Ideas for improvements/features needed

[IBBoard]

I know I've got the suggestions box for things like this, but it doesn't get used and I've got the best part of 1TB (yes, Terrabyte, well, approximately anyway) going to waste. Each month I tend to use around 20GB of bandwidth, even with the larger downloads, but that's mainly because people know the FileFront network and so won't look much further once they know it's there, even if there are better (and advert free!) alternatives available

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had ideas on features to be added or things that could be made available that would make better use of the bandwidth

I did think about offering to hose mods, but even the Space Hulk mod has apparently had over 1100 downloads in the space of a few days, and at 70MB I still wouldn't be able to handle many of those!

My other idea was image hosting - let long-term members and submitters have their own gallery so that they could use HWT instead of something like ImageShack. Would people want that?

The only other alternative at the moment for making the most of the bandwidth is to give people "@hiveworldterra.co.uk" email addresses if they want them, although with the competition from GMail and the like I don't suppose many people would need them.

I've got a few ideas for the site as well - searching in articles and downloads being one of them (I've just got to get round to working on it) and an RSS feed of the news being another (for those who use RSS) but any other ideas would be great

[IBBoard]

Ok, so it isn't fully live yet (I've got a lot of pictures to add first! and it's missing a little bit of functionality, like paging, and it doesn't take uploads yet) but I've just finished a quick module for the evening - the Dawn of War Gallery

The idea is that it'll allow me to do the badges and banners in a similar way to Hangar-8 - where you can see them all on a page (or at least a part of the collection of them) rather than having to click into each one to see a sample.

So, I need feedback from people about it especially what should be done with the larger images that don't fit in the page. For now I'm just scrolling them like they do on the forums, but any other suggestions are welcomed

[DanTay25]

Hmm... well, it isn't getting used ! I was thinking, maybe you should use something like this on the Army Schemes page. I mean, have an image of the banner, badge and soldier of each scheme, and you click on it to select it, like in the current menus.
As for the gallery, maybe you should reserve that for cool screenshots and stuff. If you're ever in need of DoW screenshots, I've got LOADS .

[IBBoard]

I'd forgotten I'd linked to that from here! I haven't done anything to that gallery in ages.

I tend to have an unfortunate habit of wanting to do lots of stuff and be involved in lots of communities and tinker with my computer. That means I've got the CMS behind my site, updates to the CMS behind my wife's site, WarFoundry, all of the Dawn of War related tools, and a huge stack of texture ideas all in progress or floating at the back of my mind while I also try setting up cool things on my computer (like Compiz-Fusion), getting a reasonable working environment, running Windows as a virtual machine, etc. And then on top of that I've got a backlog of downloads that need screenshots adding!

One of my ideas with the Gallery was that it could be linked to other places, so a screenshot didn't have to link to a larger picture, it could also link to a download. It would be a good way to show case the army schemes and let people pick first, but I'd need the screenshots first!

[DanTay25]

I tend to have an unfortunate habit of wanting to do lots of stuff and be involved in lots of communities and tinker with my computer.

I know what you mean- I can never seem to finish what I start. I get bored hafway through. It's why every unit in my Space Marine army has a different colour scheme. Bright orange Tactical Squad, jet- black Devastator Squad and silver/orange/black Assault Marines. Oops... well, I got bored.
Back on the subject, I've got err... ('scuse me while I count) 173 DoW pictures in all. If you'd like some...

[IBBoard]

For Skins@HWT it would be quite good if you could post some of the ones with custom textures somewhere like Fileshack and then I'll look at taking them from there adding them to the gallery. It'll give me a reason to get the gallery working well if nothing else.

[DanTay25]

Err... which Fileshack do you mean, the games one or the image hosting one? I guessed at the latter, but although there's an upload page there's no way to view or download the pictures. Am I missing something?

P.S. I just uploaded a file named "Space Marines 11". It's of two Black Templars with Faction's Honour Company skin.

[IBBoard]

With images I probably meant Imageshack. Having checked fileshack.us I don't think I've ever used it, and .com doesn't seem to be a hosting place. Any free hosting (even the stuff your ISP gives you) would be fine, though.

[DanTay25]

With images I probably meant Imageshack.

Oh... Well, I'll separate out the ones with downloaded textures and upload them.