Media notifications

yea agreed, how am i supposed to know if someone replied to a comment I had or posted on my thread. you seriously think we wanna have to write down all the things we posted or commented on and then look them up later so see if someone commented, posted, or rated it? NOTIFICATIONS!

inb4 this isnt facebook

there is a reason facebook is so big, it does a lot of things right. many other forums have notifications for things, and it is pretty handy, no reason for NS to not have them, minus the fact they rarely seem to implement anything that would be of actual use

Want a clue as to what isn't a good way to get us to do things?

Hey man -

TBH we couldn't agree with you more. Notifications and reply systems in comments are two things that we have had on our radar for a while. The primary reason that we haven't pushed anything out yet though is that both things are kind of tied to bigger issues.

Notification you see is the programming equivalent to an iceberg. YOu only want a tiny little notification, but the overhaul necessary to do it correctly is massive. Seems like an easy change on the surface, but there's an immense amount lacking on the back to make it happen. We have a couple of theories as to how to handle notification, and I have a feeling that this summer its going to be one of our larger projects to handle. If you start to get notified of everything happening on NS it would be totally overwhelming, so we have to come up with a really slick way of managing notifications.

The comment reply thing in of itself isn't that difficult, however our feelings are that the comments need a bit more of an overhaul than just the reply. Doing a full overhaul will allow us to really pimp out the comment system in the same amount of time it would take us to just add replying. So again, this will likely be an item we attack over the summer.

Overall there's a few important things to remember about development

-Facebook has literally billions of dollars to put into development. They do things really right because they have basically unlimited money, and don't even have to be profitable.

-Winter is a tricky time for us to add/fix because we get really wrapped up in handling bug fixes and server load. NS has almost doubled in traffic since last winter, and that amount of growth alone is a lot to handle. Additionally we have projects like the Nike Ski Chosen contest that we have to work on... and are pretty cool for you guys.

-We listen to absolutely every single complaint and suggestion you guys make. We write that stuff down, and build it into our plans. NS is shaped by what you want, so don't ever think what you're saying is falling on deaf ears

-NS lacks a lot of simple functionality that 'every other site' has. This is because its custom coded from scratch. NS also happens to do a ton of really awesome things that no other community site does. Its always a trade off when going custom over pre-packaged.

-The last two years most of our time went into overhauling media handling. This summer you're likely going to see a lot of changes come out of us pretty rapidly. We've got the core structure of the site where we want it, now we just need to tidy up a few loose ends, and code up some tiny missing pieces. Pace of development to the end user will feel like its on turbo.

I'm just quoting this because last past was long.


Very stoked to see what you guys pump out!


I've known for a while that NS is completely scratch code, and it's so awesome how you guys listen to the members.

Kinda what makes NS so addicting.



I do have another question, that isn't really thread worthy.

Could a .gif be on the splash page? Like an animated .gif?

i like this,    its so cool how much is going on beneath the surface. updates are always fun.
Newschoolers is a living thing!

qouting for thisness