Vlasta's blog

Next batch of updates

More updates are ready to be published. Or are they? One never knows until he tries (entomologist trophy is always waiting). The most visible change is a replacement of the old "People" tab with a more general page currently called "Mingle", but that may change if anyone proposes a better name. I have considered calling the tab "Social", but that sounds too corporately.

More website updates are on the way. In the near future, you can expect a slight modernization of the main Gallery and People pages. I actually do not like the term People too much, it may change. To be more concrete, the Gallery page will show active contests, and there will be new functions on the People page, for example the ability to find a person by their username.

Return of the Theme of the Month contests - part 2

So, the new TOTM system is now being tested. You will find the official announcement of the July TOTM in the Request forum.

Return of the Theme of the Month contests

Once upon the time there were monthly contests organized by willing volunteers. It was fun and I think these contests should return, this time with a bit more support from me.

Forum & Groups

This week, there was a minor change to the forums, something that was planned and missing. Also, since nobody has created a group yet, I'll tell you how to do that today.

A bunch of minor updates

It has been a month since the new web script was published, but I am still working on it and new changes are coming almost every day. Here is an overview of the more significant ones.

When you are above 150 karma, your karma wheel gets an upgrade.

If you want to add notification to your news feed when a cursor set or an icon set it published by anyone, you can now do that by subscribing to these news sources on your user-news page.

User icon updates

User icons were a controversial topic since they were first introduced on rw-designer. Uploaded icons need approval before they are visible to other users. There are rather strict rules on what is acceptable. Majority of uploaded icon break the rules and are not accepted. Even some of the accepted icons are borderline cases and may actually be disapproved in the near future.

Quick fact: While new comment system still supports the smiley codes in the form of sequences of normal ASCII characters (like : ; ) etc.), however it is recommended to use the unicode characters for smilies instead. And BTW you can use other unicode characters that the font used by your browser supports. 🌻 Just google them. But don't go too much overboard, if the character is not supported by all browsers, some people may not see it properly.

News feed news

For old time members of rw-designer, the changes to their profile pages were probably the most significant. There is much to be said about the new profile pages, but in this blog post, I only want to focus on one part of old user profiles - the news feed.

Quick change: the number of items that each user can offer for sale has been limited to 3. Otherwise, the flea market will be too messy. Attempting to add more will now fail, just think about what you really want to sell.

More about comment up/downvoting

Let's have a closer look on how comment upvoting and downvoting works. It is not particularly complicated, but I have noticed some misconceptions about how it interacts with the karma system.

One week later

As expected, there were numerous problems with the new web and I have been fixing them every day. Let's talk about some of the solved problems and about some of the new features.

The big switch

The enhancements to this web site script have been in preparations for more than a year. In the recent weeks I did not have much time to work on it, so the progress was slow and it looked like it would take too long to finish everything. So, I have decided to take a risk and I will be switching the main web to the new script very soon, likely during the night from Sunday to Monday (depending on your time zone).

Live preview of upcoming web changes

A couple of months ago, I have shown you in a video stream what changes are coming to the rw-designer web. I am still working on it and it is far from finished, but it is ready for a public test.

Switching to new Visual Studio after 15 years

In the past weeks, I have been updating the source code of RWPaint so that it can be compiled using new version of Microsoft Visual Studio. In today's stream I will be talking about what it will mean for you and me in the future.

Deleting anonymous comments

Just a quick update. Authors of cursor and icon sets should now be able to delete anonymous comments on the page with the sets. This should help people keep the pages cleaner. Only comments less than 1 month old can be deleted. Let me know if you encounter problems with this feature.

RW Paint and Cursor Editor beta - April 2nd stream

Version 2023 of RealWorld Paint and RealWorld Cursor Editor is getting close. From now on, I will be working exclusively on fixing bugs and not on adding new functions. You can participate by downloading the latest version, testing it on your computer and contacting me if you find a bug - something that was supposed to work and did not.

Recoloring tool - March 12th stream

A simple way to recolor images, especially cursors or icons, has been one of the most requested features for years. I have created a simple script for replacing one color with another and some people have been using it, but it was working only in very specific situations, because only the exact colors were replaced. In the last weeks, I have been trying to improve the situation.