[First filed: Dec 7, 2010 @ 0:17]
If you’re reading this post and wondering ‘what the hell happened to RiotACT since yesterday’ then welcome to RiotACT’s 4th incarnation, where we change site skins almost as often as Google’s logo.
The version we you’re seeing now has come about due to the massive growth we’ve had over the past two years. Back on March 14 2008 when we introduced the previous version RiotACT was getting an average of 27,000 unique visitors a month. Roll forward to november 2010 and you all contributed to a number 155,754 unique visitors. What this has meant, mostly for johnboy is a huge increase in the number of comments and contributions from you lot, our readers. In the latter case its meant that much of the great content that’s been submitted we haven’t been able to run as the old format didn’t really support it.
In this version we’ve finally gotten around to giving ourselves a catchy logo, changed the look and feel of the homepage to a magazine style, predominately to allow us to run more content and made a few other tweaks to improve (we hope) usability.
With the exception of the homepage much of the site is still the same although it might look slightly different to fit in with the new theme. Rest assured that the underlying fundamentals of RiotACT haven’t changed. We’ll still be running content with local relevance, you’ll still be able to submit your articles and you’ll still be able to engage in discussion on those issues, convincing your fellow Canberran’s and onlookers to your point of view.
Over the next few days I’ll be posting some additional articles on each of the new features and the changes that have been made, but for now I’ll cover off a few features on the homepage
Firstly it looks different. You can now log in using your email address OR RiotACT username. The grey bar at the top of the page also contains a drop down menu containing the FAQ, Registration details, contact an admin, and submit a story links.
We’ve introduced a change to the layout to enable Riot to cover more stories. There are more categories of content, and a current issues section where Johnboy will be covering hot topics. You’ll also notice that we’ve condensed full articles on the homepage to excerpts to let you skim over the content that isn’t relevant to your interests..
For premium members we’ve introduced a heap of goodies. Private mail, friends, blacklists, new comment flags and the ability to edit your own comments unless someone else has replied, favourite categories, and your own avatar. To check these out click on register at the grey bar at the top or get premium membership in the sidebar to the right. I’ll cover those in more detail in the next few days, but at cheaper than coffee and a bit of cake its definitely worth getting for the exclusive members only competition if not the ability to blacklist the commenters you find most annoying.
For now, knock yourselves out. The biggest issue on the last release was the amount of white space between comments, so while we’ve made changes here we’re well aware that we can’t please everyone. Flame away 🙂
Jazz
UPDATE: And we’ll just have another go at this after a bit more work.
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