huge number of modules for any specifics. Tagging doesn't help much and the dates for first submitted/last updated starts with the upload to the new vault.
But each module is already tagged with a lot more information that could be really useful for searching:
I've marked in green what I think would be useful for everyone (edit: I did use text/background color editing but it looks like it doesn't show....)
Some people might only search for Single player Min Character Level 01 Tricks & Traps heavy
And others might be looking for DM Required Max Character Level 10 Roleplay heavy
My personal favourites would be the original dates for submitted/updated and the expansions so I could find the actually newest modules and maybe even those that use CEP/Project Q
I agree with the tags situation. The main problem with it is that IMO it relies a bit too much on user input without any real suggestions and what not. I mean phrasing wise and that sort of thing; that's why there is three tags for hack and slash modules since people search with different terms. I cherrypick some of the Old Vault information for tags like the DM requirements, category, classes, and sometimes the setting if it's Greyhawk, Krynn, or something like that. If stuff like the author field could be converted into a tag then it would make it easier since I feel that should be done automatically instead of manually.
When you mention original submission dates do you want that in the tags? I can start adding it to newer entries but it'll take some time to get the older ones sorted out. The CEP/Project Q HAKs and stuff included are slowly getting marked so users know, however I've been trying to just get the modules sorted so all the content is available.
You can't judge a project by its download counts. Even if they were correct, which they aren't, they say nothing about a project's quality unless it is a module.
Take for example a hak that contains a creature that hasn't existed in NWN before. The creature is very popular and many people want to use it in their module.
The creator of that creature hasn't done a good job at all, the creature is mediocre at best, but there's no better alternative, so people use it.
Now several modules that become very popular use that hak and the hak is downloaded whenever the modules are downloaded. This gives the hak an even higher download count than each separate module. Does that make the hak a good hak?
Just look at the hak required for "A dance with Rogues". It has been among the top five downloads of the old vault forever and a day and still is here at the new vault. But is it a good hak? Does it contain quality content? Not at all. Some of the models in it are among the worst I've seen.
Now let me explain why I think that the download counts aren't correct. At the old vault if you uploaded a new version of something the download count of the old version was transfered to the new one. Here the download count drops down to 0 whenever you re-upload something. So people who update their project on a regular basis get less downloads than someone who uploads just once and never touches the project again.
Yeah. With the download count resetting the way it currently does, displaying content by download count is pointless - unless unique downloads are already being tracked, but not displayed. Also, you'd have to be able to see a much longer list than the frontpage widget currently displays and, preferably, pick-and-choose what types of project you want to see.
I'd consider it justified that projects used by modules, especially multiple modules, would be pushed up by that. This kind of ranking method doesn't ask "do people think this content is well-made or visually appealing"(which is subjective; tastes differ wildly - and also, content being visually appealing doesn't always mean it's something that people find useful, or even that it's in a usable state the way it currently is), it asks "what content is being used most". If, say, a gorgeous tileset hak is being used by multiple different modules, and thus downloaded more often than others (as more people have reason to download it), that absolutely means it should appear above less-used haks. I'd also say that yes, absolutely, it would be justified for a less-than-amazing rendition of a creature to be high up on such a list, simply because people use it. Should somebody make a new, better version, I rather expect users would switch to the new, better option, and then over time the new creature would overtake the old one in the download count ranking (this is also why All Time/Last Year/Last Month etc is important).
Module-specific hak compilations, though... hmm. Hmmm. ::headscratch:: ... hm.
I'll throw in another issue with download-count tracking and ranking: What about projects that contain multiple different files, versus projects that contain only a single file?
I suppose what all this really boils down to is that the projects search could stand expanding - we can have stuff ranked by amount of votes already, maybe we could just add unique downloads, average vote score as options. Heck, maybe that's the right idea - display content ranked by average vote score, by default - that would give people more reason to vote, and more reason to vote objectively rather than just handing out full tens to projects they think are especially great, because otherwise all the 1-full-ten-voted content is sitting at the top of the search list mildly inconveniencing everybody. ::chinscratch::
Yet another thought, stepping away from the download-count avenue entirely: What if we had a "community ranking" page, where users can individually decide what kinds of projects they do or don't want to see listed (checkbox on/off), with upvote/downvote/novote buttons that serve no purpose besides determining the project's placing in the ranking list? Don't even display how many up- or downvotes a project got, just show users their own voting options. Anonymity and one-click voting are good for honesty and participation.
Mind you lot, I'm just throwing ideas out there. It's extremely likely that most if not all of them aren't worth the time and effort it would take to implement them.
The Barbarian wrote: Mind you lot, I'm just throwing ideas out there. It's extremely likely that most if not all of them aren't worth the time and effort it would take to implement them.
I have no clue how much work it would take to implement your ideas, but if it isn't alot of time, it would be worth it. In my opinion they are good ideas. Moving away from download counts as the sole criteria to determine if a project is popular or not can only benefit the community.
Awards? Based on what?
The Old Vault awards were based on both download count and votes. Nowadays, there's nearly impossible to have any project voted on or commented, so only the download count remains. Not a very good criteria - does tell how many people were interested in the project enough to download it, doesn'n tell if it was good or bad.
So, I don't think it's possible or even likely to have some award system here.
It's easy to share those sentiments given the amount of non-voting that goes on....
Sadly, there is a lot of great content out there that nobody voted on. :/
Maybe we can devise some way to encourage voting more?
(Rather than just resigning to "That's not possible or feasible")
You didn't listen.
The culture has to change first before you can proceed. So sure work at encouraging more voting, commenting etc... We can revisit this when things change.
Simply driving people to vote on your own works however is not what we are tlaking about here. We need a broad trend of increased voting and commenting - increased overall participation - before the old-style, vault-wide awards have any meaning.
There are a few which very well could be given awards since Neverwinter Vault opened. Swordflight Chapter 3 is an example, perhaps reaching 10 or more votes. I do believe the old vault automatically gave Hall of Fame award to a series of modules if the previous received them as well.
Demonheart has been well received with downloads and voting.
Tales from the Lake of Sorrows, The Soul Cages, Al Andalus to name a few for NWN2 that have also been well received since opening.
Hakpaks too! Places from Witcher 1, Barbarian's NWN Heads, Eyrgiga's Robe-Based Armors are some newer content uploaded since the place went live.
Elven Treetop City Tileset is another new addition, highly voted on and downloaded, as is Mountainous Forest for NWN1.
NWN2 tileset and hakpaks do have less votes compared to NWN1, but new content is still being created and uploaded too. PJ's Placeable Cornucopia and City-Stat Project, Volume 1.
Potential is there.
NWVault had a tracking system that would post a news item on the front page, saying what content required 1, 2, 3 more votes to reach Hall of Fame status, showing the name of the content, along with a clickable link. This fueled visitors to push said content into HoF status quicker.
A realistic minimum number of downloads and votes would be required, and much lower than the 25 votes and whatever # of downloads it was at NWVault, as both games have aged and the community is that much smaller. Or the # of downloads is axed and Hall of Fame is issued by the number of votes - again a set minimum. Perhaps 12 or 15, as an example.
FP!
I disagree, FP. We should still maintain the old thresholds. It doesn't matter that the community is smaller. Until you have a large enough pool of votes the score will deviate with each new vote. Its just basic statistics. We need decent sample sizes. If we don't meet them, thats too bad. Perhaps come up with a different way of honoring projects. But that ultimately becomes a cliquish thing and of little value since it does not allow content that say you and I overlooked to be raised to the top of the pack.
See, I like the way you think Fester Pots, that's open mindedness, and I applaud your comment...
(Thanks for adding something of quality to this post)
I think 40 downloads and 6 votes should qualify something for a NEW Award status...
(That being the 'possible' proposed bottom line qualifications required)
I say new because this is 2016, so we could have like 2016 or 2017 Content Awards or something like that...
(It's just an idea, I'm all in for new ideas, & not pessimistic closed minded opinionated hoo-ha, no thanks)
Honestly I don't think the scope of the NWN community allows for a working competetive awards/rating system. During the last years of the old IGN vault new content already had a hard time of being noticed at all, not to mention properly discusses and rated - and that was half a decade ago.
To grow a larger fanbase that reaches beyond the 50 people who are responsible for 80% of the whole activity of this site and the additional 100 people who visit and actually leave some comment from time to time (instead of just downloading without any feedback ever) we'd have to come up with quite some effort. The fanbase is potentially there because old-school always has its fans and after all NWN/NWN2 still sells.
Actually there is a lot of work that each individual who loves NWN and the vault can do here. I try to give review/feedback on one module each week and I started to take screenshots from modules that have none/too few/imo bad ones, so they can be added to the entry. It's more work than working on the toolset and not half as fun but what's the use of making my own mod to be finished in 6 months when no one will be there to play it?
I have a lot more ideas how to promote this site and how to make it more attractive but I won't tell anybody else to spend even more time on the new vault than it (obviously) already takes. For my part, over the holidays I will start to revamp my blog (see signature) to spotlight my favorite modules and projects there which will hopefully generate a little more traffic for the vault.
Personally I would like to see a consolidated sticky thread where we could discuss how to promote NWN/NWN2 and epecially this site because I think we have to if all that hard work that is put into projects shouldn't go to waste within the next years.
How about downloaders get a -2 points until they comment? :D
LMAO, man that'll sure change the ratings of some people's points severely. :D
Secondly, this is a club, & you have to actually be approved to be a member, so club status should be dependent upon your points & activity, correct?
(Not making content available for public / non-members would be a start, no?)
I don't see any value in adding more restrictions and hurdles to making use of content or trying to change how people behave. I also think that trying to force people to vote and comment etc... would reduce involvement rather than increase it.
If all of this is for having an award system, then perhaps starting a reviewer guild or golden dragon award or something would be worth while. I think there is the danger of those sorts of things being cliquish, but in all honesty for the time being its probably the best way to give projects more visibility via awards and recognition.
::chinscratch:: I think I'd put it out there that "rewarding (something) is pointless because there aren't enough people doing (it)" isn't usually how it works - people generally start doing something when they see a reason to do it (and stroking the ego of some stranger on the internet is only an incentive for a very small amount of people whose logic I find fascinating if bewildering but I love them all the same, strange creatures that they are). I don't think I've voted or commented on... nearly anything, so far. Is it weird if I think that a bunch of creators cheering on eachother's content and handing eachother awards for it is a bit of a circlejerk? >_> I've had really good experiences with rewarding commenters by taking requests, and would not claim to have cause to complain about the amount of attention and ego-stroking I've received. Plus there's the download count. Who needs votes, comments, or award badges, when you've got the download count? I was rather fond of watching the page views go up, too. Where'd those go? :-(
I'd fully expect the implementation of a vote-based award system to increase (regular-)user participation in voting - at least, as a present non-voter, that would motivate me to go around voting and commenting. If it's just about handing out awards to bring joy to the creators (rather than about trying to get more people to vote and comment to bring joy to the creators), maybe a "Nominate for Award" button on project pages which, if enough people click on it ("This project needs X more clicks to be nominated for THE SUPER EPIC AMAZING COMMUNITY'S CHOICE AWARD 2017 KEKEKE"-text label), automatically puts the content on a regularly-reoccurring poll - like the CCC poll, but maybe people can pick up to three options - could be an idea. A spotlight blog would require somebody to maintain it - which means more unpaid work for somebody, and, as henesua very rightly noted, singling out a small amount of people whom others might feel a need to schmooze up to so they'll promote their content, which isn't really a pleasant addition to any community.
If it's about giving good content more exposure, I really like "Most Downloaded(all time/last year/last month/last week)" pages. :O Those are a pretty surefire way to find the good stuff, and simply being at the top of those pages is a reward. Also, it doesn't make so much of a competition of it, so nobody would have cause to feel bummed out about not getting an award, or about "only" getting bronze or silver.
It bears noting that it is already possible to view projects ranked by amount of votes received, so "Most Voted (all time)". The option is just a tad well-hidden at the moment; users have to actually go looking for it to find it. Maybe making that way of displaying content the default setting would be satisfactory - it's basically the HoF page on the old Vault already.
But that doesn't account for potential content with a large amount of low votes. Hence why Most Downloaded seems preferable to Most Voted - that way, votes can serve their intended purpose of recommending people whether or not to bother downloading in the first place, and the entire system kind of regulates itself.
But then again, there's content that is updated and re-downloaded, while other excellent content might be uploaded and downloaded only once, so depending on how the download count is handled, that may not work as intended either. o_ô
...
I'm definitely opposed to any attempts to punish not-voting or restrict anonymous user access to (non-XXX) content, in any case. The entire point of websites like this is to make content available to people - decreasing the exposure the content gets is not in anybody's interest, certainly not in the creators'.
... also, is this a club? I didn't sign up for any club. I AM AN INDIVIDUAL! FIERCE AND PROUD AND FREE! AHHHHHH INVISIBLE CHAINS... PEER PRESSURE... X_x ::bolts::
Some good points mentioned
I'd like to see continuos download count (if you choose "update" and after that it adds new downloads to existing ones, instead of starting a new count). I also miss "page views" info.
Awards are something I personally don't care - I prefer some feedback instead. And that's the point I disagree with TheBarbarian. As I stated in my previous comment - download count alone and only doesn't give me any info - was my work good or bad? What needs to be fixed? How can I make it better?
Still, "click the button if you like the project" - great idea! And it's more likely to be actually used, that Voting.
Dude, yes. Criticism is way more helpful than pure ego-stroking. I'm pretty sure simply getting people to vote more wouldn't improve that issue all too much, though.
The problem here is really that being critical is largely considered "unfriendly" and "discouraging", so most of the people that don't only have nice things to say opt not to say anything at all. If the point of the exercise is to facilitate creators getting more feedback from their downloaders, and more critical feedback, what you'd really wanna do is give unregistered users the option to comment anonymously.
This might be nice as an opt-in for creators to turn on on their project pages. If turned on, have an additional comment box below the download links, above the normal comments, labeled something like "This creator desires honest and critical feedback to help them improve, and has enabled anonymous comments."
::chinscratch:: If the resulting comments are only displayed to the creator, who can delete them at will and/or turn the feature off again if they're getting harrassed through it, site moderation wouldn't have to check that stuff over to remove profanity from it either. It'd be an "at your own risk" kind of thing, and every creator could decide individually whether or not it's their cup of tea.
Great point TheBarbarian, well said, but it's not really about ego-stroking, but comments / criticism helps too! Indeed how would we know we had a bug / issue, if nobody ever commented? I mean largely it's more about user interraction than ego-stroking as you pointed out above. (I loved the long dissertation, it was comical, entertaining, and thoughtful, for sure.)
I do like the idea of a button to vote for awards & possible content highlights, e.g. most downloaded content this week/month/etc...
The button would be a way of saying, good job, & I think it deserves to be recognized...
(I mean hell if they don't wanna vote & comment, at least they can press one button, right? :)
Yay. :D
I know exactly what you mean on the bugs/issues. Valiant commenter Belleirophon recently pointed out some lighting and shadow issues on one of my models, and it turns out that a bunch of others are affected too because I reused the mesh for the base faces, so now there are several heads with that same problem and I have to fix them all individually. X_x This could have been avoided, had people been "ungrateful" enough to point out the flaws in free-of-charge amateur-crafted content.
::further chinscratching; chin now starting to bleed::
If encouraging more user interaction is the goal, how about a page where site members can offer to mentor others in their skills? Get mentors to work on a little project together with a student - with the mentors offering an array of potential projects that aren't too big (perhaps stuff related to the upcoming or ongoing CCC, to which they could contribute together); newbies aren't usually able to judge the amount of work and effort that goes into a particular project, and if they're allowed to choose the project, you're liable to attract the people that don't actually want to learn how to do something but rather want somebody else to do it for them. The listed mentor gets attention (if they want it... if not, they just don't volunteer to mentor), the community possibly gets all-new content creators, the students gain new skills and get an invitation to "join the community" (butting into an existing "group" as a newcomer can be scary as *expletive*! Especially when you're a new "artist" and think your work is infinitely subpar to what everybody else in the group is making), the CCC has new life breathed into it. If it works, anyway.
::further facial mutilation:: Perhaps the forum would be suitable for this. But then again, if you want more active people communicating and interacting on the site, you want to catch the attention of the people that don't currently frequent the forums, so that'd be my argument in favor of erecting a separate page, possibly with a link button in the side menu column. Or a little front-page "Want to learn? These site members are offering to mentor:"-notice.
hrrrrrrrrrrm.
Yeah, I think the whole forum section thing has that covered, the topic is awards, but mainly I started this topic because I think having awards would result in two things, some creators having their great work highlighted / spotlighted which would help us all weed through the bad stuff to find the good stuff faster, encouraging more interraction, and secondly it would give people wanting to remain anonymous a way to say, this is awesome, without voting & commenting... (As a lot of people may prefer not to interract publicly for whatever reason)
I dunno, maybe we all inheritingly distrust the internet & websites? Who knows? Anyway, it was just an idea, and hopefully someone can find a reason to say yes and get any kind of award system impelemented, that way we can all benefit from it in some meaningful way, no matter who agrees with said reward system or what it actually accomplishes in the end.
Having no reward system or only highlighting Old Awards / Hall of Fame content, which may not be on par with new content, leaves little incentitive to new content creators, and if you can take away anything from this entire post, let it be this point, that SOMETHING is needed. (Otherwise the site will more or less fail to deliver something of real value to NWN Buliders, sure content downloaders mean something, but let's get real, it's the builders who need the incentitive here, not downloaders!)
I'm assuming of course the entire point of this website is to upload stuff to share, so why not give people a great reason to share new content?
I really am not a big fan of a lot of old content, much of the stuff was created many years ago, so it's not going to be what long time experienced builders can create, and therefore it will not be par with the new content in many ways. Also, that old content required older versions of CEP, a bit of work to download & install, and some of it used far too many haks, making download time insane for low bandwidth users. (I think we need some standards there, where most builders need to use like CEP v2.3 or higher, or they just get the low vote right off the bat...)
If we can put our heads together to come up with a better award system, then that would make this a better forum topic, otherwise people may view pessimistic comments as those wanting to stick with the "Old way", which may not be as good or better than the new way... I think NWN is an old game, but it needs new ideas & new content being released to keep it alive, and that's the entire point of this entire topic.
As I pointed out, Guile. You can implement something. Start a review group that hands out awards.
Not my thing, sorry. (I'm too busy making new content bro. :)
If it's about giving good content more exposure, I really like "Most Downloaded(all time/last year/last month/last week)" pages. :O Those are a pretty surefire way to find the good stuff, and simply being at the top of those pages is a reward.Modified the Top Downloads to Weekly. Let's see how that plays out. If it starts to generate a new list outside of what was listed for All Time Downloads, I'll generate a new block for weekly downloads and find a spot for its display.
FP!
@Fester Pot - can you remind me how to find Top Downloads?
Themes:
Black Hole - Front Page, footer.
Castle Vault - Front Page, right side-bar.
Garland - Front Page, right side-bar.
NWN7 - Front Page, right side-bar.
NWN7 Zen - Front Page, right side-bar.
Stark - Front Page, right side-bar.
Twisted Vault - Front Page, right side-bar.
Zen Vault - Front Page, right side-bar.
Although it does say Top File Downloads, it is currently set for weekly resets. I'm not sure if it requires some sort of reset, as I can see already it's not picking up Demo Mountainous Forest Seamless Area Transitions - which already has 32 downloads - but it's not on the list at the moment, and is only 3 days old.
The current list displayed now is: (weekly) (all time)
Top Weekly Projects
Top Monthly Projects
It seems to also be picking up the all-time count and showing that list, but displaying how often the all-time list has been downloaded on a weekly basis based on the double value of download counts displayed.
I'll fiddle around with the settings and see what I can bring up.
EDIT:
So I've been fooling around with some new sort critera and this has been generated. Sadly, I can't get the duplicates to only show once:
Critera searches NWN1 modules, haks and scripts for download counts. I'm unable thus far to get it to search >= 1 day and <= 7 days of download count. Doing that just ends up with a blank search result.
I know the public id dl counter keeps track of each project's weekly download count, as seen above, but that option is not available using sorting criteria as shown below.
Pretty exhausted from doing this and for now, I'm done trying to figure it out.
FP!
I think Top Downloads needs it's own page, where as "Hot Content" which should be strictly NEW (within a month or two old & not Updated Stuff?)
However, I'm more looking for newer content awards than download highlights, cause everyone is gonna download playable offline modules in mass...
(Or main game files like the CEP / Critical Rebuild etc)
Since we are already talking about finding modules in the vault, I want to bring up that it's nearly impossible to search the huge number of modules for any specifics. Tagging doesn't help much and the dates for first submitted/last updated starts with the upload to the new vault.
But each module is already tagged with a lot more information that could be really useful for searching:
I've marked in green what I think would be useful for everyone (edit: I did use text/background color editing but it looks like it doesn't show....)
Some people might only search for
Single player
Min Character Level 01
Tricks & Traps heavy
And others might be looking for
DM Required
Max Character Level 10
Roleplay heavy
My personal favourites would be the original dates for submitted/updated and the expansions so I could find the actually newest modules and maybe even those that use CEP/Project Q
@Fester Pot - strange, I'm not seeing that. I tried Garland and Black Hole, nix.
Because you have disabled it in your custom block options under your account, so it won't display.
FP!
Doh!
@TheStoryTeller01
I agree with the tags situation. The main problem with it is that IMO it relies a bit too much on user input without any real suggestions and what not. I mean phrasing wise and that sort of thing; that's why there is three tags for hack and slash modules since people search with different terms. I cherrypick some of the Old Vault information for tags like the DM requirements, category, classes, and sometimes the setting if it's Greyhawk, Krynn, or something like that. If stuff like the author field could be converted into a tag then it would make it easier since I feel that should be done automatically instead of manually.
When you mention original submission dates do you want that in the tags? I can start adding it to newer entries but it'll take some time to get the older ones sorted out. The CEP/Project Q HAKs and stuff included are slowly getting marked so users know, however I've been trying to just get the modules sorted so all the content is available.
You can't judge a project by its download counts. Even if they were correct, which they aren't, they say nothing about a project's quality unless it is a module.
Take for example a hak that contains a creature that hasn't existed in NWN before. The creature is very popular and many people want to use it in their module.
The creator of that creature hasn't done a good job at all, the creature is mediocre at best, but there's no better alternative, so people use it.
Now several modules that become very popular use that hak and the hak is downloaded whenever the modules are downloaded. This gives the hak an even higher download count than each separate module. Does that make the hak a good hak?
Just look at the hak required for "A dance with Rogues". It has been among the top five downloads of the old vault forever and a day and still is here at the new vault. But is it a good hak? Does it contain quality content? Not at all. Some of the models in it are among the worst I've seen.
Now let me explain why I think that the download counts aren't correct. At the old vault if you uploaded a new version of something the download count of the old version was transfered to the new one. Here the download count drops down to 0 whenever you re-upload something. So people who update their project on a regular basis get less downloads than someone who uploads just once and never touches the project again.
Yeah. With the download count resetting the way it currently does, displaying content by download count is pointless - unless unique downloads are already being tracked, but not displayed. Also, you'd have to be able to see a much longer list than the frontpage widget currently displays and, preferably, pick-and-choose what types of project you want to see.
I'd consider it justified that projects used by modules, especially multiple modules, would be pushed up by that. This kind of ranking method doesn't ask "do people think this content is well-made or visually appealing"(which is subjective; tastes differ wildly - and also, content being visually appealing doesn't always mean it's something that people find useful, or even that it's in a usable state the way it currently is), it asks "what content is being used most". If, say, a gorgeous tileset hak is being used by multiple different modules, and thus downloaded more often than others (as more people have reason to download it), that absolutely means it should appear above less-used haks. I'd also say that yes, absolutely, it would be justified for a less-than-amazing rendition of a creature to be high up on such a list, simply because people use it. Should somebody make a new, better version, I rather expect users would switch to the new, better option, and then over time the new creature would overtake the old one in the download count ranking (this is also why All Time/Last Year/Last Month etc is important).
Module-specific hak compilations, though... hmm. Hmmm. ::headscratch:: ... hm.
I'll throw in another issue with download-count tracking and ranking: What about projects that contain multiple different files, versus projects that contain only a single file?
I suppose what all this really boils down to is that the projects search could stand expanding - we can have stuff ranked by amount of votes already, maybe we could just add unique downloads, average vote score as options. Heck, maybe that's the right idea - display content ranked by average vote score, by default - that would give people more reason to vote, and more reason to vote objectively rather than just handing out full tens to projects they think are especially great, because otherwise all the 1-full-ten-voted content is sitting at the top of the search list mildly inconveniencing everybody. ::chinscratch::
Yet another thought, stepping away from the download-count avenue entirely: What if we had a "community ranking" page, where users can individually decide what kinds of projects they do or don't want to see listed (checkbox on/off), with upvote/downvote/novote buttons that serve no purpose besides determining the project's placing in the ranking list? Don't even display how many up- or downvotes a project got, just show users their own voting options. Anonymity and one-click voting are good for honesty and participation.
Mind you lot, I'm just throwing ideas out there. It's extremely likely that most if not all of them aren't worth the time and effort it would take to implement them.
The Barbarian wrote: Mind you lot, I'm just throwing ideas out there. It's extremely likely that most if not all of them aren't worth the time and effort it would take to implement them.
I have no clue how much work it would take to implement your ideas, but if it isn't alot of time, it would be worth it. In my opinion they are good ideas. Moving away from download counts as the sole criteria to determine if a project is popular or not can only benefit the community.
I 100% agree there, content doesn't have to have a high download content to be stellar...
My PC Assistant only had a few votes & a few downloads, had to update it a few times....
But it was undoubtedly one of the best pieces of work I've ever produced, bar none.