Slating, praising, it's all good.

The pluses are straightforward and boring to write so I'll get those out of the way first It's slick. The resizing text boxes are very swish, auto-resizing for costume icons \o/ Event listings = win, etc. It's obvious a metric truckload of work has gone into the backbone before our mitts have gotten anywhere near it.

Obviously I'm not really going to particularly comment on the overall look as I doubt it's finished The current giant happy text and icons do feel a bit.. giant and sterile though, if that makes sense.


And now a pasting of the notepad file I filled with crap while messing around with the site, also serving as a "how good is the forum at handling hugeass posts" test. This may or may not make any sense, and is in no sensible order whatsoever:

(-wishlist: stuff is more "ideas that even i might not use but they were in my head at the time.." than actual "i wish..".)


--

Costumes - Editing
-The edit button looks a little too much like a tick? Could just be me, got confused.
-Cost - I entered "£40 including PT" and it read that as "0" I'm guessing it's an int/float based field. prolly better off as text for entries like "roughly £10..." or such
-Needs either a "Enter new event" field or a link to such, filling out all the fields to get that far and discover ObscureCon'03 isn't on the list would be a pain.. I've seen a lot of cosplay entries listing game release events, summer balls, etc.
-wishlist: having an "events attended" list rather than just "first worn at", so people can list events they're intending on rewearing it for, or did. Would help if people were tracking down a costume by what event they saw it at, not realising it'd debuted at an earlier one.
-Possibly just allowing the events list to be a text box, but pattern matching con names into links? Might be more effort than benefit but would be the fancy way to do it.


Costumes - viewing
-All the text seems a little far down - maybe have photo thumbnails run down the right hand side and have icon/details center? Or details first, photos next, comments last.. Not sure.
-Comment button next to icon seems to do zilch


Profiles - viewing
-Interests and friends end with an extra delimiter
-wishlist: Might be funky to have friends listed as their icons, or half-size icons, with name underneath, or as alt-text
-The LJ thing is awesome, though gives interesting results on friends-only journals XD

Friends list
-People without avatars just get "Avatar image" listed, as opposed to their name like elsewhere displays


Profiles - Editing
-Contact info doesn't understand carriage returns, just throws it on one line, br tags work, it seems a bit mixed which text boxes understand the whitespace properly and which need tags, and which come supplied with tags and might not need them o.o;

Events - Viewing
-90 days back seems a bit short given how far apart most of our events are
-wishlist: half-sized costume icons next to the entry
-My "costumes complete" was listed as 0 for ages after entering a new one, but costume listings had updated properly -- seems to have caught up since

Photos - Viewing
-The popup window looks a bit ugly, lots of empty space and needing to scroll to see the photo, I'm guessing it's unfinished
-Views counter?



Photos - Editing
-wishlist: categories for photos - ie. reference/in-progress/finished/photoshoot/con photo, etc.


Member Directory
-"Showing 1 to -1 of -1" XD
-wishlist: number of completed costumes for each maybe? might however lead to "i've made more costumes than anyone!" dramu
-wishlist: latest costume icon perhaps?

Tutorials
-Oh this looks abuseable Worth taking out the <p> tags in the default text as they just confused me and I thought the whole thing needed tags, which just get removed and screw it all up And since there's no "go back and edit" function yet.. oh dear. I'm guessing image links would be allowed for the tutorials to display?


Links - adding:
-Needs to add a gap between summary and article, as it is they just join onto each other in the final entry.
-I'm guessing these will be moderated eventually rather than instant appearance?
-Might be worth enforcing the summary to be a single line and having that as the description next to the url on the links page - as urls on their own aren't often that descriptive.


General
-wishlist: 'mystery costume' type stuff? as in normal entries, but allow the name of the costume to be hidden until debuted (either automatic by event listing or manual "Yeah I've worn it now" tickbox), so people can upload in-progress pictures without easily giving away what they're for. Possibly also so people could also have an entry saying they will be cosplaying at event X, just not disclosing what as.

-wishlist: notification on new comments on your costumes, and possibly notification of replies to comments you've made?


--


More sensible/lucid comments may follow at a later date.

Firstly, thanks ever so much for doing this, and for being the first brave person to step forward with feedback! (Hopefully others will now follow )

You've highlighted a few things that we knew of (and a few bugs I'd forgotten, thanks ) and lots of new points to consider. I cant reply to each bit as I'm supposed to be leaving the house soon, but I assure you everything you've mentioned is being stored on a spreadsheet and being ticked off.

Handling events is something we are currently pondering over, as you can see for the moment you can only pick from a list added by us. At the moment specific conventions are easily enough to keep up to date and be added by admin, but I hadn't thought about the idea of users wanting to add events that arent necessarily cons. More thinking to be done! Multiple events per costume is also something in the planning, events is proving to be the trickiest little bit to organise!

I'm quite taken by the idea of changing the layout of the costume page in regards to the photos, we shall have a play.

Also, although its not quite finished, do feel free to say anything about the overall appearance site design, whether you like it or detest it! (Dislike the giant text? Kat:1 Perrin:0 ) Any changes might be slow over the next fews days, as I'm busy most of the weekend, and Perrin is away also.

Very useful, and good to see things from another point of view. Thanks again, and please do post anything else that comes to mind, no matter how trivial it seems!

P.S, we *may* be culling some of the smilies :shoot:

P.P.S Your 'costumes complete' total was something we changed just before the upload, and may have forgotten to put a bit of code back in. An amusing 'quick! Change it before they notice' moment, alas we failed

<b>More stuff:</b>

Costumes - adding
The autocomplete box is very funky, although I tried pressing down to see if it would suggest anything at one point, it didn't, then when I clicked on the next field it switched the text to "undefined", gah.

"Time Taken" is a much shorter field than I thought In the case of entries like "The coat took a week, the flooglemumph another month and the fztgragaphon took three years to be delivered!", though that might be a good thing.

Description doesn't recognise carriage returns either.. Or br tags o.o;

Tried uploading an oversized PNG, once it was done it just returned to the page without any change, or any error - good that it caught it, but for people who don't understand the concept of checking filesizes before uploading it might be handy to have it say why nothing happened

"Cost : £1e+16" and "Cost : £-3"
heh heh heh.. Sorry, couldn't resist

Might be worth having fields like cost or awards won not appear if they're empty, otherwise it looks all lonely and "I DIDN'T WIN ANYTHING T_T"

Photo uploading
Can't believe I didn't spot this earlier - the description field on photos gets discarded, nothing shows up on the photos and editing it reveals an empty box, editing the photo and then putting a description in there works fine though.

The automatic thumbnail stuff is awesome, although it looks really weird on long landscape photos (http://www.cosplayisland.co.uk/costume/view/57) since it top-aligns you get a huge gap between it and the text, if it could align on the center it'd look nicer


Profile editing
When going back to editing interests, they start and end with extra commas, although it doesn't effect the outcome

Stores
Especially for local stores, might be worth having a "based in" field.. Also possibly a category for stores that're local but also have online compnents? Not sure.
It doesn't put in line breaks between fields so the summary, url and description end up end-to-end and look a mess, also the url adds http:// on the front even if it's already there




<b>Random ideas</b>

A category picker for costumes, prolly not much use but it'd be nice to be able to sort/search by which are anime/game/film/etc costumes

I think it's been mentioned before but I'll throw it again for completion's sake - a "Variant:" field for costumes perhaps?



<b>Random ideas that might create a huge amount of work, yay</b>

A simple way of linking to others' profiles or even individual costumes to be really fancy, similar to LJ's lj-user tag or deviantart's ev---: so you could easily write "This is a group photo of blah, blah, me and blah" and have them be links to the others' profiles. MOAR regexps!

Personally I like there being a kind of central control-panel-y page once you've logged in, kind of like dA/AMV.org/etc, rather than separate sections for everything, so it shows your inbox, what comments you've recieved, view counts, if any of your friends have added new costumes, any site-wide announcements, etc. Even if the page is just a ton of text, it's nice to have one page you can bookmark and check to see if anything new has happened in one glance. Cosspace just added a "who recently looked at your profile" box which is both very cool and quite scary Things like that.. this could just be my preference, i'm very much "Data! Semi-useless stats! Information! Now! Woo!"

Cosplayer journals? I don't use them since I just use LJ really, but they seem a popular idea on other sites. Sounds like hard work though.


--



Now I shall stop procrastinating on the video.

Honest.

Quick one I just spotted - not sure if it's on purpose or if much can be done if not, but the inline LJ-last-entry thing strips out lj-cuts, not such a huge issue except I just threw up an anime spoilerish post under a cut, but on the profile here it was obviously wide open.. Doh

's looking good

Main page's "Who's online:" has the extra delimiter still


Latest costume looks a bit odd with the word wrap.. I'd probably recommend making it more:

Bob
Some Series
by username


Adding photo to costume, reference tickbox: "Tick this box is the image is..."


Photo viewing is still pretty clunky


That's.. actually about it. Dammit, see how nitpicky I have to get now? Pft.

The more picky the better really! (At least it means you're trying )
We're still working through your last lot of feedback, everything and anything is still useful at this point!

(and pay no mind to TestBoy, he's a bit special )

Its really quick and easy to use! I'm super impressed ^^ Super special awesome?

Anyway X3 It works really well, it loads fast and I could use it straight away ^^ thank you for keeping it simple.

Visually its clean and clear, I think maybe some personalisation for the graphics would be cool ~ I'm sure there are alot of people who are able / willing to create graphics ^^ ~ meh its an idea ^^

Having abit of trouble editing posts, got a couple of errors earlier.
Also ended up putting a thread in the wrong place by some miracle.

Mascot please. Perhaps some sort of monarcical (is that even a word) lolita/magical girl with a union jack cape? Y/N/M? That would help to make the site look prettier. And, yes, the giant text is a little in-your-face and lacking in grace. It's like the Morrisons' new poisonous, hard-edged, 1960's-cement-carpark logo versus the softer, more dulcet and elegant tones of good old Safeway. You can see I've got my priorities straight. lol. What can I say, I know not your complex codes and htmls, but I like layouts to be pleasing to the eye. Sorry, I'm such a weirdo.

Also, I agree with the whole being able to enter your own events, because there's monthly/annual/whatever meet-ups/local groups and events such as Halloween or, indeed, random nights out which also involve cosplaying.

The smilies appear in a completely random area of the text on these here forums and you hafta search for them. though, that may just be my computer being insane again. *le sigh*

I have not explored very much yet because I will actually hafta write everything down/find my pictures and then transfer them. I tend to blank out how much monies I have spent on things. lol. I shall probably be back to whine more later. You're doing an excellent job though, thanks for all your hard work, it's nice to have our very own UK-based site. Positively spiffing, jolly good show.

Hey, great work so far!

After the old cosplay.uk died a slow death a few years ago, it was about time somebody did this, since Cosplay.com isn't very 'UK' friendly.

There's no Entry option for 'London Expo May 2007'. That would be great if you could add it please!

Thanks!


Alias
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