Hello everyone,
We are happy to announce some new features and improvements today after a month of coding. Nothing really fancy, but I hope you guys will like it. So what's new?
Snapshots of the Day Overview
There was no really good way to browse the SotD's on the website, except through the title block on the home page, so I created an overview based on the movie/series snapshots tab design:
The "Snapshots of the Day" Overview
You can see every SotD since the beginning of WTM sorted per month or per year. The SotD feature was launched on December 31th, 2009, so there were no SotD's before that date. As we do nowadays, we used the "magic formula" to find the best shots and nearly every single day has its own SotD now. So don't be surprised if some of your old shots have been promoted to SotD... or better. This also explains why we asked for help in the Replacement Thread recently: a lot of these shots were bad ones from the old days. Thank you for all your replacements!
In addition to the twelve tabs for every month, you can find one called "Final" where you will be able to see every... Snapshot of the Month, which leads me to another new feature.
Snapshot of the Month
The "Final" tab will show you every Snapshot of the Month for a single calender year. How it works? Basically, after a month ends, we have somewhere between 28 and 31 SotD's. After reviewing all of them to check if there is nothing suspicious, we will run the "SotM task" which uses the magic formula on all these SotD's, and a SotM will be chosen.
The "Snapshots of the Year" Tab
A SotM shot will have a slightly different banner and will be shown on the home page for a month (still under construction). The poster will also get rewards but i'll come to that later.
Snapshot of the Year
Of course SotM's mean... Snapshot of the Year! How do we choose the SotY, the single best shot out of over 50.000 uploads? It works differently than the SotD & the SotM feature. After New Year's Eve, we will have our twelve Snapshots of the Month. As we do for sidequests, we will reset all votes (except favourites) on these 12 shots, and you will have two weeks to rate them and choose the best shot of the year.
Because we don't want cheaters, you will not be able to see the number of votes, the rating or the number of favourites during these two weeks. The vote will take place in the "Final" tab. After reviewing the votes, we will again use the magic formula and one shot will be promoted to Snapshot of the Year.
The shot will also be featured on the home page with a different banner and the uploader will obviously get some rewards.
Rewards for SotD/M/Y
The first things you will notice are the new banners. We are introducing two new banners, designed for the SotMs and the SotDs.
The new banners
The banners are clickable. This means that you can directly access the SotD's Overview, by clicking on one of the banners. For example, if you click on the SotY banner, you will be redirected to the "Final" tab where the shot has been promoted to Snapshot of the Year. The banners are now displayed everywhere, even on thumbnails: on your Profile, on the SotD's Overview, on the movie snapshots tab, on the tag search...
The main rewards are Awesome Uploads & Shiny Memorabilia. But there is more for the Snapshot of the Year. Here are the rewards:
- Snapshot of the Day: 1 Awesome Upload ;
- Snapshot of the Month: 5 Awesome Uploads + a special memo ;
- Snapshot of the Year: 6 Awesome Uploads + a special memo + Supporter Status for a year + own sidequest.
To sum up: a SotY gives you 12 Awesome Uploads (6 + 5 + 1) and a SotM gives you 6 Awesome Uploads (5 +1). Only new SotD's will get Awesome Uploads, this feature is not retroactive. You will only get the Memorabilia if some of your very old shots are now SotM's or SotY's.
Talking about Memorabilia...
New Memorabilia
WTM really needed some new memorabilia: a lot of users now have more than 30k FF solves like @CW or @sohor, and the last FF memo is the T-800 for 15k FF solves. We asked you on the forum what you would like to have as new memorabilia and we are really grateful for all the suggestions you gave us!
Unfortunately, our former memo designer @miascugh could not help us anymore, so we had to find a new talent out there. @Pzy offered his help, and we started to work on your suggestions (discussing what would be doable, etc.). We spent over 50 hours arguing and designing the new memorabilia. We tried a lot of objects but some just looked like crap as a memo. We decided to keep 24 memorabilia. Here they are:
The new memorabilia designed by Pzy
- 5 new SotD's memos: SotY, SotM, 25, 10 & 5 SotD's ;
- 5 new FF solves memos: 100k, 70k, 50k, 35k & 25k ;
- 5 new first solves memos: 10k, 5k, 2k, 1k & 400 ;
- 3 new uploads memos: 2k, 1.6k & 1.3k.
There are also three new awards memorabilia which I'm going to explain quickly: we have the "Minion" memo from Despicable Me for the best contributors of the community. You will get it if you upload more than 200 character shots, title shots or replacement shots. You can also get it if you add more than 200 trailers or abstracts.
For classic lovers and animation addicts, we designed two memorabilia : the knife from 12 Angry Men and the house from Up. You will get these memorabilia if you upload more than 100 black & white shots ("b/w" tag) or animation shots ("animation" tag). The display order and the description of the memos might change in the next couple of days.
Cheers to @Pzy for spending so much time designing these memorabilia, he never complained (and gosh, it's hard to work with me!), so thanks to him. He deserves our gratitude and some rewards.
Arrow Keys Navigation
Here is a feature I really wanted to have for a long time and which I think the hardcore players will appreciate. You can now, if you want, activate the arrow keys to navigate faster between shots. The arrow keys navigation is enabled by default on the following pages: the SotDs Overview & the Movie/Series Snapshots tab. But if you want, you can enable the navigation on every shot page: News Submissions, Feature Films, The Archive, Contests... To do that, go to the menu "Options", then "Settings", and in the "Site Settings" tab, you can activate it.
Activate the Arrow Keys Navigation
Three keys are used to navigate faster between shots, when you activate it:
- The left arrow key: go to the previous (un)solved shot ;
- The right arrow key: go to the next (un)solved shot ;
- The top arrow key: use the random awesome button.
The navigation comes also with slight transition effects which only work on modern browsers.
WTM Supporters
Good news: the Supporter Stats are back! We have over 30 GB of data for just this feature, so it was getting very slow. We made some adjustments and we hope that the website will run correctly now. It might be a little slow at first, but it should be fine after a couple of days. If the Supporter Stats are still buggy, we have an alternative solution which should also work so, no worries: they are back and for good.
Another thing: as some of you may already know, the last few weeks I tested a new feature on my Profile for Supporters called "Gallery of your Best Shots". It works pretty well but it still needs some improvements. Instead of showing only one favourite snapshot on your Profile, you can now activate a Gallery of your ten best rated shots:
Activate your Gallery
The Gallery will first show your SotDs (if you have some) and then your normal shots, sorted by rating. The feature includes Awesome Uploads only if they have more than 10 votes. I decided to not include contest shots because I was afraid of the "Draw the Movie" shots. If you, as a supporter, think that contest shots should be included, let me know on the forum.
Faster Upload for Character & Title Shots
I have to admit, uploading character shots from a movie was a mess: you had to choose the type of upload, enter the title of the movie, choose the character... A lot of users requested an improvement for that. I heard you. Starting today, when you will click on the "Upload new Snapshot" link on a character page, you will be redirected to the "Duplicate check" step instantly! The same thing goes for title shots by clicking on "Upload" in the Movie/Series Snapshots tab.
New Bookmarks Page
I refreshed the design of the Bookmarks page a little and I also added a new feature: you can now see how many days you need to wait before the solution to the shot is available.
New Bookmarks page
The Bookmarked Shots are now sorted from oldest to newest.
Poll Feature
In order to get a better idea of what the community wants, I added a poll feature on the home page next to the last uploaded shots. It's the same poll used on the forum. We can see who voted, but not what they voted: it's anonymous.
Poll Feature
We hope this will help us get more information about your wishes because only a few players use the forum. The first Poll is "Which new feature do you like the most?". The next one will start mid-August. You will have to decide the theme of the new "community contest" and there might be some surprises in the choices.
Talking about contests, we launched a new one today: "The Sound of Movies".
E-mail Validation Step
In order to prepare a Monthly Newsletter feature, I cleaned up the registration process and the change e-mail function. Before, you could basically create an account by entering completely wrong e-mail addresses, the website didn't care if they were real or not. To counter cheaters who like to have multi-accounts, you will now have to enter a valid e-mail address because a link will be sent to validate your account. If you don't click on the link we sent you, you won't be able to log in.It works exactly the same if you are already registered and you want to change your e-mail address: you will be logged out after changed it and you will have to confirm your new address by clicking on the link we sent you. Otherwise, you won't be able to play anymore. So be careful while changing it.
Others Improvements & Fixes
I also changed a lot of little things on the website and fix some broken stuff. If you want to see the full changelog of this update, you can read the Special Thread with all the new features, improvements & fixes.
Of course new features mean new bugs (especially with me), so I count on you to report anything suspicious in the Special Thread (not here or on my Profile please). If you really think you found something critical, please use the Feedback Form instead.
I hope you guys like this little update, I still have plenty of ideas to develop (or not), but I will focus only on the new bugs I introduced here for now and take some vacations.
A big thanks to @Asmodai & @MisterZob who supported me and helped me the last few weeks. They are doing a hell of a job everyday so cheers to them too. They are not your enemies, they like the community as much as we all do and want the best of it. Thank you guys for trusting me!
Enjoy!
