Hey folks, I've been hard at work throughout this week working on the site, both with features I've planned and features requested by you guys. The biggest addition to DeltaStyles: ratings.
5 Star Ratings
Now every file will have a 5 star rating where all registered users can submit their rating to show their critique in a quick and passive way. There are only 5 stars, no half stars. This data is averaged across all ratings and displayed in various places around the site now, like the top rated section, sort options in search and categories, and the user pages, and of course the main file page itself.
To rate a file, simply click or tap the 5 stars to enable voting and then select your star rating. Once you refresh the page it will go back to showing the average rating. You can change your rating at any time, but you can't rate your own skins.
To start out the counts will obviously be low, but over time I suspect we'll have some fairly robust rating numbers for the top skins!
Disclaimer: any hint of rating inflation or gaming the system will result in deletion and ban. I've dealt with that before.
Why not full reviews along with the rating system? Well in my mind the comments can be used for actual reviews if people want to do so. In my experience when you allow reviews along with the ratings, people put the bare minimum anyway, like "nice" or "great job!" or "it sucks" - even if you put a minimum word or character limit people will put in rubbish to get around it or not bother at all. What a world we live in! So if you rate something and would like to share your reasons why, drop them a comment!
Search improvements
Another feature I've been working on is some little additions to search to make it more useful. There are now tag filters, so you can search specific tags, and match "and" or "any" - so if you want to see all skins in your search for the term "gba" that have the tags "airplay" AND "standard screens" you can, but you could also switch that to "any matches" to get skins with the term "gba" that have either of those tags.
Other than that, you can search by platform, and you can also sort by ratings, updated date, release date, name, and download count. Hopefully that makes search a lot better for you guys!
Manic tag
I was recently made aware of this other app called Manic, which apparently is another emulator app like Delta but with even more platforms like Sega Saturn, CD, Master System, Game Gear, and more. Additionally, it has .DelstaSkin skin support with its own unique features to them. I believe some skins are compatible out of the box, but I have added a "Compatible with Manic" tag for you skin makers to make it easier for Manic users to find those skins. I have also added the platforms that Manic supports. This may be a bit confusing to casual people not in the loop when they see a platform that isn't in Delta but I'm hoping the description on the game pages help with that.
Other minor changes
As always with these new features, I break things along the way and fix them again, but also take a polish sweep over the site when I see something needing to be improved. I'll try to list a few I can think of.
- Game platform pages are dynamic now, similar function to the home page but for a specific platform (much easier to add new platforms)
- Skin lists got a big polish sweep to be more consistent across pages and a bit nicer looking
- Sort by rating and updated date added to All Skins page, Tag pages, and category pages
- Fixed colors around the site to be more consistent in both dark mode and light mode
- Fixed navigation breaking points on smaller screens like iPads
- Skin pages got re-arranged, tags are now on the right with the other file info
- Skin pages on mobile now show the Download and file info sections right after the description rather than after comments
- Comment lists in the sidebar are much nicer looking, with the avatar in its own column and text in another
- Added top skin creators by number of skins on the homepage
- Added a "users currently online" function to the bottom of the homepage
- User pages got a touch up, you can sort by game and other sorting consistent with the other list pages
- The submit form got a polish pass, and TinyMCE has been replaced with HugeRTE for the rich text inputs
- A ton of other small things
Comments
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