Announcing New V-Features: Mentions/Replies and V-Mobile Site

We’ve been busy at work on some new features for the community. When we announced the last set of features, we got some great feedback which was incorporated into this release. Some of you may have already noticed the features as we rolled them out silently over the course of the last two weeks, but we felt it prudent to announce them officially, now that they appear to be reasonably stable.

Several members have expressed the desire to be able to be able to subscribe to a service which notifies them of responses to their posts. Because Velominati is a community where everyone’s voice contributes to the conversation, we ultimately decided that having a system that notified readers (either via email or rss feed) in this way would encourage myopic behavior focused on responses only to specific posts rather than the whole conversation.  This would ultimately fragment the conversation and diminish the sense of community here.

However, the point is well taken that it can become quite difficult to identify responses to a particular post – a member’s own post or anyone else’s, for that matter. In an effort to improve visibility, we added two views which will hopefully help readers follow specific threads: @Mentions and @Replies.

@Mentions:

The @Mentions view is accessible by clicking the @Mentions link displayed on each post.  This will open a view which shows all posts for the article that mention the posts’s author’s name.

The @Mentions link

The @Mentions view

@Replies

The @Replies view is accessible by clicking the @Replies link displayed on each post.  This will open a view similar to the @Mentions view, except this view only shows those posts which used the Reply or Quote link to respond to it.

The @Replies link

The @Replies view

V-Mobile Site:

Marko has been the most vocal about the need for a Mobile version of Velominati, as he regularly accesses it from him iPhone. He graciously stepped up as the leader for this effort and provided all the requirements and did the bulk of the testing for it. Turns out he was totally right; after doing the math, this was revealed:

mobile-specific site = way more awesome than regular sites

The Mobile site has essentially all the same content with all the same radness on the regular site (Rule and Lexicon quickviews, photo and YouTube viewers), but provided in a streamlined (and faster loading) view when loaded from a mobile phone (you have the option at the bottom of every page to switch to the regular version if you prefer that.)  All the features normally visible in the layout are available via the menu at the top of the page. Please let us know if you spot anything a muck with the site, or if anything your rely on is missing.

The V-Mobile site: (l-r) Home, Main Menu, Posts, Categories

The major outstanding feature requested by the community remains the direct message capability, and once we work out some privacy and philosophical issues around that concept, we’ll release something to support that as well.

As usual, your feedback is welcomed as we’d appreciate any input you have.  If you spot any problems or if a feature doesn’t work as you expect it to, just drop us a note and we’ll see what we can do to correct it, or explain to you why it’s your fault and precisely why you’re an idiot.

Cheers.