what happened to worlds and gfx?

[deadlydiamond98]

Hey, just curious, but why are the worlds and gfx tabs no longer updated?

[Cedur]

I'm sorry to say that this was retired at the end of 2018, together with the monthly threads.

[Taycamgame]

Obviously remember you can still check the Episodes / Graphics subforums to find new worlds and gfx! They're just currently not being featured like Cedur said.
On that note, are there any plans to revisit these in the future?

[Cedur]

Can we get a featuring event at the end of 2019, for the whole year?

[PdizzleParker]

I'm pretty sure that they'll never be updated; most people just come to this site for the forums anyway. It would be pretty cool if we could still see popular ones there instead of digging through the worlds and graphics forums.

[Taycamgame]

Can we get a featuring event at the end of 2019, for the whole year?

Perhaps something similar in style to Level of the Month, except on a yearly basis.
It could be called "The SMBX Awards 2019" or something
The categories could be as follows:
- Episode of the year
- Project of the year (could be judged on which one looks best, has made most progress, etc.)
- Level of the year
- Creator of the year
- Graphics pack of the year
- Script of the year (maybe this one isn't as good as the others though)

This way, instead of having to decide on the best episodes / graphics every single month, it would be done once at the end of each year. It might take a bit of effort to gather everything made in the year together, but if perhaps a different person worked on each category, it might not take so long to sort out.

Even if this is too much to handle, I'd still like to see some sort of yearly recap. It was kind of a shame to see the monthly features stop, but yearly features seem like a great replacement that only have to be done once every 12 months.

[aero]

The monthly threads didn't really work, and featured content stopped with it. Right now we have the Forum Updates announcement that staff post to as things happen rather than keeping to a time period. There isn't any "let's save this for the month thread" or anything like that. When it comes to featured content, staff are more of a bottle neck. Anyone in the community is welcome to host awards for content as they please. If there's an "SMBX Awards of 2019" and things are going well for it, then I don't see why it couldn't be featured. The time constraint and staff bottleneck would just hold things back.

[Taycamgame]

The time constraint and staff bottleneck would just hold things back.

Then why aren't there staff members specifically for featuring content? Infact, afaik, there aren't many staff members around currently?

[aero]

Staff members are around for moderation.

[MECHDRAGON777]

I would not mind helping out with that, but I think someone else would have to host it. An awards ceremony sounds like a fabulous idea.

[cato]

I actually wanted it as well. First-time players going for SMBX would be going for the Episode and graphic. Have to show a good first-time impression, right?

[Emral]

Surely creating an exhaustive, automatable index of content would be more effective than selecting a few members to assume the role of a more caustic equivalent to level judges. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.

[Taycamgame]

Surely creating an exhaustive, automatable index of content would be more effective than selecting a few members to assume the role of a more caustic equivalent to level judges. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.

Does anyone here know how to successfully implement something like that though?
Considering it would probably take a while to create, I see no reason for a team to do the work while the automation bot is being produced.

(BTW, I noticed how that MM Bookmark page doesn't actually show the course IDs, which is a weird design decision IMO)

[Emral]

Surely creating an exhaustive, automatable index of content would be more effective than selecting a few members to assume the role of a more caustic equivalent to level judges. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.

Does anyone here know how to successfully implement something like that though?
Considering it would probably take a while to create, I see no reason for a team to do the work while the automation bot is being produced.

My point is it would be silly to implement the previously discussed idea because it would require more maintenance and give less useful results than developing an automated system. The idea of a group of "moderators" for these subjects determining the quality also seems much more easily disagreeable than having a five-star system any user can contribute to.

And anyone can learn web development in a few weeks.

[Taycamgame]

Surely creating an exhaustive, automatable index of content would be more effective than selecting a few members to assume the role of a more caustic equivalent to level judges. Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.

Does anyone here know how to successfully implement something like that though?
Considering it would probably take a while to create, I see no reason for a team to do the work while the automation bot is being produced.

My point is it would be silly to implement the previously discussed idea because it would require more maintenance and give less useful results than developing an automated system. The idea of a group of "moderators" for these subjects determining the quality also seems much more easily disagreeable than having a five-star system any user can contribute to.

And anyone can learn web development in a few weeks.

So it wouldn't be fully automated, as users would still need to give the stars. However, I agree that this is the kind of thing we'd need, and I think it'd be really useful for the SMBX community!

[Emral]

The automation part is the "finished content automatically gets uploaded to the database" instead of "5 arbitrary people pick one thing to feature every season"

[Cedur]

I would support a star system under two conditions.

1) You need at least one post to vote.
2) Votes can be tracked by staff and abusive votes can be removed.

[Taycamgame]

I would support a star system under two conditions.

1) You need at least one post to vote.
2) Votes can be tracked by staff and abusive votes can be removed.

As long as moderation / management of the system is easy, then I see it being a real push forward for the community and see no reason why this shouldn't be a thing, other than that it may take a while to initially implement and test. But once it gets going it should be a really smooth way to "feature" episodes. We could then either have the output update in real time or every so often.

[Emral]

My whole point was that the idea of "featuring" stuff in a community where one cannot even search for any existing content made for the engine. With an index, people would be able to find what they're looking for AND know its quality from the ratings without ANY need for moderator intervention (Cedur's idea of a post minimum requirement is good as it makes spamming ratings inconvenient) or arbitrary community picks. Highlighting an element for the heck of it shouldn't be the only sensible way for people to find it after half a year has passed. I feel like that aspect about episodes/scripts/graphics/levels on this forum is a much bigger problem than the discontinuation of monthly/seasonal features (a higher rate than the release schedule of decent-to-high quality content, but a lower rate than the release schedule of content in general).

[Taycamgame]

Then, perhaps it could be setup as the following:
- An index of all available episodes, levels, gfx packs etc.
- These can be rated from 1 to 5 stars
- The higher number of stars, the higher up the list it'll be
- Maybe there could be a featured section which doesn't require mods to decide themselves. On each episode etc., there could be a button or something which gives some sort of "upvote". The more upvotes something has, the more likely it is to be automatically featured that month. E.g. lets say I have an episode. If people upvote it enough, it'll make its way into the featured section. Albeit similar to the star concept, this would be a section which contains the top stuff (I came up with this idea mainly because multiple different episodes can have 5 stars).