Discussion Forum

Weeeeeeeeeee \o/

Shh you, go make us more coffee! :P

im so exsited!!!
:D:D:D

About what time tomorrow will it be finished? This is great :D

No idea, I'm currently 2.5 hours into the data conversion, Ian is working on bug fixes and redirecting the old pages to the new ones and Gen is resizing ALL the images so we don't need a bank loan to pay for the bandwidth charges. I'd say we'll launch roughly 10 minutes before we all fall asleep. :P

You mean I get 10 minutes to do what I want?! :o

Ooooooooh. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Sweeeeeeeet, can't wait guys. CAN I GET A HUZZAH?!

Not gonna lie, when I got redirected to this, my eyes went all big and I was like, "Yeeessssssss!!!" Very excited, sirs.

Well, many hours later and v3 is live, it's now 04:18 here! Please bear in mind this is a complete code re-write so we're expecting (many) bugs, we just need you guys to help us find them all!

We know there are some features missing, we know they're missing and we will be bringing them back but we wanted to get the core live and working properly before adding anything else.

Please do let us know if you find any problems, we'll do our best to get them fixed asap, hope you like what we've done with the place!

Forgot password does not work. I tried to login as my name, but says password is wrong. There is a Sure_Fire and wants to me to login as that name. Can't login and lost all my decks

Didn't have time to get forgot password page working I'm afraid, I'll try and get a rough one working in the morning, I've sent you a PM.

I really want to create an account and it will not allow me to do so. No matter what username I try to create with, it gives me an error that there can only be letters and numbers.

Fixed that issue now, MacSauce. Try again :)

Freaking love what you guys have done. Seriously well done =]

Three things though...

1) There's no apparent way to get to the forums from V3
2) There's no "friends list" (super minor complaint but eh)
3) The 'deck stack' picture thing is a liiiiittle finicky, especially with EDH decks and having the general in the SB.

Last but certainly not least though, before you guys address any of these things: get some well-deserved sleep =D

SWN, not certain if you saw it, but at the bottom of the screen there is a button for TCG Vault, WOW Vault, and then for Forums. If you saw it, and by "not apparent" you meant it needs to be more accessible, I agree--but I also agree that this is an incredibly well done and much needed change, and am enjoying going back and looking at all my old decks and how pretty they now look. :-D

Maybe Im just being dumb and missing something, but how are we supposed to get back to decks that we have commented on? Or see which of our decks have gotten comments recently? (comment history and inbox)

Without that and without even the friend/follower functionality, Im not really sure how to have a continuing dialog about a deck without having to bookmark them all in my browser.

Also, am I supposed to be getting to my own decks by pressing "settings" and then "decks"? It seems odd to have your own profile buried like that.

Lastly, is there a way to sort comments from first to last?

No I didn't see it, thanks for letting me know. And yeah, pretty much everything else is great. HUGE step forward for the site. I'm visiting family at the moment so can only use my phone, so when I get back and can really see this thing on my computer I think it will be a treat =]

Hi guys, Gary is sleeping still as I think he only got in bed 4 hours ago!!

Tal, you can click on your name at the top when you are logged in, this will take you to your profile page.

Friends - this is something they will be working on next, the old system was not up to scratch so they are still re-writing it. They want to make it easier to get information about when your decks get comments and when your comments are commented on. The old system didn't really do anything, other than let you "follow" a friend, but it didn't give you any information about it.

Never fear it's a complete work in progress, this isn't a launch it and leave it sort of project!!

This new website is looking great! Well done guys!

One thing I sorely miss though, is when you view a deck and you could see how many occurrences of mana symbols there are in the deck. And in the old version this was presented near the mana curve-chart, but now I cant seem to find it.

Is it possible for you to get it back? It really made building a mana base so much easier. :)

Edit:

I completely missed the tab "Deck Stats" ... Haha. Never mind this above. ^^,

[quote=surewhynot]
1) There's no apparent way to get to the forums from V3
2) There's no "friends list" (super minor complaint but eh)
3) The 'deck stack' picture thing is a liiiiittle finicky, especially with EDH decks and having the general in the SB.[/quote]

1) Link at the bottom, somebody else mentioned I think. Might move it later but at least there's a link for now!

2) Friends is on the list of "things to do very shortly after launching". All existing friend data is still in the database, it won't be lost!

3) Yeah, we made it, then I imported my EDH deck. Yeah. Suggestions? :P



[quote=Tal;36886]Maybe Im just being dumb and missing something, but how are we supposed to get back to decks that we have commented on? Or see which of our decks have gotten comments recently? (comment history and inbox)

Without that and without even the friend/follower functionality, Im not really sure how to have a continuing dialog about a deck without having to bookmark them all in my browser.

Also, am I supposed to be getting to my own decks by pressing "settings" and then "decks"? It seems odd to have your own profile buried like that.

Lastly, is there a way to sort comments from first to last?[/quote]

Notifications/Favourites/Activity Stream is on the same list of things to do soon. I simply didn't have time to get it done and I wanted v3 live!

You can click on your own username to get to your profile, I'm willing to take suggestions on how to improve this, I agree it's not very clear.

No way to change the order of the comments, is this something people want to do? I can add it to the list...

asdf0345i345, I'm not sure the stats page will have what you're looking for actually. The color breakdown shows the number of cards of each colour that you have in your deck but it does now show the mana symbol occurrence. I have an item on my list to check the stats page to make sure it's up to scratch and I've just added a note to remind me about mana symbol occurrence.

I found the "Color breakdown"-chart and its great that you thought of it. :)

Although I was kind of hoping it would work as the previous "Mana symbol occurrence" worked in that it showed a summery of all mana symbols per card, so if you had two blue cards with 3 blue mana on each, that would be presented as 6. But as "Color breakdown" seems to work today it doesnt take to account how many symbols there are, just how many cards of one color.

If there could be another chart like "Mana symbol occurence", that would be great I think. :)

Another small, minor thing: In the "Deck List" where all the cards are shown, if there is a 0 generic mana card, the "0" is presented in text, even though you have a image for 0 generic mana: http://www.mtgvault.com/images/mana/0.png

Edit:

Gary, didnt see your answer to my post before I posted this. ;) But thats great if you could fix another chart or change the way "Color breakdown" works at the moment!

[quote=asdf0345i345]Another small, minor thing: In the "Deck List" where all the cards are shown, if there is a 0 generic mana card, the "0" is presented in text, even though you have a image for 0 generic mana: http://www.mtgvault.com/images/mana/0.png[/quote]

That one is easy, I missed the zero in the conversion method, fixed! :)

Is "color breakdown" useful at all I wonder? To be honest with you, I've no idea why I changed it from symbols to colors only. We didn't have a chart before, only a table with stats in it I guess, but still... Anyway, I shall look into it for you!

[QUOTE=Gary]Is "color breakdown" useful at all I wonder? To be honest with you, I've no idea why I changed it from symbols to colors only. We didn't have a chart before, only a table with stats in it I guess, but still... Anyway, I shall look into it for you![/QUOTE]

The table with stats of the mana occurrence was one of the big benefits with MTG Vault in my opinion and it made mana building much, much easier for me.

In the sense of helping with mana base building, I don't really think "Color breakdown" is that useful unfortunately.

Say for example that you have 4 "Pariah" (1 white mana) and 4 "Leviathan" (4 blue mana) in a deck, "Color breakdown" would represent that as 50/50 white/blue which wouldn't give me much. To instead have a chart or table with stats show "4" white and "16" blue occurrences for the same example would be much more beneficial, at least for me. :)

good looking site but still no forum integration?? you might as well remove the forum because it's pretty much dead anyway. This was the opportunity to integrate deckbuilder/visualizer into something that functions as a discussion board. I don't get it. Writing a forum is dead simple so that can't be it, what you have now is what it's always been, randomness. At least split it up into categories like we did with the forum. And what's with that retarded comment system, it lacks any kind of useful functionality. If it was a forum with integrated deck builder you would have written something worth having online.

That wee link to the forum at the bottom of the page pretty much means the end of this board. All I can say is that I've tried to keep this place going by answering peoples questions as good as I could for years and now that the new site is here it's clear that this place is now officially in the exile zone.

It'll be nice when you get the notifications on there so i know who has commented back when i comment on there decks and vice versa =p

awesome! this site has helped me as a deck builder for a few yrs now and its just amazing to see it redesigned. hope yall get some rest this couldnt have been an easy transformation lol. keep it up guys and i tell everyone i know bout this place.:D

For the deck stack issue, maybe instead of the 'nudge up/down' thing you currently have, make a 'button' that says something like..."select as cover art".

Good to hear you guys have a plan for the friends list kind of thing. Can't wait to see it implemented.

Keep up the great work guys =]

[QUOTE=Seth]good looking site but still no forum integration?? you might as well remove the forum because it's pretty much dead anyway. This was the opportunity to integrate deckbuilder/visualizer into something that functions as a discussion board. I don't get it. Writing a forum is dead simple so that can't be it, what you have now is what it's always been, randomness. At least split it up into categories like we did with the forum. And what's with that retarded comment system, it lacks any kind of useful functionality. If it was a forum with integrated deck builder you would have written something worth having online.

That wee link to the forum at the bottom of the page pretty much means the end of this board. All I can say is that I've tried to keep this place going by answering peoples questions as good as I could for years and now that the new site is here it's clear that this place is now officially in the exile zone.[/QUOTE]


I hope the forums doesn't leave or become dead, I really like this place, I check it out every day.

[QUOTE=Gary]...
No way to change the order of the comments, is this something people want to do? I can add it to the list...[/QUOTE]

Its a cosmetic issue, so it may not be high on the list of priorities, but the current order does feel pretty disjointed if you are trying to read them.

To view the comments in order, you scroll down to the last left-aligned comment. Then you scroll down to the last reply to that comment and start reading the comments upward until you reach the original comment. Then you scroll up to the next left-aligned comment and repeat that process for any replies to that comment.

I dont suppose there is a way to eventually have the comment section for each deck set up in a similar format to a forum thread? Or would that be too complicated to implement?

[quote=Seth]good looking site but still no forum integration?? you might as well remove the forum because it's pretty much dead anyway. This was the opportunity to integrate deckbuilder/visualizer into something that functions as a discussion board. I don't get it. Writing a forum is dead simple so that can't be it, what you have now is what it's always been, randomness. At least split it up into categories like we did with the forum. And what's with that retarded comment system, it lacks any kind of useful functionality. If it was a forum with integrated deck builder you would have written something worth having online.

That wee link to the forum at the bottom of the page pretty much means the end of this board. All I can say is that I've tried to keep this place going by answering peoples questions as good as I could for years and now that the new site is here it's clear that this place is now officially in the exile zone.[/quote]

The new tagging system will allow us to split the site up into user-generated categories, the most popular deck tags can be made into sections of decks for specific types of player, for example we could make a a section "Red Aggro" or a section for "Modern" and you as a user would get to choose which of these sections you subscribe to / visit. The deck tags are a very powerful tool in my opinion.

The forums and the deck comments system have been around for roughly the same amount of time, we have 35,000 posts in the forum but we have 258,000 comments against decks. Deck comments ARE effectively a forum, you are able to have discussion on the things the site is here for; decks!

I know that the "retarded comment system" needs work and I want to have sections of the site dedicated to discussion only without the need for a deck at the front but we can't do everything at once, these things take time. I really do want to please everybody, but it's very difficult to do this sometimes and I can only go by the numbers to tell me where to spend my time and when you're talking 35k vs. a quarter of a million I hope you can see my thought process on the matter.

What do you feel the deck comments system lacks that this forum here offers? The type of site we have here is perfect for all discussion taking place on the site itself ala reddit, there's no need for a separate forum if the site is good enough to handle both jobs.

[QUOTE=Gary]
What do you feel the deck comments system lacks that this forum here offers? The type of site we have here is perfect for all discussion taking place on the site itself ala reddit, there's no need for a separate forum if the site is good enough to handle both jobs.[/QUOTE]



I'm really happy with the new V3, I'm definitely not complaining about that, Very good job on it =]

But i like these forums for general discussion on the decks more, It's easier to go threw and get across what you need. When you post a deck and leave it to people commenting on it, there are so many decks being made everyday (many of which I'm fairly certain they don't even care if they get a comment or not) that if you really need help on the deck you just made there is a good chance you won't get that help.

On the forums it's in categories all in a row on one page and If I have a question it almost always will get answered, If i need help on a specific deck and a specific part of the deck, even if i made it a long time ago and posted it on the vault a long time ago I will generally get that help.


I mostly just find that the forums are much easier to get help and a message across if needed. And I like how I can just talk about rulings, combos, specific cards, tournaments, ect.... without a deck even needed to spark it.

If I had a question on the rulings of a card for a specific situation, it will get answered usually for me by the next day by someone (usually seth or epsilon) which I doubt I could do on the V3 as efficiently.

But you said you were working on things still so I'm excited to see what else you have going for it.

And like I'm not complaining, because I really like the new V3, you guys did awesome =] I just like the forums and what it does for me too that the vault hasn't been able to do as effectively.

Great job! This is sooo much better than v2. I love the new comment system :) By the way, I'll be reporting bugs whenever I see them. I'm just going to report them all in the Island Image thread for now to save space, so make sure to check it out periodically.

Love the new look, very well done. Understanding you're still working on things, I have a couple questions/suggestions.

1) I just made a new deck. Previously, it wouldn't show up in public lists until I changed from "Work in Progress" to "Complete" (or something similar). How do I make my new deck public now, as I don't see that option, and the deck doesn't appear to show up in the new decks list?

2) Tagging your decks is a great idea, however, it seems like in addition to the free-form tagging that currently exists (which allows for typos and such), would it make sense to also populate a list of the most popular tags to choose from, similar to the old method? Might help avoid decks getting lost because someone typed "Aggor" instead of "Aggro" and so on...

3) I'd also second a desire to see the table of mana symbols that somebody else commented on earlier in this thread. It was nice to see when building that to help me keep my land selections balanced properly.

4) I don't understand Seth's complaint. Deck commenting is fine, and allows for discussions by the people who prefer doing it that way. And the forums are just another alternate method of doing the same, for the people who prefer doing it this way. Seems like having a choice is better? I would say that it's nice to have a list of decks in your profile that you've commented on, so it's easier to get back to them without trying to remember the deck name and having to search again.

5) I'm guessing this is already on your list, but do you plan to restore the Most Popular Decks listing that was previously the default home page of the site?

6) Last (for now), something I always wanted in the old site as well, is a way to filter decks based on format. When looking at any deck list view (unloved, most popular, active, etc), it would be nice to be able to filter on Standard, Modern, Classic, etc.

Keep up the great work! I love using this site.

Mitrian

Found the answer to #1. Clicking that little lock icon. I guess that's easy enough... once you know it's there!

Also, is there a way to change the deck's icon?

Hi Mitrian,

#1 and the answer to the deck icon is here: http://www.mtgvault.com/faq/ ! :) There's tonnes of stuff in there for you to read.

#2 - it is a possibility. For starters a lot of people aren't actually tagging their decks, so we need to address that as well :)

#3 We'll work on it!

#4 The old "Deck Comment History" will come back, just better. The old one was a bit ghetto as I quickly chucked it together, but guess it did it's job! Having the two different mediums works well. I do agree we need to incorporate the features of the forum (to an extent) into the site - where else would people ask simple questions? But this is an ongoing discussion between myself and Gary.

#5 We don't right now. At least, it won't be calculated in the same way. I quite like the idea of say a leaderboard page, which most likes, most comments etc etc but it needs to be thought out correctly.

#6 We do store legality against cards (which we need to update!), so the plan is to use that to work out what formats a deck is legal in. This could then be filtered by (and is accurate!)

Hope that helps for now :)

Love the way it looks guys, and I read through most of the comments and understand that many/all of the old features will be coming back in good time. Thanks for putting the work in to get it done. I miss the deck comments history/inbox, the upcoming decks and front page decks, but I'm sure you'll get it all back ASAP. No rush, coding is work.

1 - I'm also excited to have "friends" and I assume PMing will be available, Maybe we will have inboxes? It's hard to share personal info on here without it being entirely public, so I can't give out my e-mail or facebook/IM info to people I comment with.

Also, I really like how the "likes"/"comments" system has been revised, so now we can see how many people have literally clicked "like" on our decks, though it was kind of depressing to have my most popular decks drop from 100+ likes to somewhere between 10-30 likes, lol.

Second thing I'm a fan of is the new "tell us how to play it" section. Too often the detailed instructions I leave in my decks get overlooked and people leave redundant comments on issues I have already addressed because they overlooked some synergy in the deck.

Third thing I really like and came back to edit for is now I can see how many times each of my decks has been viewed! My zombie deck has been viewed over 26.5k times! WOW! :D Small suggestion, but in addition to the "likes" and "comments" summary on the "my decks" page, could you add the views? (The page that shows all my decks).

2 - Another BIG suggestion. For the search engine, enable searching decks by "likes" and "comments". I also want to be able to sort and see the most liked and commented decks of this/last week/month/year/all time. I want to be able to see want the most popular decks have been in the past, perhaps adding an optional "date created between" filter in the engine so (for example) I could also see what standard decks were most popular on the site in march of 2009. Along the same lines, add in a "sort by views" sorting option.

3 - Also, in addition to a "likes" button you could add a "played with/against it" button in order to see what decks actually get used by viewers and lend cred to commenters who have actually play tested a given deck. Maybe if you click the "played with/against" button, any comments you leave in the deck are highlighted somehow.

4 - Also, highlite the comments of the person who created the deck.

Anyway, those are all my suggestions, I'm sure it's ambitious but I thought now would be the time to put them out there.

Beowulf85
19 Decks, 288 Comments, 47 Reputation

I have one HUGE problem (as in, I'll use a different site) it is mostly cosmetic though, but it totally ruins my experience on the site: In the card search you can filter by expansion. This is good, but in the previous version it was sorted by Block, with each subsection in chronological order. This was insanely useful and made me love this site. :D

Currently it is an alphabetical list. :mad: How stupid. Before you simply could find things by knowing when they were released with all the core sets at the bottom. Think of it like this, you took all your magic cards threw them up in the air and then made piles. This is how I feel, I feel like I have to sort through all of the useless stuff just to find standard or modern. (you can no longer from just the drop down list see when modern ends, which means I have to check somewhere else)

If it has to be in the current form, can you at least make it an option in settings? Because I come here to find cards quickly, scrolling through the list makes me want to go to another site... and I am currently looking for that site right now! I love you guys. (especially you surewhynot) and I prefer it here. So please please change this tiny detail or make it a setting/option.

EDIT: I'd be fine if it could be alphabetical or chronological, Would be cool to be able to search and filter cards in a whole block too.

EDIT: The search used to auto complete and guess cards as I typed. Why was this feature removed? It makes it even harder. Hating it more.

EDIT: Can't even search decks nicely, going to google to search for specific deck archtypes is not ok.

Right... :)

BeoWulf:

Glad you love lots of the new features! We are indeed working on bringing back a lot of the old parts, but wanted to get the main deck building functionality working first :)

The friends system will hopefully be a proper friends system. Imagine say, Facebook? We'd love to get an activity stream, pm system etc.

Regarding the search, they have been requested, and I believe they are on Garys list of todo's! Hadn't thought about the date filter, but that'd be quite cool. I think the oldest deck is 2006!

#3 We'll have to think about that one. Nice idea though :)

#4. I like it. I'll get that added to our list.

Wysra:

I am going to look at this right now (the type filter). I wanted to add it in for launch, but as you can imagine, there was about 9 million different things to try and do :) Main reason we didn't do the old solution, was as you rightly pointed out, being able to search whole blocks would be a nice feature.

Autocomplete.. just completely forgot about that. Sorry. I'll look at getting it added!

Ian

Thanks for replying to my comments guys! :)

I don't feel a need to make a facebook clone, though if you are going in that direction then seeing friend's deck building/editing/commenting activity in a live feed might be interesting. What I'm mainly interested in is a PM/inbox feature so we can discreetly share contact info with people we meet.

Also, I know you are not sure how the new "most popular decks"/"leader board" should work, but I really think that, even if revised, it needs to be implemented again and should be a priority. My reasons:

1 - It encouraged a sense of competition.
2 - It got people commenting on top decks.
3 - It got people commenting on others decks in hopes of getting comments on their own decks.
4 - It gave people something new to look at every time they came to the site.
5 - It acted as a kind of filter so that people could see the most popular/commented decks without having to search for them.
6 - It instilled a sense of pride and community respect, and acted as a reward to good deck builders.

In fact, it's what initially drew me to this site and is why I have over 200 comments, though I'll agree that it needs to be revised and I think it was a very good move when you stopped comments from being worth "like"s. People often created fake decks and used them as some sort of a message board/thread and since they drew comments top decks that people have actually worked on would get bumped out of the way.

This would most often occur with deck threads based around:
a - Complaints
b - Compliments
c - Post your "x" deck here!

All of those were popular and could be done on these boards, but these boards don't see the same activity that the core site does. For this reason I would suggest adding a special area to the main site for those three activities.

Activity c (post your "x" deck here) could change weekly according to a public poll where people vote what kind of deck should be given its own private thread in the next week. This specific activity would also encourage people to get involved in the site and boost the site's social activity.

If you are not sure how you want to revise or implement the leader board, maybe a thread should be started discussing it? Many deck builders (such as myself) are very analytical and could help you to figure out the most effective way of making it run, I'm sure some of us could even come up with deck rating algorithm suggestions, lol.

If you do start a thread for it the thread should outline the specific problems you had with the old system and why you think it needed to be updated and revised, state your ideas for solutions, ask if anyone else had any problems, and if they have suggestions. After all, you want to do this right the first time. I'm told a good king surrounds himself with many wise men.

Been reading through this stuff and am glad to see you guys plan to implement basically all the things I was looking forward to (beyond what you've aready given us). The ONE thing I haven't seen brought up is in regards to the "Unloved" decks. First off, I freaking love this idea...it's now pretty much my homepage! The one thing is, I think a deck should become "loved" after it gets a certain amount of comments/likes/etc.

- searching: how do I find decks that are of use to me, like by format, or by listing MULTIPLE cards? The search seems very limited.

- Tags are nice, I like that

- how do I find decks I commented to, how do I follow up comments?

- to me it looks like the vault is still just a place to keep track of your own decks and that's it. It's not a place where people can interact. And with that many users thats a shame.

- As for the forum vs commenting system that has been the biggest and most important issue since the day I signed on, I've said this a long time ago before development of V3 started and the problem never adressed.

You cannot have both a commenting system and a totally seperated forum that isn't even integrated in the main page. Now with the link at the bottom 99% of new users will not even realize there is a forum. The forum has rich commenting functionality, the vault has not. The result, people will use the one on the vault because it's integrated even if it lacks functionality. That or they'll come to the forum, add a link to their deck and never come back to look if someone replied to their thread.

Everyone with some magic experience and there's been a bunch, that came to the board interested in finding a nice community HAVE LEFT. The forum is dead. The only section that people use is the questions section and I'm pretty much the only guy left who gives them answers. There was Epsilon but I think by now he got fed up with this crap forum as much as me and left. Why should guys like me who know the game in and out stick around? There's no interaction, there's just nothing to gain. I've been hoping over the years the situation would improve and with the upcomming V3 you guys would have handled the issue. Instead you made it worse. Well good luck with it because I was interested in a place where I can meet players, discuss ideas, discuss strategies etc... Instead I get pretty graphics and thousands of decks posted by kids totally new to the game who are only interested in their own decks. Maybe you guys call this:

cool deck
please check out my deck http://...

an interesting discussion but thats what you have created.

I had enough, cheers guys, I have no choice but to resign as moderator of all boards. There's no hope for this board left and the vault just isn't my thing. If I want a site to create decks I'll use tappedout.net or deckstats.net as they are just far better and offer far more in terms of deck analysis compared to the vault. The vault has no added value.

I just wanted to add on the search functions. You can actually search for multiple cards, but it was a little bit untested. If you select the "Card Name" radio button, then type say "[birds of paradise] [enduring ideal]", it will search for all decks with both cards.

It may be a little bit buggy thought :)

I just noticed, but if I leave a deck link in one of my comments it no longer directly links, which makes it more difficult to share your decks. Please remedy this. :)

This isn't a comment about the site or anything, I was just interested in how you guys created a website like this? Like what program or site did you use? haha I have no intent on making an mtg website, I like using this one too much, but I have always thought about making a website in general =p And I'm really impressed with all of this

If I'm not mistaken both Gary and Ian are php developers. If you want to learn about web development you would need to learn a programming language like php which is pretty popular or java or .Net (which is what I use professionally) + you need a firm grasp on HTML, JQuery and CSS and some other stuff like JSon and Ajax which you pick up as part of the former. It's a very steep learning curve these days though, its not something you just pick up without a very serious time investment.

Sorry, missed your question, Seth's reply notified me! I grew up learning PHP and MySQL, in fact v1 of MTG Vault was written in PHP but after my first job (PHP) got merged into another role I was forced down the .Net path and haven't been back since!

MTG Vault is currently running on a Windows 2008 Cloud Server, IIS 7.5, ASP.Net 4 (C#) and MSSQL 2008. v3 uses a LOT more JavaScript and jQuery than the previous versions and this enables us to speed everything up by doing a lot of things using AJAX to avoid page refreshes etc.

I am generally more focused on front-end (the pretty stuff) using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc, but I also do a lot of our database work. Ian works more on the in-between stuff, getting the pages working in the background and getting jQuery to talk to our code behind-the-scenes, he's also much better at fixing bugs than I am! We can both do everything if we need to but it's better to have focus. We work together in our day jobs too so we're pretty used to each other now and code can normally flow quite well.

If you want to build websites, start with HTML, you can't build a website without it. Once you've learnt the basics you can start bringing CSS in to style your HTML. I forced myself to learn using only notepad, no fancy programs to help me, no WYSIWYG editors, just notepad. I will never regret this decision, it helped me learn exactly what HTML elements exist and what they do, this is a valuable skill to me now.

You should give MVC 3 or 4 a spin, I just don't want to go back. I'm currently using Castle Windsor DI container for IOC with MVC 4 (razor and C#), HTML5, CSS3, Telerik Kendo Mvc extensions and SqlServer 2008 as project manager for all our webdevelopment. I love my current setup. If you're new to inversion of control you should read the book Dependency Injection published by Manning, it will change your carreer.

Wow, Alot of jargon I need to look into. Thanks for telling me about it =] I'll have to do some research now

[quote=Seth]You should give MVC 3 or 4 a spin, I just don't want to go back. I'm currently using Castle Windsor DI container for IOC with MVC 4 (razor and C#), HTML5, CSS3, Telerik Kendo Mvc extensions and SqlServer 2008 as project manager for all our webdevelopment. I love my current setup. If you're new to inversion of control you should read the book Dependency Injection published by Manning, it will change your carreer.[/quote]

I've been desperately wanting to give MVC a spin for a while now, just a case of finding the time. The DI stuff looks really interesting, not heard about it before, thanks for the tip! :)

Diggin the look of the new site, but a few things bother me. 1st off, the unloved decks page just keep growing and growing and tend to be random nonsense. also few people use the tags correctly, i would LOVE if people actually tagged what format their deck was. i have no interest in standard and sorting through 10 shitty standard decks tagged "tournament quality" before i find a single legacy or modern deck is frustrating. That's another thing, countless "tournament quality" decks that are just nonsense. like Seth was saying, this site seems like about 90 percent brand spankin' new players that don't care about much other than getting attention on their "awesome" decks.

One of the things we want to get updated and working is the card legality. We can then use this to work out what formats a deck is legal in, automatically. Few other quirks / things we need to sort first, but data is high up on the list!

Ian

[QUOTE=alleywayjack]Diggin the look of the new site, but a few things bother me. 1st off, the unloved decks page just keep growing and growing and tend to be random nonsense. also few people use the tags correctly, i would LOVE if people actually tagged what format their deck was. i have no interest in standard and sorting through 10 shitty standard decks tagged "tournament quality" before i find a single legacy or modern deck is frustrating. That's another thing, countless "tournament quality" decks that are just nonsense. like Seth was saying, this site seems like about 90 percent brand spankin' new players that don't care about much other than getting attention on their "awesome" decks.[/QUOTE]

See, that's why I think there should be something implemented where an "unloved" deck that gets...say, 10 comments is taken off the "unloved" list. I think it's safe to say once a deck has 10 comments, it's quite 'loved' in some way or another.

Unloved is a bit of an experiment tbh. Instead of comments (what happens if you make a deck with more than 10 comments unloved?), maybe it needs to be based on time, so it's only on there for x days, or maybe you can only make decks with x views unloved. Or something :P

I don't know if restricting unloved by flat views is a good way to go about it simply because someone could overhaul a deck and want to draw attention to it again to see what people think. Maybe if it gets x views or comments every time it is unloved, it gets taken off of the unloved board or gets moved over to a "loved" board and gets a "loved" tag?

You could also make a discrepancy between tagging a deck "tournament quality" and making it "unloved". Maybe decks labeled tournament quality shouldn't be able to be made unloved in order to make people think about if their deck genuinely is tournament quality?

Maybe in order for a deck to be considered tournament quality users would have to vote that it is actually tournament quality (5 votes gets the tag)? A deck builder could enter it in to a section of the site (much like the unloved section) for rating which would also serve to draw attention to the deck and get it off of the unloved board.

I actually really like the idea of the unloved board in principle and think that you could expand on it, probably re-using a lot of the same code. You could do the exact same thing for "multi-player", "tribal", "EDH", etc... Popular deck formats, which would allow people to find decks they are looking for faster by using tabs on the home page, and allow other to draw attention to their decks in a proper area of the site without simply flooding the unloved board.

Anyway, ideas, ideas. Hope you find a way to bring back "featured" decks soon.

I'm not sure, but I think my views on my deck are going up every time I reload the page and thought in might be counting every time I looked at it. I'm still adding cards to the deck, it's an EDH deck, it's private, and it already has 130 views.

Yeah, I guess a good way to do it is if an 'unloved' deck gets a certain number of comments and such it will take it off the unloved list. OOOOOOR you can only mark a deck as unloved if it hasn't gotten a comment or like in a certain number of days.

Just brainstorming here, but the problem is pretty apparent that the Unloved section, while an awesome idea (seriously, kinda my homepage now), needs a little touching up to make it true to its intention.

[QUOTE=Beowulf85]Maybe in order for a deck to be considered tournament quality users would have to vote that it is actually tournament quality (5 votes gets the tag)? A deck builder could enter it in to a section of the site (much like the unloved section) for rating which would also serve to draw attention to the deck and get it off of the unloved board.[/QUOTE]

And what prevents "I vote for you if you vote for me" situations? Also you must realize that most of members of the vault don't have the experience to judge the effectiveness of a deck in a real tournament meta. And even those that do can usually only judge certain formats. Take me for instance, I can tell you if you can take a deck to a legacy tournement and stand a chance or not but I know little to nothing about vintage, modern and standard tournaments. I used to be very familiar with standard but not anymore and as it changes drastically each rotation you really need to be part of the format.