To clarify what I've said elsewhere... We will have several ways to interact with people.
Followers This will work like public Twitter profiles, where you can follow whoever you want, whenever you want. As a user, you can always see a list of who you're following, as well as a list of who is following you. When that user does something on the site like create a new forum thread or create new game content (ie a new castle in Sieger) or get a new achievement, you'll see it on your activity feed.
Friends This will work like Facebook, where your friendship invitation must be accepted by the other person. If the other person ignores your request or straight-up rejects it, you'll only have "follow" privileges. You'll always have access to your friends list of course, and either user can break the friendship connection at any time.
What's the Difference? We will place restrictions on user interaction based on whether you're a friend or follower. For example, we may restrict whether followers can post on your profile page, and armatars you upload can only be shared to your friends. We may let followers send you private messages, but we may prioritize messages from friends by highlighting them in a different color or something along those lines. Of course, any activities your friends are a part of on the site will show up on your activity feed.
Groups? Clubs? Clans? We're unsure of what we'll call it, but some time AFTER the public AG3 launch, we'd like to build the idea of a "club" or "group" setup where someone can create a group and invite people to it. These could be used for game tournaments, etc. where the players wouldn't have to be friends or followers to share comments and ideas. Users will be able to join as many of these groups as they like. Any group activity will show up in your activity feed.
Spam, noise, clutter You'll be able to filter out whose items you want to see, or not, which games you want to see, or not, etc. For example, maybe your best friend JoeUser likes to create 100 new levels for Light Bot 2 every day, and you don't play LB2 ... you can filter out LB2 messages without filtering JoeUser completely.
Larry has also talked about giving you the ability to "ban" users from your profile page, or from seeing your activities, even if they're following you on the site.
Problem is probably all those glitches accurring on the games throughout the website... I've made a comment about it in the S&S section sticky, hope they get it solved quickly!
Sounds good! If there are guys with my favorite games with good highscores, it will motivate me a bit to try and beat it.
More motivation = more gameplay! And that is what we need on a gaming website! =)
That is.... if and when they repare the glitches! =P
As I said, there's a forming Internet "standard" for how those kinds of things are written/formed/displayed/linked, etc., and Larry's working on it right now. It'll be pretty neat once we figure out all the nouns, verbs, actors, etc., that the documentation talks about.
Biology Major. Chemistry Minor. That is enough information right there
I dunno if the type of programming you guys are doing is the same as mine, but strings like this typically involve variables, where the variables can contain links to a specific area, so you would have something like "Your friend," + FRIEND2 + ", has achieved a new highscore in" + GAME1544 + ". Can you beat it?"
Totally java speak, but that's how they would do it. Sounds like a pretty interesting project though!
Yes, it's similar to that, but we also have variables for "Your friend" and "has achieved" and "a new high score in" etc... all depending on the type of message we're building.
I absolutely agree with the idea of Followers, and I love how I will be in control of almost everything around my future userpage on AG3. About the groups, they don't necessarily need to be called guilds, maybe just groups ; why called guilds? I mean, Guilds and groups aren't the same thing. But I have one minor suggestion, what if we could comment on achievements other people get like.. [quote]Your friend Freakenstein has achieved a new high score in In3structotank. Can you beat it? (2)Comments: Zanto_zsnes says: Hey dude! nice work on that achievement! I'll see if I can beat you cormyn says: Way to go Freakenstein, you've done a good job there.
And so on.. What do you think? this suggestion goes with the general achievement suggestion.
Okay so It's been 3 or so days, and I've been looking at this thing. I'm a big fan of guilds, so I would like this feature to grow LOTS.
Based on the OP, guilds can:
--Be used for various flash game tournaments
--Share comment and profile feeds
--Share any updates with changes
And I guess we sort of established some sort of requirement with guild leaders like, they gotta gave a specific amount of reputation to found one. I also would like some clarification. As they are guild leaders, can they do things normal guild members can't, such as change the framework of the guild? What I'm going around is like posting ranks, updating the guild's About, accepting new members, yadda yadda.
Can they also be about...everything else? I love that we may have groups pertaining to games and such, but sooner or later, people may want to make a Kitty Klub.
What about overall guild ranks on account of membership, views, comments, profile streams, total reputation, total AP, and others?
Can there also be a discussion groups? Like every week or so the OP could change the subjects and he can invite or delete a person or people. This could limite spam. Their could also be the possibility to turn the discussion public so anyone can join but I'm getting a little of topic here.
If editing posts become part of AG3, I feel that there would be no need for this. The OP can update the first post and everyone else can adapt to the change in topics. I'm kinda looking forward to editing posts, since we can make better use of contests and surveys.
I can understand completely why you guys would want to hold off on making it possible for users to start making "guilds"... it would mean a huge expansion on this website! 0_o I mean, almost every user must have one or more ideas for a "guild" of his/her own, so the amount of those will surely pass the amount of users within a month! And that would have the servers' space stressed under that amount of data, right?!
The amount of data would be negligible compared to what we use now for high scores and shared game data and such. ) Or the size of the SWF files we deliver every day.
It has more to do with the fact that this is a post-launch idea, and will take some time to think about thoroughly, design, and implement.
