A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Changes on ADA:

Forums rewritten
- No more double logins
- All the forum only users are merged with the new database..

Admin interface for z5 for customizing the site through web forms
- Allows adding prods, uploading images, setting credits right and modifying party ranks..
- No more manual database work

Forgot password functionality
- If you lose your password you can retrieve it with your email account (enter failed password to get the link)

And as added bonus we most likely introduced some bugs too. Please let us know!

- rle

This is bloody awesome!!

Oh,it seems that the "last reply" functionality is not changing its content on the frontpage. When I posted the reply above and went to the frontpage,it still said "rle". Not exactly a big thing what so ever.

Awesome!
This place is vital for the Amiga scene, everyone active and most important: a point for all folks interested in getting into Amiga demo coding.

Little design/layout point to make:

The output font-size of forum headlines and content text is rather big compared to the standard content font-size on the pages. I'm looking at this on a Chromium ATM. Dunno about Firefox or other Browsers yet.

Excellent, echo everything that dodge said.

Thanks for the feedback!

I noticed the same issue with the font formatting in couple of places (main page, first load of some threads..). I'll look into the formatting and the glitch of replies not raising correctly on main page. It is definitely not meant to leave like that.

Keep posting here if you notice more glitches

Good job - thank you!

My only comment is the text formatting. the way it is displayed on the forum is inconsistent with the display of comments (see the example below).

You can also isolate / separate posts on the forum (the red line in the picture):


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24540152/stuff/ada01.jpg

Anyway, it's great to see that the 'ada work; started. I can help a bit with some graphics for the web, if you need.

Did quick fix on the formatting. Should be better now.

Wow, great news! Awesome!!!



Perhaps related - Seems to be missing posts on users' "Recent Forum Posts" lists. Many who have replied in this thread only have a single one listed: "ada updated".

Also, would it be too much work to avoid having a separate ("empty") page for editing messages?

Edit: posted some test material here so you don't need to go through #amycoders logs ;)

Just a couple of notes:
- first, a big thank you to Rauli for his work (and Todi for the original work). Two weeks ago, i was still considering shutting down the site after Revision but that won't happen anymore :)
- the forum rework means that you need just one login for both forum and site. It also means that the forum is actually open again for new people to join and post. Sorry it took so long.
- the site will remain "as is" for the forseeable future. It's simple and i intend to keep it that way. A bunch of demos with credits, amiga download and screenshots + forum. It's not my intention to collect/list each and every demo (other sites like demozoo and pouet already provide an excellent platform for that).
- admin tools means i will consider allowing multiple admins to manage the content in the future. That way, the site will not rely on one person.

z5
Shut down?!? You can't just shut down heaven! ;)
Anyway, pleased to hear "as is"! I've always liked ADA's design and concept, and would very much like it to stay that way, rather than evolving into some "catch all" blob. The single login is great. Perhaps if I'm lucky - a simple PM system will emerge in some distant future - and then ADA would be just about perfect in my eyes. :)

@Raylight: i'm staying on until your demo is finished. I heard something about Revision 2014 so not long to go anymore ;)

[x] main page post order
[x] code field formatting
[x] made home page links to go to last post of thread

Link to Last post of thread is definately nice (and was once requested by Booster, iirc).

Just a small thing: on the demopage, the screenshot title has turned into a link that points to nothing.

[x] ability to edit your pre-update posts
[x] user page lists users pre-update posts

Quick explanation of the above: say you remember posting in the forum but you don't remember in which topic. You can click your user profile where you will see all your latest forum posts. Clicking on a topic will bring you back to the first post you made in that topic.

Great news! Thank you, Wouter and Rauli.
I wasn’t aware that shutting down ADA was so real and that we were so close to disaster… Well, unlike Raylight perhaps I wouldn’t call this place heaven (mainly because there are far too few tits), but its role in integrating the community is impossible to overestimate.

We are lucky. And it’s time to celebrate now! Join me in Twin Peaks dwarf dance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZqGz_krNY

There is one thing i would really like some visitor feedback on (well, visitor feedback is always great but you know what i mean!).

There are now admin tools for the site. This means stuff can be added a lot faster (see for example some of the FAP stuff that was just added). With multiple admins, this means the database could grow really fast. Stuff can be added directly when available.

However, up until now, i have put a lot of work into the screenshots of each and every demo. I take the screenshots in Winuae and i'm always trying to capture those who will portray the demo as best as possible and from start to finish. Also, there are a lot of them (some demos have up to 40/50 screens). These screens are then processed by my mate and then added. This takes a lot of work. But i've always found it worth doing because for me it's my favourite thing on the site. I really enjoy seeing each demo laid out from start to end in nice screenshots. And i like to browse through the site just looking at the screens.

However, i'm wondering what i should do with this in future. Do i add demos first without screens and then add screens whenever they are done. Or do i allow multiple admins to take screenshots and convert them (meaning that they may vary in how they look,...). Or do i reduce the number of screens?

So in short, how do you feel about the screenshots? Worth doing and putting time in?

awesome news - and really great that clicking on "latest post" now jumps to the latest post o/

z5, I also really enjoy the screenshots on this site and it's part of what makes it unique to read about a demo here.

I think it makes most sense only to add prods when you have screenshots. ADA is about showing care and attention to the prods,and not just a placeholder for prods. Thus,the questionmark picture should be reconsidered.Things are added first to Pouet in any case,so why not keep up the fab tradition here on ADA,regarding presenting the added prods in a great way?

Oh,the top 10 charts has always annoyed me. It is utterly impossible to get in there.I mean,when obvious starquality demos like the Lns + Ghostown demos can't get in the list then what can? The list has been appearing static for years. Should it make sense,it should be sorted by year or something similar....dunno: top of the year?

Thanks for the feedback on the screenshots. Please post as much feedback as possible on that topic.

@corial: just to be clear: it is my intention to provide each demo with screenshots as before. I'm just considering adding prods when released and screenshots later. I also want to find out if it's worth doing them as i done before hence the question. Also good point about the charts. Now that there is an active developer, maybe an alternative can be done. There are however far too few votes to make a proper charts nowadays.

I am glad to see that activity is coming back at ADA. Awesome job, guys!

As for the screenshot feedback: I think they are essential for the traditional ADA look & feel. I always liked how they provide a visual layout of the demo's flow. Now that I see you trying a new feature to add productions without screenshots, I must say that I do not like it. Please, only add productions when you have the screenshots. This site is not about speed anyway ;)

And while I like the small screenshots (160) for fast loading and the layout, I think it would be better if you provided a higher resolution screenshot as well, maybe when clicking on a picture. And for that, maybe it would make sense to block-resize everything to a virtual 640x512 size, so that full-size screenshots always take up the same amount of space on screen, regardless whether the original was 320x256, 640x256, or else.

1) Thanks to everyone involved in the upkeep and development of this fine site :)

2) I think multiple admins can take the screenshots and process them, but there must be an agreed screen resolution and it should be saved in a specific file format. Screenshots should always be taken using WinUAE (or UAE). That way there should be no difference in quality and taking screenshots can be made much simpler (for perfect shots of something you can drop the frame rate in WinUAE to make catching that perfect moment much easier).

3) I can't believe you were still considering closing this site down. Just curious, would it be possible to view site statistics in the future? Are/were the visitor count that low? Other Amiga forums (Amiga.org and recently English Amiga Board) allow users to voluntarily donate to help pay for server and bandwidth costs. (I currenly donate €10 to EAB every 2 or 3 months and used to donate to Amiga.org until it became so popular that others reached the target each month before I got a chance to donate!)

4) See 1 ;)

@lonewolf10: this site is hosted on untergrund and totally free because of that so no donations needed. As for statistics, i think they are available at untergrund but only viewable for us (website admins). To be honest, i stopped caring about site statistics many years ago and i don't have any clue about visitors. These things seem important during the first years of doing a website but it becomes uninteresting after a while. I suppose the site lost a considerable amount of viewers over the years (still amazed that some demos have > 100 voters) but i don't actively promote the site anymore (which i used to do in the first years). Also, the forum had been closed for many months.

About closing down, that's all in the past. I just need to find a way to add productions on a more regular basis.

Does the forum support goto=newpost function since last visit? I guess it needs cookies but wuld be nice to have. At the moment it does page=last what is already better then before update.

And what about a auto-login so you don`t need the login manually each visit?

Edit:
On the forum main paige the font for the link (buttom) is too large.

Great update to this fantastic site!

And while I like the small screenshots (160) for fast loading and the layout, I think it would be better if you provided a higher resolution screenshot as well, maybe when clicking on a picture. And for that, maybe it would make sense to block-resize everything to a virtual 640x512 size, so that full-size screenshots always take up the same amount of space on screen, regardless whether the original was 320x256, 640x256, or else.

@noname:we are taking this into consideration.

By coincidence this morning,I saw that the production Hyper by Focus Design & Scoopex has completely wrong screenshots. Too many fullscreenpictures for my little 4k :)