Today I intended on spending about 5 minutes working on improving the social network promotional buttons we added a few months back, so that when adding a twitter button, as well as specifying the URL you can specify the text. I used this new feature in this competition post on Desura. Code to do this was (incase you are interested):
Anyhow to cut a long story short boy do I get easily distracted. While exploring social buttons, I discovered Open Graph, a newish protocol for sharing information which is been used by Facebook, IMDB and possibly the search engines (are they?) to better explain a pages content.
While this feature doesn't really affect anything on the site, it will help when we better integrate with Twitter / Facebook and do social stuff properly (i.e. sharing info with friends / followers), single signon (so facebook / twitter users can comment without registering etc). That's the next step anyhow, just need to find a way to add this functionality without adding slow loading javascript based share buttons everywhere which most sites do, which 99% of the time never get clicked anyhow!
Speaking of social stuff, follow us pretty please!
debating if this news is frontpage worthy due to its technical nature, should we display it only on the site blog profiles? thoughts?
I think it's news worthy. It's important information about the site that the members should know about.
The site is not just visited by mod or game players, but also by modders and developers (including web ones) alike. ;-) And that would be pretty valuable info for the latter.
BTW, the AddonDB and similar projects may have suffered from lack of it in the past due to the whole site being rather focused on the promotional side rather than the development one.
I'm in agreement with " feillyne " here. And when you also consider the continually growing mobile/social site interdependance, how can you lose out ( promotionally ) ? However, " moci " also has a valid point - I would like to hear more details on the accout creating process. Not being a fan of FB's laughable " security protocols ", how much additional access to member profile info would we all be sharing when we might prefer not to ?
Just the same, flesh out this post into a more detailed article and it's definately front page worthy ( if not only for the valuable feedback from your members.
This right here ^^^
And to be even more specific:
"Not being a fan of FB's laughable "security protocols", how much additional access to member profile info would we all be sharing when we might prefer not to?"
I have specifically stayed away from Facebook since I first heard of it. I don't like the idea of me suddenly having a FB account created from information on ModDB.
The next unacceptable thing folks will suggest is switching the comments section(s) over to FaceBook. Please, just no...
Decentralization is the greatest advantage of the internet. Things like Google and Facebook have more in common with the restricted internet China's government want's to implement than you think.
interesting enough, noted
Nifty. But, is social site integration really necessary?
I agree, being able to post to facebook is nice but I can just picture all my stupid ex's on facebook coming here and posting something on a tech video like "omg sew boorrrrrrrrrrrrrrring"
You have to remember its all optional :) You don't have to link with facebook if you don't want to :)
Glad to see this coming along. :)
I'd really like instant messenger chat functionality in-game. I'm talking like AIM, MSN, GChat, etc. :) I remember my biggest problem with Steam is that I have to have it's chat client and my regular chat client running at the same time - and it definitely sucks whenever someone messages me and auto-minimizes my game. :\