[admin]

We're very excited to introduce a set of features we have been developing for a while now, and we need your feedback and bug reports so we can continue to make it better! Together they make up "Dashboard" which will become the central place for the majority of user activity on CGHUB. This is one of the biggest updates to the site since we launched a little under 2 years ago, we hope you guys like the updates!

Before Dashboard, different elements were scattered about the site and it wasn't always easy to find what you were looking for. Dashboard attempts to solve these issues by streamlining the flow of information that people use on a daily basis.

Upload Pages Overhaul
We have overhauled the upload pages, simplified them, re-formatted the layouts so they are more clear and easy to use. Under Dashboard there is now an "Upload" button which, once pressed, will bring up all the upload options on the site (Image upload, Tool upload, Blog upload, and Job upload).

Dashboard Home page
The Dashboard Home view page offers the user an "at a glance" view of recent activity to save time and effort of having to check multiple pages to gather information.

This page is broken down into 4 sections:

My Comments - The 10 most recent comments on your profile and images

My Messages - Your 10 most recent private messages

My Updates - Your 10 most recent updates from users you are following

My Posted Comments - The 10 most recent comments you have made on CGHUB.com

My Updates, My Subscriptions, My Messages integration
These sections have all been brought together into Dashboard so that users can quickly move between updates from users they are following, to managing their subscriptions to images, users, blogs, etc.

Upload Enhancements
We have revamped the upload page with a few cool time saving features. You'll notice these the next time you upload an image or tool.

Cleaner layout enhancements
We have made the upload pages cleaner and better formatted for quick and easy uploads. Changing between the sections is seamless and should make it much easier for users to upload multiple items.

Copy these settings when I add another image
This feature should greatly reduce the amount of time users spend entering information on the items they upload. For example, if you want to upload a group of sketches that all have the same information, you can click "Copy these settings when I add another image" and then click "Save and Add Another" and it will remember the information you put in the last image, and you can quickly adjust the name or other info that may be slightly different from your last upload. A small feature but a big time saver!

My Comments
On the Dashboard Home view, this is a new feature which will be expanded on in the future (you will be able to "View all" and see all comments made on your profile and items). A new feature here is the ability to see if you have replied to new comments made for you.

My Posted Comments
On the Dashboard Home view, this section allows you to see the recent comments you have made throughout the site.

Gallery Image Enhancements & Speed Improvements
Unrelated to Dashboard, we are also in the process of optimizing gallery images. In our test cases we have been able to reduce load time and file size by about half while keep the same quality, so browsing the site should become much faster as we get through all the images in the gallery. We are currently about 1/3 of the way through uploading the optimized images. You can get a taste of this improved speed by browsing one of the galleries that has been processed: http://cghub.com/images/view/439/

Nav bar and home page space reduction
We have reduced the vertical height of the nav bar by about 30% and shaved off some padding on the main page between the nav bar and the banner and editor's picks row of images so that there is less wasted space. The beta tag has finally been dropped!


We want to hear your feedback, what do you think about these new features? Run into bugs or have ideas for how we can make it better? Let us know!

At the time of posting there is a known bug where My Messages and My Posted Comments are displaying oldest first, this will be fixed in the next 24 hrs. to show newest first.

Upcoming upgrades
Skins (Dark UI)

[Edrice]

There's no dashboard button when on the forums.

[walrus]

That's a very cool feature! I like it so far... haven't tried it out to upload anything, but it's a nice way to navigate and check updates!

Unlike Edrice above, I still have a 'Dashboard' button up in the upper right of the UI even when I'm on the forums. But I did find it odd that the dashboard included recent comments on art and blogs but not on forums. Nowhere does it show that just yesterday (or right now!) I made a comment on someone's forum post and someone has since responded. It seems like that should be part of the dashboard, and would be a welcome addition. (I don't mean to sound ungrateful for what the you've done with the dashboard, just surprised that it doesn't cover all of the site.

Secondly, I found the wording a little strange to have every post say "you just posted this comment" or someone "just posted on your image," particularly when said comment was made a month or two ago. Just implies that something happened very recently - maybe you could just use that word when it's an event that has happened in the last day or since you've last been to the dashboard. I checked and that wasn't the case, but maybe if I log out and log back in, the "justs" will be gone.

But overall - great tool, I can see it being really helpful! Thanks!

[Edrice]

It's fixed now, I have the dashboard link everywhere I've been.

[mjasnowski]

Looks pretty cool, I noticed under "My Comments" it indicates I have not responded to a comment when I have.

[admin]

But I did find it odd that the dashboard included recent comments on art and blogs but not on forums. Nowhere does it show that just yesterday (or right now!) I made a comment on someone's forum post and someone has since responded. It seems like that should be part of the dashboard, and would be a welcome addition. (I don't mean to sound ungrateful for what the you've done with the dashboard, just surprised that it doesn't cover all of the site.

Secondly, I found the wording a little strange to have every post say "you just posted this comment" or someone "just posted on your image," particularly when said comment was made a month or two ago. Just implies that something happened very recently - maybe you could just use that word when it's an event that has happened in the last day or since you've last been to the dashboard. I checked and that wasn't the case, but maybe if I log out and log back in, the "justs" will be gone.

Thanks for you input walrus, you're right about the forum posts, they should be listed in the comments as well. We will look into the feasibility of doing this, here are some reasons why it is more challenging than it sounds:

There is a more complicated issue with the forum being a separate 3rd party software product (vBulletin) which makes this kind of integration much more difficult (but not impossible). It's something we will investigate, but replacing vBulletin with a custom coded forum is in the future and will make it much easier to track these kind of events.

For now there is a distinction between comments (which are what are made on everything but the forum posts) and forum posts. Hopefully in the near future we will be able to bring everything into one unified package.

Your comment on "just posted" makes sense, maybe we can remove the "just" for anything that wasn't posted on the current day? So anything 24 hrs or older won't have "just" in the line? Alternatively we could highlight items where were posted in the last 24 hrs and remove "just" altogether.

[walrus]

Ah, I can see why its not as easy as it sounds - the catch of working with an outside forum provider (but it does generally beat writing your own forum admin app from scratch! ) Oh well, someday, maybe integrating the two will be more feasible.

As for showing newly-updated comments, either "just" or color would work. Color or a green icon like you use in the forums would show more at a glance than the word "just," although both could work. Personally, I get confused a bit on the forums because a large green square means new updates to threads but all teh rest of the posts have small green squares... so it becomes size telling you what's been updated, not color. But if the only place you used green on the dashboard was for new posts and you kept it consistent like that, it could work quite well.

[AimBiZ]

I like this new feature so far. It's exciting to see the site develop. Keep up the good work!