No, I just smell like it. :P

Bad jokes aside, between a glut of overtime at work and a bunch of back of house stuff here at Weasyl, I've had little time for much else around here.

The good news is that a lot of the stuff I and others have been working on behind the scenes is getting close to bearing fruit! Since this stuff is viewable on GitHub as part of the open source project I don't need to be too secretive about it, although naturally nothing in this post should be construed as a promise, schedule, etc.

So just what is in the works (or recently completed) anyway?

(Note: This is a partial list, and doesn't include some things that aren't user-facing)

General

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#183 - Site update list and editing - deployed - In addition to the ability for administrators to edit site updates, charmander has included a list of all our previous site updates viewable by all users. This has allowed us to retire the Weasyl Tumblr account.

Tagging

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Whilst there's still deficiencies in the tagging system we need to address, we're taking initial steps to help make it harder to abuse community tagging and easier for staff to deal with any instances that may occur.

#136 - Add option to revoke tagging privileges - deployed - Administrators now have UI for revoking tagging privileges. The ability to do so isn't new, but we previously had to rely on operations staff to make the change under the hood.

#179 - Global and user restricted tags - not deployed yet - This combines two related features:

• The Weasyl directors can specify a list of tags that can only be added to submissions by the owner or staff
• Users may specify a list of tags that can only be added to their submissions by themselves or staff

This is probably the next thing we'll announce - we're currently testing this and finalising policy for it. The plan is for the global blacklist to only contain tags that are offensive or profane in nature and have little or no valid use for classifying content, with individual users able to blacklist terms they would prefer others not to use.

We're still shaking things out though, and we'll definitely be taking feedback when we announce it. Many thanks to one of our newer devs Kyra for the heavy lifting on this one.

Shiny Stuff

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#180 - Marketplace (Commission Search) - under development - This one is somewhat of a pet feature to me, and something I can see being disruptive in a good way.

This will allow users to search the commission information provided by artists. Users will be able to search for artists open for commissions by type, content (tags) and price, with currency conversion built-in. There's also some related changes to the commission information system that will allow artists to specify content they prefer to do (improves rank in search results) or will not do (excludes the artist from searches for those tags). Noxid may have had something to do with this...

Commission information searching addresses a major pet peeve of mine as a client - finding artists open for commissions through networking is tedious!

#93 - Ads - under development - A limited deployment of ads by community members. We will NOT be running any third party advertising, period.

The policy work for this is mostly done, but there's still testing and a couple of features to do before it's ready for production. I expect us to announce the details once we enter the final testing phase so that we can launch it with actual ad content, but there's no timeframe on that as yet. Props to charmander once again!

Admin

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Community & Ratings Guidelines - We're getting closer to getting an update out the door.

So we've got a whole bunch of stuff happening at once. No wonder I haven't had time to work on photos... and when it's all done, it will probably be time to do a mod recruitment cycle.

There really is no rest for the wicked!

~hendikins