Nerf NOW!! is posed to receive a feature update for end users (that means you) soon, and I want to make sure all bugs are ironed out before rolling these changes to the main server. You see, I’m a very lazy programmer, so instead of properly testing everything, I’m going to ask you to help me out.
Here’s how it works: The new version can be previewed at http://beta.nerfnow.com and will offer new features as soon as I’m somewhat done coding them. In this post, I’ll details the said new features, and you will try to use them as you see fit. If you find any problems, or have any comments or suggestions, please leave a comment here. If you prefer, you can also email me.
What’s been implemented so far:
Comments
You can now leave comments for published comics. You can post without registering, or you can log in using OpenID. Logged in users can edit or delete their comments later, while unregistered users don’t have that luxury. Also, logged in users’ names are underlined and linked to their identity pages, so everyone can tell two registered users apart even if they use the same name (yes, two people can use the same name).
Comment length is limited to 300 characters. Some formatting is allowed, bbcode style. Right now you can use [b]this[/b] for bold text, [i]this[/i] for italics, [u]this[/u] for underlined, [s]this[/s] for line-through and [url=http://beta.nerfnow.com]this[/url] for links.
Spam protection is in place, courtesy of Defensio. Comments are screened through Defensio’s servers, and if deemed to be spam, won’t be published immediately. They’re still stored in our database, however, so false positives can be manually identified and published.
Photo Notes
Photo notes are here! Stolen Inspired from Flickr, you can now leave notes over the comic itself. This feature will be exclusive to logged in users, so get an OpenID if you don’t have one already.
After logging in, click the “Add Photo Note” to create a new photo note. Photo note comments are limited to 140 characters, just like Twitter. You can move the note around and resize it at will. Use this to select a part of the comic you want to write something about. When you’re done, click the “Save” button. Later you can edit or delete your comments.
Formatting is allowed in photo notes, using the same syntax as normal text comments.
The Future
This should complete the feature set for the next update, but there’s still work to be done before it’s released to the main site. There are rough edges, and hopefully they’ll be smoothed over the next couple of weeks. This is the time I need your help the most. Please, test everything as thoroughly as possible and report any errors you find here.
Known Issues
You can’t click on username links in photo notes, since the text will disappear as soon as the mouse leaves the note box. I’m working on this.
The new version is being tested mostly on Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Internet Explorer should get more attention as we get closer to a final release. Our target is to get everything working in the three major rendering engines (Mozilla, WebKit and IE).