I've been spending some time updating a few aspects of the site. Fixing a few small issues and looking at ways of improving how the site works - and hopefully encouraging more users to post.
One thing that I've been working on is adding a wall to the home page so that all posts made to users profile wall's are aggregated in one place. This means that it's easy to see what's happening in everyones profile without actually having to go and view them. Just check out the Wall on the front page - it will display all posts from all users.
Currently, the Wall only shows posts from people that are your friends, which means that you will still miss out on stuff that non-friends are talking about, but this is something that we are working towards changing.
Another change that we are going to make is to allow any member to be able to post to your profile wall. Currently only friends are allowed to do this, which means that to leave just a simple message / reply / comment, you first have to ask them to be your friend, and then they have to accept your request, before you are allowed to post. We feel that this makes the site too hard to use, and is one of the reasons that the site is not used more.
We will still retain the Friends function as we will use it to allow you to filter how you view the posts on both the profile wall, and the wall on the main page.
Once these few issues are fixed, we will then be looking to reinstate the Points system and points competition. Again - this is another feature to bolster site useage.
For those newer members who do not know what the Points competition is. Points are accumulated for each action that the user performs on the site - For example - logging in, posting a photo, adding a comment, rating a video. In fact, pretty much all actions will earn you points. At the end of the month, the user who has collected the most points wins a prize - a Vdubber tee shirt / hat / mug
The old competition simply awarded a prize to the user with the highest points at the end of the month. We are thinking of changing this a little with the new competition, and also improving the prizes, so stay tuned, more to follow soon...
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