I really like the feel / idea of this site, inasmuch as i can see. Please don't take the following as mindless bashing.bare in mind, the complaint/suggestions found below are relative; existing in comparison to every major mugen/mod sharing community i have been familiar with (not trying to step in with a fantasy or bizarre personal preference).Here is my feedback/argument:what is up with the lack of clarity on the homepage? it would seem pretty standard (given the site's function, at least in part) to organize homepage access to content something like this: CHARACTERS // STAGES // LIFEBARS // SCREENPACKS // OTHER as large, obvious links, with logical subsections/ an obvious search bar pertaining to selected filters within. *I genuinely hate pointing out something negative (because i love the impression i get from this site) but I can't honestly ignore this (without at least pointing it out). I mean...it seems to lack functionality that doesn't need to be lacking. In the case of your search / catergory setup, it's confusing and made for a pretty bad first attempt to access content.* pretend you're a newcomer to this site who has a passing familiarity with mugen; you want to see the MVC-styled Ryu available. where do you go? when i typed 'ryu mvc' or 'mvc ryu' in 'Search this board only' under 'Your Releases' [weird title by the way] with the blue 'character' filter on the same page selected, the results were a mess. I mean, do this yourself. Do you honestly think this is an effective way to organize things? You already have posts marked with useful tags (CHARACTER/STAGE/etc). where is the obvious search bar--the one that lets me go to the correct section and search the TITLES of the posts within? I apologize if i sound ranty, but this is a glaring problem.
your problem stems from the fact that youre expecting dedicated mugen archive functionality from the search feature of a forum. search algorithms for SMF forums have long been pretty unreliable. they were created without this sort of thing in mind, after all. they don't mesh well at all with the adjustments valodim slapped over it- ie. being able to filter by category. you can sort stuff by character/stage/etc but in the end its still pulling from the same flawed search functionality that services most smf message boards.this also ties into a larger issue- this is a discussion forum, and was never supposed to be a warehouse for links to specific content. we only recently started genuine archival projects, but these are really just directories to links that we don't maintain (unless we are the authors of said content.)so i get what you mean, but you're viewing this forum more as an archive for "accessing content" (in your own words) than a discussion space, which is not what it was intended for and not what it can really achieve sadly (as the forum's admin is MIA)maybe in the future, if the forum migrates, we can see more direct archival and organization of content. but as it stands, this is just a place for discussion.
I take your point. Your emphasis on this site's intended purpose changes the way I see things. My original complaint did bare in mind examples of forum-based sharing (done more straightforwardly, as I saw it), but I cannot think of one whose primary function was not content exchange....hmm.1 (odd) example comes to mind: https://marvelmods.com/forum/index.php in the past, there was much more discussion than anything to actually download here, but it was always managed in a way that made it easy to find/access what was added. I think I was coming from a place of "if you wanna share stuff via forum posts, why not do it like this?" [a flawed perspective in light of your response]The only suggestion I would strongly reiterate is to implement 1 thing: the ability to search posts by their title. If this is doable, I think it would be of tremendous value.Thank you very much for reading my feedback and for your considerate response. P.S. consider that 'Search by Title' function (i might be imagining it wrongly, but it would seem a deeply useful feature, even if nothing else changes).
