New GOL site update released, read on for what’s new

I continue to refine the website almost daily and I just put up some major changes to be aware of. Did you notice?

New navbar and notifications area
First of all, the navbar at the top has changed. It’s still fully responsive like the old one, but it’s more compact, while still remaining easy to use on mobile. Its style and colour remain exactly the same as before, but things have moved around. It also stays with you as you scroll, enabling you to get to other sections quicker and easier (like how we had it originally some time ago).

The navbar also now has a notification area (the envelope icon), so instead of having article comments either go to your email or get none at all, you can now get some notifications. Likes on comments are also shown there, but they are merged together per-comment (so you don’t see a new notification row for every single "like").

Note: This feature may have some bugs lurking, but I’ve done as much testing locally as I possibly can. It’s not an essential feature, so I can fix stuff as it gets reported.

Comment notifications can be completely turned off in your UserCP notifications preferences page. That is new page, where all kinds of notifications/emails we do are now adjusted in one place, so that makes it easier for you again.

Personal message notifications also sit in that notifications menu, as people kept completely missing that they had some. Hopefully this will help people keep track of that feature as well.

It will be refined based on feedback, as this is just an initial version of it as I am hoping to see how it works out in the wild. I will also look to expand it to the forum probably next. I am also hoping to implement username tagging, so if you tagged someone in a comment they would know they are wanted (many other sites like reddit and popular forum software do a similar thing).

It does not use AJAX yet, so you will need to refresh to get new notifications. I am still researching the best way to do that for it. It’s likely really easy, but I want to find a good way to implement it that satisfies me.

The user menu is now your avatar, click it. Longer usernames were squishing the navbar, and an avatar looks more personal so it killed two birds with one stone.

Other smaller features
- Above the comments box is a slider for submitting minor grammar and spelling mistakes. Please use that instead of the comments. This way we can keep the actual article comments clear and hopefully more on-point. This also means if I make a real boo-boo (like when I said shit instead of shut in a title, oops) and I’m not around other editors will see it.

- New users will now have a “New User” badge for the first 7 days

- Each year a user has been registered on GOL they will get a cake icon besides their username, just a little bit of fluff really to celebrate people being here each year.

- The admin panel for editors also has a better tracking area to keep tabs on submissions, reports and so on. This will help me and the other contributors keep track of the community and keep it flowing nicely.

- Adjusted the article subscription manager page (always available from the UserCP). You can now individually adjust how you're subscribed to each article. So any you are set to have or not have emails on, you can change them as you see fit.

While doing that I also fixed a bunch of smaller bugs and nuisances.

If there’s a feature you would truly find useful do let me know, already on the list are:
- Enabling users to submit their livestream events to our events page

- An ignore user option (which gets requested rather often), this won’t strip out text quoted by other people though, since that will be probably tricky to do and would need the quoting system to be re-designed. People should be mindful when quoting iffy stuff either way.

I have other stuff planned, but those two are my next priority. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.