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