My last website update has been a while, so I thought it was worth adding a few notes on some new features that are live now, and some which have been soft-launched in the past month or so you may have missed.
We've also just made live a few tweaks to the site search that we've been working on and I thought it was worth sharing with you all.
Excluding comments and reviews from search results
The default behavior for our site search is to include both comments and reviews as part of the search. This isn't too useful when searching for files and reviews because, for example, if you search 'British', you'll end up with results where somebody would ask for a British-version of the pack in the comments.
So starting from today, we no longer include comments and reviews when you search for files. This functionality has been deployed to all of the site search, so you can optionally use it for other content too, for example gallery images. You can also choose to revert to the old behavior for file searches by changing the exclusion options.
You can see an example of this in action and how it can be useful with a British-themed search here.
Wildcard searches
Our site search now properly supports wildcard searching. This functionality is not too useful for most content, but is useful for example in searching for phrases which are not separated by spaces.
You can see an example of this in action and how it can be useful in searching our Native Database here.
Featured and Trending pages
We now default to only showing one game in our featured and trending list -- mixing GTA V, GTA IV and Resources content didn't make much sense here! The game will be GTA V by default, but you can configure this by changing your default game on the main downloads page. You can also use the filters on the page itself to check out other categories.
Misc Downloads Changes
When uploading a file, you can sometimes lose track of the tab and end up closing it by accident. You'll now get a confirmation when closing the tab or window to make sure you don't waste time uploading content to LCPDFR.com. We have acknowledged some speed issues when uploading and hope to have a fix ready later soon.
File comments are now sortable by the newest comment. Depending on user feedback, we may make this the default behavior in the future.
The file field (used in 'Optimized for') no longer performs terribly and now actually works.
Fix some validation issues with LML install.xml contributions.
Fix some issues with the table on downloads category pages.
Fix an issue where file types didn't show in 'Inside the File'.
And later this year..
My focus recently has been to improve a lot of less user-visible features on the website that need a bit more love. For example, I've been putting a particular focus into our moderation tools and our search. Our moderation tools have not scaled to the current size of the community so this is a priority for us to streamline. I'm especially interested on improving our file approval process with a friendlier file approval flow that will be easier for users to see what's going on and easier for our moderators to work with. Hopefully we'll roll this out next month.
We are also working on re-working our file security scan and file upload process to prepare for an eventual move for files to an Amazon S3 compliant storage service.
Concerning further work on the site search, the improvement plan is for file search results to look and feel similar to how exploring files in their categories works now, including the ability to filter based on author-provided data just like the category view.
We're also hoping to feed our trending data and downloads data into the search to help provide more relevant suggestions.
I hope everyone is safe and well and that this year hopefully is a lot better than the last.
Cyan