Major Community Upgrade (IPS 4.5)

Posted here are the full notes regarding our major community upgrade to IPS 4.5.  Please see the topic by @Sam for more information: https://www.lcpdfr.com/forums/topic/107683-welcome-to-the-new-lcpdfrcom/

Downloads: Easier than ever to get updates for files

The slightly confusing way of getting updates on files has been changed to a new button that allows you to just receive updates when a new version is available.

Site-wide: Changes to the 'Ignored Users' feature

One common complaint we often receive is the block/ignore feature is lacking.

We'll be making a few changes to that, including what I feel is the most user-facing, which will be the ability to control whether ignored users can comment on your files and gallery images. By default, this new option will be turned off to prevent us from exposing ignored lists inadvertently. You will be able to turn this on inside your 'Ignored Users' settings.

We hope that this will lead to less off-site drama making it to the website, and gives creators a little more additional control over their files.

We'll also be making adjustments so that you see less content from ignored users in feeds, and around the site, where possible.

Downloads: Featured and trending tabs are more useful

We've updated the 'Featured' and 'Trending' tabs of the downloads section to be a lot more useful.

Featured will now show the how long the file has been featured, Trending will now show the position the file is trending, and both will now be filterable by game. Both menus will now have better sorting options.

Downloads: New file version approvals revamp

Right now our approval and security check process for updated versions is a little bit confusing.

We'll be integrating our security check and manual approval process into a bit of a less of a confusing flow that is coming with the update to our downloads software.

When updating a file, the current state of the file is preserved, and changes are staged to the file.

After approval, or after the automated security check is successful, the file changes will be made, including adding any new files and any files which were deleted as part of the update. The file before the new version upload will still be available to download during this process unless you choose to manually hide the file.

Downloads: Automatic approval for trusted authors, stricter approvals for new users

At the start of the pandemic, the site experienced much heavier traffic. As part of this, the community started uploading new files to LCPDFR.com at a much higher rate. A lot of these submissions were from new authors that were not familiar with the rules of the website and the etiquette inside the GTA modding community. Due to staffing issues and the sheer volume of traffic, we chose to manually approval all files from new authors.
We'll be keeping a form of this manual approval going forward, and there will be three real-time account 'ratings' that will guide our new approval process.

• 'default' - This will be where accounts that do not hit an automatic criteria will be. Accounts with this rating will always have their files approved manually.
• 'autoconfirmed' - After a certain criteria (previous approved files, account age, etc) accounts will automatically score this rating. This rating means that the file will undergo our security check process and will be automatically approved if there are no issues.
• 'trusted' - For accounts which commonly run into issues with our security check system, or commonly submit script modifications, we will now have a trusted rating. This rating will be partially scored manually by management on application. Only accounts already reaching the autoconfirmed status will be eligible to apply. 

These ratings will not be public and will only be visible to the creator in the 'Creator Settings' area.

Downloads: Turning off comments and reviews

We will be allowing creators the choice to turn off comments on their files when they submit files. Reviews will still be possible, however the text of the reviews will only be visible to the author and the reviewer. The star rating will be public.

However, choosing not to engage with the community will come with some downsides.
Files with comments and reviews disabled:

• Will not trend
• Will not be recommended in the 'Users who also downloaded' feeds

For script modifications and modifications with an involved installation process, linking to a dedicated support topic on LCPDFR.com is required.
It won't be possible to change this once a file has been submitted.

This is a bit of an experiment, and we'll see how this goes. Feedback will be monitored and we'll constantly keep this new feature under review.

A full changelog of all the changes is available below.

Please let us know what you think by commenting in the topic here: 

Thank you,

Cyan