Ideas for the Abime Websites

[CodyJarrett]

Which features do you most like and dislike on the various Abime websites?

• English Amiga Board (EAB)
• Hall of Light (HOL)
• Amiga Magazine Rack (AMR)
• Amiga Lore
• Amiga Games That Weren't (aGTW)
• Amiga Point of View (APoV)

Are there any ideas that you'd like to see on these sites?

[Nosferax]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

Which features do you most like and dislike on the various Abime websites?

• English Amiga Board (EAB)
• Hall of Light (HOL)
• Amiga Magazine Rack (AMR)
• Amiga Lore
• Amiga Games That Weren't (aGTW)
• Amiga Point of View (APoV)

Are there any ideas that you'd like to see on these sites?

Amiga Magazine Rack (AMR):

- Maybe add a pdf version of the scanned page for easier reading on tablet during commuting

[ransom1122]

Sorry I have to say those annoying watermarks on every hol screenshot.

That's it moving on now. .

[Thalion]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

Amiga Magazine Rack (AMR):

- Maybe add a pdf version of the scanned page for easier reading on tablet during commuting

You have my vote.

I love the HOL search button on EAB, maybe an AMR search can be added?

[Leffmann]

Something I'd like to see on EAB is an improved HOL tag, where it automatically pulls the name from the HOL database, instead of inserting "HOL Database (ID=123)". Even better would be if you could just tag the game name and have it resolve the link for you, so you don't have to browse over to HOL in the middle of posting on EAB, but that takes a bit more work of course.

[DH]

Originally Posted by Thalion

You have my vote.

I love the HOL search button on EAB, maybe an AMR search can be added?

+1 with that suggestion

How about adding the abime sites, on the forum, to a drop down menu on the Navbar like Amiga Lore (without the GFX)?

[Gzegzolka]

EAB - for me it's perfect, I would change nothing here
- I love button "Today's Post" it's easy to check what's going on here
- I like easy image upload and option to quick reply
HOL - near perfection
- maybe add additional sub page "Controls" that would describe button config for games. One day I should try to upload my screen-shots for some games that do not have them. - it would be very cool if there was more additional information about differences in ECS/AGA/CD32 versions.
AMR - design is good but limitations are bad
- some kind of "donate and increase page views" option would be nice. I too often see message about 200 pages I have already seen.
- add missing issues of magazines. Some time ago I point where to find few missing Amiga CD32 Gamer issues. Download to pdf would be cool option.
aGTW - design is good, but page need update, it was not touched for ages.
APoV - also cool part of EAB, it would be awesome if there were new issue
Amiga Lore - design is too much complicated for me and page was not updated so I find it useless. Update it with stuff from Codetapper's web page http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/ and stuff from https://amigueros.wordpress.com/ Amiga Discovery got some cool information and he dig some nice game demos from time to time.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

Amiga Magazine Rack (AMR):

- Maybe add a pdf version of the scanned page for easier reading on tablet during commuting

Someone asked for that a while ago. My response was "send me a list of all the pages on AMR with the links to the PDFs and I will add it" and guess what? Nothing after that. It's always a case of "I want this, I want that" but whenever we ask the person to do the work, they shut up and disappear.

The offer is still open. If someone can find all the PDF links, I can add them. But I'm not going to do the tedious work when I just want to lookup individual pages most of the time.

The 200 page limit is a pain I admit, I would like to see the end of that. Ideally I would like some kind of "verify that you're a human" system that helps build up the AMR data, a bit like Google did. Perhaps you get shown a random page and have to say whether it's a game advert, editorial page, review, what game is shown etc. And it remembers the answer. When it finds duplicates (asking several different people the same thing) then it adds it to the database. And we'd then slowly build up indexes of all game ads in the magazines and other stuff that is missing.

[Amiga1992]

I still don't understand what Amiga Lore is.
The website itself has way too much information on te hfrontpage and I cannot make out of it what the hell is it about or what am I supposed to do with it.
Also AGTW is somehow part of it and again, I am puzzled as to why or how and how it works.
Sorry for being an idiot, just my opinion!

[Nosferax]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Someone asked for that a while ago. My response was "send me a list of all the pages on AMR with the links to the PDFs and I will add it" and guess what? Nothing after that. It's always a case of "I want this, I want that" but whenever we ask the person to do the work, they shut up and disappear.

The offer is still open. If someone can find all the PDF links, I can add them. But I'm not going to do the tedious work when I just want to lookup individual pages most of the time.

The 200 page limit is a pain I admit, I would like to see the end of that. Ideally I would like some kind of "verify that you're a human" system that helps build up the AMR data, a bit like Google did. Perhaps you get shown a random page and have to say whether it's a game advert, editorial page, review, what game is shown etc. And it remembers the answer. When it finds duplicates (asking several different people the same thing) then it adds it to the database. And we'd then slowly build up indexes of all game ads in the magazines and other stuff that is missing.

Presently there isn't any PDF... Every page is an individual scan. What I'm saying is someone should regroup them in a single file that can be downloaded to be read offline.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by Nosferax

Presently there isn't any PDF... Every page is an individual scan. What I'm saying is someone should regroup them in a single file that can be downloaded to be read offline.

Are you volunteering for the job?

[CodyJarrett]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Are you volunteering for the job?

I think that it would have to be an automatic PDF generation process.

[CodyJarrett]

Originally Posted by Akira

I still don't understand what Amiga Lore is.
The website itself has way too much information on te hfrontpage and I cannot make out of it what the hell is it about or what am I supposed to do with it.
Also AGTW is somehow part of it and again, I am puzzled as to why or how and how it works.
Sorry for being an idiot, just my opinion!

Where the HOL deals with objective information, Lore deals with the subjective side of things e.g. game ratings, comments, reviews, lists, interviews and articles. The reason that it wasn't added to the HOL was that there were some objections to overloading the HOL with extra features and also that HOL development had ground to a halt.

It is also intended to be a portal to the various Abime websites. It replaced an existing portal page which nobody visited. I also think that some visitors go directly to individual sites without knowing about the others and that the Abime sites could be more unified.

The reason that aGTW (and APoV) was included in Lore was to start to bring some of the sites together. aGTW also uses key Lore features such as interviews and articles.

Something needs to be done with Lore and I agree with the points you make. It needs to be rebuilt and reorganised (or replaced).

[Gzegzolka]

Yes, I do not use Lore web site, I know where to go directly if I'm searching for some information.

Also some links to missing Amiga CD32 Gamer issues I find in net:
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/am...cd32-gamer.htm
https://archive.org/details/amigacd3...rt=titleSorter
I still can not find issue 2, 21 and 22

[Thalion]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Are you volunteering for the job?

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

I think that it would have to be an automatic PDF generation process.

If you can give me access to the pages on AMR i can assemble an PDF out of them. So yes i volunteer for the job. But if would need to download the pages manually it would take too long is could only do 200 pages. So if it is possible to give me access i'll do it.
If you give me the job we can discuss details in private later

[BuZz]

I dislike the adverts on this site, the watermarked images on hol, and the download limits on amr (especially since I have a full amr mirror which could be used if there are bandwidth issues).

I like the useful information provided though and the projects in general.

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Are you volunteering for the job?

I will volunteer - I should be able to generate pdfs from the data on my mirror. I can have a go anyway.

[Steve]

Personally I would like to see higher resolution scans for the pages on AMR. Most of the scans are far too difficult to read and take quite a lot of strain to read the small text - and I have good eyesight. I think minimum should be 300dpi.

[BuZz]

A quick conversion using imagemagick of some amiga format from amr - http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/amr/ (150dpi)

[Thalion]

There is another option for having PDFs available. I could use the very good quality versions from the TOSEC collection. I have them all so what is available could be used the rest can still be taken from AMR.

[quahappy]

HOL I think is fantastic in it's current form. The only issue I would raise is the page limit. Come close many times! A suggestion I have which I don't know is doable or not: Cross-linking EAB members to HOL. So if you're logged into EAB, you're also "logged" into HOL and you won't face page limits. If you're a guest, then page limit would still apply.

No faults with good old EAB. As a supporter I certainly don't find adverts intrusive at all.

AMR - No issues with this one and I'm a regular user. Easy to navigate and the layout is spot on.

The remainder (Amiga Lore, aGTW and aPoV) I would be inclined to agree that they are "cluttered".

Hope the above helps.