Reorganizing Awards

[Divine]

While looking through some of my awards, (the few that I have) I was thinking that I would like to have some awards in different locations, such as having my Veteran award at number 4 instead of my recruiter of the month. Personally I don't like how high up donator/dedicated supporter awards are on the forums because it would overshadow some of the other awards I'm more proud of. I don't know if this is even possible but I thought it wouldn't hurt suggesting it. I'm sure this has been suggested a million times but it would be awesome to have.

~ Divine

 

[_MEGA]

Not sure if this has changed with updates to vBulletin, but in the past the answer to this kind of request has generally been along the lines of "while a neat idea, it's not practical". As I understand it, the awards are loaded in a certain order every single time a user loads a page. Because the awards for every user are going to be loaded in the same way/order each time, it means pages will fully load quicker than a page where where users are able to put there awards in custom slots. When each individual user is able to set the awards in a custom order, it will ultimately take pages longer to load. For example, I have over 100 awards and if I made them in a custom order as opposed to the "standard" order the awards load in, it will take longer to load pages. The more people and more awards that have to be loaded in a custom order, the longer things take.

Hopefully that made sense. I'm sure someone with a more technical background could probably explain it better, but that's how I understand it at least.

 

[Divine]

Not sure if this has changed with updates to vBulletin, but in the past the answer to this kind of request has generally been along the lines of "while a neat idea, it's not practical". As I understand it, the awards are loaded in a certain order every single time a user loads a page. Because the awards for every user are going to be loaded in the same way/order each time, it means pages will fully load quicker than a page where where users are able to put there awards in custom slots. When each individual user is able to set the awards in a custom order, it will ultimately take pages longer to load. For example, I have over 100 awards and if I made them in a custom order as opposed to the "standard" order the awards load in, it will take longer to load pages. The more people and more awards that have to be loaded in a custom order, the longer things take.

Hopefully that made sense. I'm sure someone with a more technical background could probably explain it better, but that's how I understand it at least.

_MEGA Yea it makes sense, unfortunate that it would lag the website, all well maybe it can be implemented at a later date. Thank you for the great informative response. (sorry for the late response)

 

[DanJK]

Although _MEGA brings up a solid point here, I would love to be able to maybe change the order of the Top 6 awards on our profile(As those are the ones that are visible easily on each post). I totally understand if doing that isn't practical but I feel like it would be less a load than ordering 30-60 awards, or maybe not depending on how things are done.

Personally I want my Event Coordinator ones from the past to show up over my donator awards but no one gets to see em

Awards are something people in our community really like, so I feel like if it's possible to do something like this it would be worth it.

 

[Simon]

_MEGA Yea it makes sense, unfortunate that it would lag the website, all well maybe it can be implemented at a later date. Thank you for the great informative response. (sorry for the late response)

Just some insight...

The plugins for awards uses a similar set up to how forum sections are set up, using what is called "Display Order". Basically you manually input the order. Generally this is done in increments of 10 so that if you add in anything down the road, it can be sorted as you want it. To actually shift awards around (and since we have so many of them) actually would take quite a chunk of time, just to input them all as new numbers, since you'd be moving stuff all over the place. Since we've added so many over the years, it isn't quite just a "change the number and go" task.

It looks sorta like this (This is how forum sections are shown in vbulletin's control panel):

Because of how the plugin works, unless we went to our own system, it's not exactly feasible to write anything that would get this done and make it accessible to users, using the current plugin.

I'm sure someone could pickup the project one day (After the many, many projects tech has taken on that effect day to day operations more) and do up a nice awards plugin. When we migrated from VB 3 to 4, I recall some custom work having to get done, since the awards plugin was older. That's about 2 years ago now. But like most things we use, it's all customized for the site and contains database entries that date back MANY years now.

I suspect donator and dedicated supporter were moved towards the top in order to promote people actually wanting to donate (its shiny!).

Anyways, there's just a little more of an idea behind it all. It would be a cool project eventually. But definitely sort of out of reach for now.

 

[Mayhem Death]

_MEGA and Simon hit it on the head pretty well. Maybe one day, but as of now it shall stay.