The New MacScene

Niemann on Tuesday, 15 December 2009. Posted in News

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As many of you know, MacScene v9.0 has crashed.  Some sort of technical error with our hosting service has caused the database to become corrupted, and our frequent requests for a weekly backup (a service we pay for) have gone unfulfilled.  Most notably the database table containing all of the posts made over the past two years of MacScene v9.0 is lost.  This put us in a bit of a jam.

 I have not been active with MacScene since I developed the latest incarnation of site a number of years ago, however my company (which spawned from Emuscene) has continued doing web development.  In fact most of the people I have worked with and who have done work for me were members of the MacScene community.  This new site is built on the software my company uses to rapidly develop social networking sites, and it's based (at least in part) on the work done on MacScene.  It seemed only fitting that we transfer MacScene to a new server and use this software to create a new site.

If you were posting news on the previous incarnation of MacScene, or if you're interested in learning how to post on our new system; let me know. 

There are a lot of new features in this site, and a lot of things that have been disabled for now.  I have to admit my own ignorance in how the MacScene community has grown over the years, and I hope that this site will (sooner rather than later) fulfill the needs of the community and help it grow.  But I would like to hear feedback from the community.  What should the focus be?  Should we stay devoted solely to emulation on the Mac; or have we continued to evolve to simply be a video game-centric group of Mac users?  Do we need photo and video sharing?  Is the live chat (try setting up an account and logging in) useful or creepy?  Should we have friend/buddy lists?  I want to hear what you want before I continue developing any aspects of the site.

Read more to find a breakdown of some of the new features included initially.

Live Chat:

 

Users who are logged in will have access to a facebook-like chat system.  For the time being any user who is logged in will see any others in their buddy list.  Users can also create chatrooms.

New Content Systems:

Admins now have access to a far more powerful rich-text editing content management system.  Our old systems relied on phpBB3 which had many shortcomings, including the need to spend a lot of time perfecting the format of news posts.  Our new system makes it easier for Admins and Editors to post news.  Members can also post comments and rate articles just like the most popular sites on the web.

New Polling Center:

The polling center is far more efficient and less likely to be hacked, and has far more customizable attributes than before.  We also have a new flash-based pie graph for showing the results.

Facebook Connect:

Instead of registering specifically for MacScene, you can use your facebook account to login.  While you can still maintain various aspects of your MacScene profile directly within the site, you will be able to log in using just your facebook username and password.  Also, if you update you avatar on facebook, MacScene will automatically pick up your changes.

Points:

Built into nearly every action on the site is access to a points system.  These points are assigned for actions (such as voting in poll, posting a comment to an article, responding in the forums, or updating your avatar) and are available for all to see.

Member Map:

This is a flash-based map showing the locations of the members of the community.  Right now we simply display a state map of the United States, although if the community proves to be more geographically diverse it can be updated to be a map of the world.

Newsfeeds:

If you have some ideas for sites we can post RSS feeds from on our main page, let me know.

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