Well, hope everyone had a great holiday and a happy new year! The holiday contest is now over, so submissions will no longer be counted. I will be tallying up the results soon and let everyone know who the winners are. Thank you all for your submissions, we received a lot of new content this month :D
December is the month of giving, so I thought in the season of giving I'd offer up some prizes to my visitors. There will be three prize packages to give out, and the reward reflects the category of each.
The first prize will be for photo gallery submissions. Who ever submits the most images through the month of December will be awarded a CD set of all my photos I have in my collection. That's almost a gig and a half of pictures. This can be on CD or DVD, depending on preference.
The second prize will be the same idea, but for the video gallery. Who ever submits the most this month will receive my video collection. That's over 15gb of videos! Since its such a large amount, this one will only be offered in DVD format.
And lastly, the final prize goes to whoever is the most active in the forums. So get in there and chat, just don't spam the forums with one word messages or obvious other obvious spam. I withold the right to disqualify anyone who I feel is trying to cheat their way into a win. For this one I was a little stumped on what to offer, as nothing really went with forum posts well. So I decided for now I will offer a copy of both the video and gallery discs. I may change this if I can think of something better, but this will be the tentative prize for now.
After reviewing the movies section I decided to make some changes. First off, I reaized that even though I opened the link to all members I never actually set the permissions on the videos themselves, meaning you could not view them. So I fixed that issue, sorry for the oversight on that one.
I also realized the link to submit videos in the movies section was some what ambiguous, so I changed the link from "submit a link" to "submit a video" and added it to the main menu with the other submit options.
Also, I replaced all references of Movies with Videos. Since they're not full length movies, rather clips and music videos, it made more sense to call it that.
Other than that, I added some new videos that were submitted previously that I had not had the time to do.
I've been debating for a while what to do about the movies section. Originally it was only for members who had contributed, used as an incentive to get people to send more content. On some small level it worked, I now have a few members who regularly contribute images, and I'm quite happy about that. However it didn't create the explosion of incoming images that I had hoped for.
So I'm going to try something new. The entire section is now open to any registered member, however I may add some special videos of higher resolutions and make them available only to the contributors. I may reverse my decision later on down the road if I find that the amount of submitted content suffers, but I hope that it does not work out that way.
I encourage the super members to continue to contribute, your contributions are what keep this site alive when I am too busy with other projects to devote much time into it. We're now at 4500 images, and over 1300 of those are thanks to you guys -- keep up the good work!
Just logged and approved some submissions and after I was done I noticed that we had hit exactly 4,000 images! I still have well over a thousand to upload and tag myself, so I will be continuing to do that as time goes on. However I just wanted to thank everyone who helped us reach this milestone, as that number includes a lot of user submitted photos. So thank you to all who have contributed!
I fixed a couple bugs with the advanced gallery, the paging wasn't passing in the "sortby" item from the querystring causing it to not work. Also noticed that if you were on the forum the link wasn't traversing down a directory to where the file was located, so the link has been updated as well.
I spent half of last night hacking apart the photo gallery page and created a new version that instead of using folders it allows you to view all of the images either sorted by date added or the rating. So on the right bar where you see the Top Images and Recent Images look at the bottom of the panel for (view more). I'm also adding in the functionality to view albums by their dates as well, but I will leave that for another day.
I also spent a good chunk of time going through the pending submitted images and published another 100 of them or so. There's still a bunch in the queue but I will add those in later.
Just uploaded a few more albums. Also installed a simple captcha on the comments page so that it will hopefully stop getting spammed. Also added several videos.
Whew! What a night it's been, I've been hard at work the last few hours implementing several new features that were needed, and I'm very happy about how things turned out. There are three new panels available to all members, the recent comments panel, the recent photos panel, and the top photos panel. All of which are very handy utilities for keeping up to date with our recent media. I also tossed in a suggestions feature that I found, thought it'd be a good idea to open up the floor a little and see what I can do to improve the site.
I also wrote a new feature for my back end, an "approve all" button so now when I log in and find 100 new submissions I don't have to sit there for 2 hours doing it (and it happens a lot). Now if I could just write a mass submit script for videos like the one I found for images, I'd be set :D And speaking of videos...
*drumroll*
The videos section has been released! There isn't much content in it yet, but hopefully my Super Members can help me out with that. I have a stockpile of videos but not only do they have to be tagged, they have to be convert to FLV (which is the most tedious part). For now this is somewhat of a beta test for the videos section, as there's still some tweaks and such that need to be made. But I've worked out all the major kinks and decided it was time to get it out the door, as it's been in the works far too long. Enjoy!
Been working quite a bit behind the scenes the last week or two. I ditched the interstitial advertisements as they weren't working for some reason. I finished coding the functionality for hiding all advertisements from "Super Members." Also, "Super Members" will be pleased to hear that I worked a bunch more on the Movies module, went through the forums and added many of the Youtube links, I've also uploaded almost 10gb of videos now, but those wont be linked in until I either figure out how to automate the process (as there's lots of them) or take time to manually do it all.
Non Super Members should also be thrilled to hear that I might be opening the Movies module to them. I found a way to embed advertisements into the videos, so they will be able to watch them at the cost of putting up with the advertisements. I just need to figure out how to do this to videos that are already embedded through Youtube or MotionVideo and not just stuff hosted on my own servers.
I've also done some preliminary work on expanding PHP Fusion far beyond it's current limitations by allowing me to run many sites under one back end, each pertaining to a different topic. What I would like to do is expand on this site and turn it into a network, by inviting people to open up their own sites on their own fetishes and create their own communities. So if you're big on something else other than earrings, such as corsets, latex, gloves, eyes, etc and are interested in running your own site about it (free of charge) send me a PM and we'll discuss getting the ball rolling. At this time I'll only be taking on a few sites, but if it does well I will continue to take more on.
As you may have noticed certain sections, such as the gallery, now require you to be registered and logged in. This will hopefully encourage more visitors to join our community. I also promoted a couple of people to Super Members because of their contributions. I logged in on the weekend to see that proteus had uploaded almost 100 images. I also uploaded a few more albums while I was approving his submissions. Another tweak was done that will cause interstitial ads to show for non super members when viewing the full sized images. These can be shut off by being promoted, which once again requires some form of contribution -- a little goes a long way.
