The challenges system has always been about encouraging photography but we also wanted it to be a means of supporting and enhancing the challenges that already take place within specific forums. With this in mind, we’ve introduced Forum-associated challenges. Yesterday, we deployed this feature to DPReview for hosts to play with.

In recent weeks we have seen challenges established with themes that are relevant to specific forums – these have include brand-specific themes such as ‘Olympus DSLR Only’ or technique-specific themes like ‘Strobist’ or ‘Worthless Made Priceless’. Naturally these would have been particularly welcomed in the Olympus SLR Talk, Lighting Technique, and Retouching Forum, respectively.

To allow Challenge Hosts to make stronger links with those forums, they now have the option to specify which forums their challenge is particularly relevant to. Associating a challenge with a forum causes two things to happen to the recently introduced challenge widget that appears at the top of the forum pages.  Firstly, an associated challenge will appear more frequently in the widget so that users of that forum get to see the most relevant challenges but also, an associated challenge will start to appear when it first opens, rather than when it has finished. This way, users of the relevant forum will be much more aware that there’s a challenge aimed at them that they may wish to enter.

Winners of all challenges will continue to appear across the site but with the creation of associated challenges, there’s a way of promoting challenges for the communities that have built up within individual forums.

As announced before, we have recently formalized the camera selection process when uploading an entry to the challenges. This enables us to deliver an interesting new feature, statistics of cameras used in challenges.

You can access the statistics page directly from the URL (http://www.dpreview.com/challenges/stats) or through the menu on the left, under Challenges.

We used several terminologies on the statistics which may need description:

• Rank is determined by the number of entries submitted to any challenge using a particular camera during the week that ends on previous Sunday. For instance, if you access the page on Wednesday, 12 August, the statistics displayed is based on entries that was submitted from Satuday, 1 August through Saturday, 8 August.
• Users is determined by the number of unique user submitting at least one entry with a particular camera. A user can submit entries with two different camera and will be counted once on each camera. 

Those who regularly participate of visit dpreview challenges may have noticed a tiny – almost invisible – change: on the ‘entry detail’ page the camera name is now a link:

You’re probably wondering why we even mention it, and think that it should have been there from Day One. Indeed, to turn the camera name into a link did literally take only several minutes, and it would not be worth mentioning by itself. The bigger change preceding this happened ‘under the hood.’ During the first several months of running challenges, we have collected a large enough set of images to do a confident analysis of camera EXIF’s and build a solid EXIF database.

This change also has allowed us to improve the way images are uploaded to challenges. Most images (about 76% at the moment) are already coming with embedded EXIF and, for these, we identify the camera directly and link the image to the camera database right away. For the other submissions, we present the user with a dropdown and ask them to choose a camera from it:

Of course, we are not perfect and in the process of analysing the EXIF’s we learned that we are missing several cameras in our database; although the most popular cameras are already there, of course. It’s in an outgoing process, then and the missing cameras are now being added the database.

The remaining 24% entries (without EXIF) were processed and identified using a halfautomatic, half-manual process which has left us with about three thousands entries (less than 5% of all entries) which are not associated with any camera. It’s a mix of entries taken with film cameras, various non-camera devices and, presumably, genuine but mistyped digital cameras. We plan to identify as many as possibly over time, but it will be mostly a manual process.

We would appreciate any feedback. For instance, if you discover that some of your challenge entries have been misclassified, please let us know. We are only human and because of the semi-manual nature or the process, there could be errors.

Of source, the newly introduced camera link is just a beginning. We plan soon to introduce basic camera usage statistics (which you probably figured out at the beginning of the blog post).

Stay tuned!

As part of our ongoing schedule of improvements to Challenges we have today added inline commenting which is available via the 'Add new comment' button just below an Entry in a Challenge.  Comments are shown in reverse date order (latest at the top) and without visible threading.  

When we deployed the new slideshow in challenges we promised to add more features in the future, today we have rolled some of these out, the most significant of which is voting. When you open a slideshow you will see the same five starts as on the regular challenge pages:

You can vote using mouse and as well keyboard (up and down arrows). This is especially convenient if are viewing the slideshow in full screen mode without the top and bottom strips: left arrow for previous image, right arrow for the next one and up and down for voting.

Along with the voting interface, we also made the slideshow title and the entry title clickable. They take you to the corresponding challenge page and the entry, respectively.

We still consider it beta: new bugs may still appear and we to plan some more features soon.

Enjoy!

Yesterday we modified another aspect of the forums, which is the top navigation controls. The previous version feels outdated and used too much screen space. We took a fresh look and criss-crossed it with the cleaner, more modern feeling of the Challenges navigation, and came up with a much slimmer design:

You can find all the previous links neatly tucked away when not used. When you do need to use them, hover your mouse over the action you want to perform, and voila, the list expands!

Another reason we are changing this is because we need the space to put something more interactive and entertaining for the users. So stay tune and keep checking back to see what other new stuff we have in our pipeline.

Over the last few weeks we've been steadily rolling out a suite of new features to our forums, which have (from a development point of view) stayed fairly static for several years.  We're glad to see our community making use of those features launched so far (bookmarking, keyboard shortcuts and most importantly enhanced message formatting).  Today I'd like to introduce about our latest new feature; the ignore list.

Ignore list

 

Last week we introduced a slideshow mode to challenges. It probably does not need an extensive explanation; it’s a standard slideshow with a set of features you can typically find in a slideshow. It’s still has a beta badge, and for a good reason. Within few hours we found (and fixed) several bugs of various degrees of embarrassment.

You may have noticed that challenges have always supported the Cooliris slideshow. It’s admittedly definitely cooler than our slideshow, but it has several disadvantages: you need a browser plugin, it cannot be as integrated with your application (challenges in this case) and finally it may have some distracting elements (such as links to buy stuff).

We definitely plan to enhance the slideshow in near future; voting and more image information, perhaps some UI improvements (such as full screen grid etc.).

As a side product of the slideshow, we introduced a 4000x4000 pixel limit on challenge images. We found that the Flash player does not play well with large bitmaps. Rather than working around it and resizing the large images to a size which Flash likes, we opted for the limit. The reasoning behind this is that: (1) this will affect only very small percentage of images (0.3% so far), (2) images of this case cannot be displayed on today’s screen (and screen in reasonable distance future) in full size anyway, and (3) we rather leave resizing on users themselves.

You can check some cool slideshows here:

• Worthless Made Priceless challenge
• Panorama challenge
• Macro Bokeh challenge  

Enjoy!

Our latest subtle improvement to the forums are keyboard shortcuts, probably doesn't sound significant but if you're a forum regular you'll probably find that the new shortcuts make navigating and responding to a thread a much quicker and easier proposition.  Additionally we've tried to keep the shortcuts consistent with those we've had in place for a while in Challenges.  The available shortcut keys change depending on the message you're looking at (and if you're logged in), there's a legend available at the bottom of the page:

Recently we've taken a little time out from developing Challenges & User Profiles to add a few minor 'nice-to-have' features to the Forums.

OP image indication
A photography-oriented forum is bound to have a lot of threads containing large-ish images, but those without super-quick broadband or the inclination to view other's 'masterpieces' would like to know which threads to avoid. Any thread which has an image in it's Original Post (OP) now has a slightly different icon (a instead of a ) with the number of images detailed in the thread's tooltip. Images in OP signatures do not affect the icon, only those in the message 'body'. Our approach here is deliberately subtle (many forumites are change averse) yet we feel it gives power-users the cues they need.

'Top posters' lists
We know that some of our forum posters are fairly prolific, but it's only recently that we've started publishing the numbers. We're fully aware that 'prolific' doesn't automatically imply 'popular', 'influential' or 'valued' but nonetheless it's interesting to see who's who in the zoo at any point in time. There are (of course) those who won't have a bar of it, but others have been quite positive. This feature is quite likely to evolve over the coming year.

Avatars in post headers
When the revamped User Profile pages were rolled out a few months ago we threw in avatars for the fun of it. At the time it was mostly an experiment, an experiment we're now continuing by including avatars in the header block of each forum post. We're using an independent service (Gravatar) to host and manage user avatars, which is neat because that way your avatar will follow you from site to site (amazon-conspiracy theorists can relax, Gravatar is a 3rd party service aligned with WordPress). Just sign-up with Gravatar (quick and easy) using the same email address you use for your dpreview profile and the magic of the internet will take care of the rest. Several thousand users already have already jumped on the avatar bandwagon, great stuff!

Enhanced formatting options
The stick that dpreview-forum detractors most often use to beat us with is the lack of bold/italic/underline support. Apparently this oversight tragically hampers the epic brand wars which are waged in that particular theatre. Well, those noble folk need detract no more (optimistic perhaps?) for these prized formatting options have arrived. Here's a quick run-down of the formatting new options we now support:

• /italics/
• *bold*
• ~strikethrough~
• _underline_
• * bullet list
• # numbered list
• ---
  signature
• email@domain.com

In addition to the classics (unchanged)

• quoter wrote:
  > quote
• http://www.link.com
• http://www.image.com/expand-me.jpg
• http://www.image.com/just-link-me.jpg;

Just in case you were wondering (and I know you were) we've deliberately gone with a non-html syntax (close in spirit to textile, markdown and many modern wiki syntaxes) for security and ease-of-use reasons (and because people are already using those symbols). There are a few other little undocumented behaviours I've thrown in there for the observant (I'll let you make the call as to whether they're features or bugs ;).

You can already use the new formatting syntax in your messages (many already are). However, the formatter (the bit which actually turns the syntax into html) has been completely rewritten and therefore probably has a few bugs. As such, we're going to have a short opt-in beta phase before rolling it out for everyone. To opt into the beta phase of the new formatter just go to the labs page and tick the 'I want to use the new forum message formatting' checkbox. If you do have issues with the new system, the best way to get satisfaction is to send a short message through the feedback system (remember to include the url of the affected forum message and instructions so we can reproduce the problem).

Bookmarking
Another neat feature we've added is the ability to bookmark messages and have those bookmarked messages available to you in a section of your user profile. To bookmark a thread or message, tick the 'bookmark' checkbox under the message text. To view your bookmarked threads & messages take a look at the Bookmarks tab in your user profile. We are planning to roll out notifications for bookmarked threads in the near (well, near-to-mid-possibly-distant) future.

Enjoy!