15 September, 2016
  • ArtWanted.com Staff
  • 1,893 Views
  • 5 Comments

5 New Upgrades to the Message Boards

We have just gone live with 4 new upgrades to the ArtWanted.com Message Boards. These changes were made based off member feedback and to improve site usability for everyone.

1. SIMPLIFIED CATEGORIES

In the past we have had 10 different categories for our message boards. Many of these categories were rarely used, but members would often go there to see if anything had been posted. We have made a change to greatly simplify our categories down to just 3 categories. The new categories are:

Announcements / Blog - General website announcements, upgrades and anything else you should know from the staff of ArtWanted.

Art Contests - Several times a month we have art contests on our website. Here you will find all the latest contests and winners and be able to vote on the current contest.

Member Discussions - All discussion topics and conversations from our artist community members.

We think these changes will make it easier for our members to navigate and use the message boards.

2. E-MAIL RESPONSES

When you post a new message (or a reply) you will now see a new option to be e-mailed anytime someone posts a reply to the message thread. This new feature will now instantly update you via e-mail if someone has commented on your thread or a thread you are interested in.

This feature also saves you time, so you don’t have to keep coming back to the message boards to check to see if there was a reply posted.

3. EDITING PREVIOUS MESSAGES

You now have the ability to EDIT a post that you have made in the past. Go ahead, correct that typo or rephrase what you said to make it easier to read. Simply click on the EDIT link next to your posts and make your changes.

4. MESSAGE SORTING

As you view the summary of messages posts, you will see a new option (under the category list) to sort the messages. You can sort the messages by NEWEST POST or LATEST REPLY. This option allows you to see the message board topics how you prefer to see them and we will remember that setting when you come back.

5. CONTEST LAYOUT UPDATES

On the Art Contests page, we now highlight (in red) the contests that are open for entries and the contest that is accepting votes. This simple change will make it clearer to our members the status of each contest.

We also now display an image thumbnail of the winning entry on the contest page. This instantly tells the members that the contest has ended and a sample of the art you can see if you view all the contest entries.


We hope these new changes will encourage additional participation on the message boards by our members. Please continue to share your feedback with us on how the website can be better. Thanks!

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5 Comments

Yury Yanin 16 Sep 2016

OOOOOOOOPS!!!!! It is even more, then I hoped for and exactly what we need now! For instance, When writing my feedback, I thought about that "e-mail feature", but decided not to bother you with it, thinking "let them do just anything for a begginning"... and oops - it is nevertheless there! If it goes on like that, you are risking to make me too positive, while I am more interesting for you when being more negativ...

Yury Yanin 16 Sep 2016

Tried to edit the above post of mine. Denied. May be some bug...

Minor notes only:

It could be good if we could read a date when each reply was posted...

Spelling checker again.. Once staff already reolied that we did not need that... Now I am writing from another computer (not mine). It has a spell checker in the Mickrosoft office, WORD software, but I do not want to type first in the WORD and then copy it into here.. Lazy? Yes. Besides, staff has already replied that it is easy to download a free spell checker into my computer. Lazy again? Yes again... and still I think that some more convenience for lazy, old, dislecsic Russians couldn't be too bad for any body else...


ArtWanted.com Staff 16 Sep 2016

We are glad to hear that you like the changes we have made, even if we" risked making you too postive". Haha

We have fixed the edit error you received, so try it again.

The date of the last post will show next to the name on each reply. We do show relative date (ie 4 hours ago or 25 days ago) until 30 days have passed, then we show the actual date of the reply.

Thanks for the suggestions about the spell checker as well.

Yury Yanin 17 Sep 2016

It is above my hopes and my gratitude is beond any words (English or Russian)! Besides I am happy to see that now you have someone very much alive there in your staff.... at last. May be one day I will get acustomed to show my art on a very successful AW site, activity of its staff will not be a pleasant surprise for me any more, I will return back into my usual critical mood and suggest some more improvements... As for now, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!


ArtWanted.com Staff 19 Sep 2016

Sounds good Yury, we look forward to hearing your ways on how we can continue to make the site better and better.

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