Upcoming features for April, 2009

Hi everyone,

Has been a while since the last blog post, so it's time to keep you updated about the present and future of Coda. In the past couple of weeks we where busy optimizing our code and server configuration to be able to cope with the increasing traffic; this efforts resulted in better response times (it should be noticeable) and buy us more time before being forced to upgrade our hardware.

Now we are free to continue adding more features, and you should expect those listed below to be ready before May.

Weekly rankings

Currently, the ranking of popularity of albums and artists are based on the total download count of albums, and this ended in increasingly stagnant rankings. The implementation of a weekly ranking should result in more dynamic and useful rankings, showing the latest trends.

We are going to keep the ranking based in totals too, so you can choose what interest you most.

Extended rankings lists

Speaking of rankings, we are going to offer longer lists (in addition to the current lists) to be able to see more items ranked below the current limit.

User profile

We are going to add you the possibility of customize your user page, being able to create a user profile and tell more about you (if you want to). Not a very useful feature by itself, but we plan to add in the future social-network like features (like connecting with other users, list your favorite artists, etc) and being able to describe yourself should be the first step in that direction.

Support for albums by various artists

Surely you have noticed that currently they aren't any albums by various artist available in Coda, or that your submitted torrents of albums by VA (usually soundtracks and compilations) aren't being approved.

This is a current limitation of the platform, and we plan to fix it soon. If you have affected torrents waiting for approval, don't delete them, those will we published, eventually.

Stay tuned, we're going to announce and explain the new features as being deployed in this blog.

Cheers !

The Coda.fm administrator

Content rating tool

As you may have noticed, we already finished and deployed the content rating tool, a new feature that allows you to report the quality of a torrent and the information about the album in his page, and view the reports of others users.

You can report that a torrent is perfectly fine, or if have some kind of common issues that could affect a torrent or our metadata about the album. The most severe issues reported (as fakes, or unplayable files) will raise an alert to our moderators for immediate action.

This feature is available in the new tab "Quality reports", in every album page.

The development of this feature took a while because we have to build the tools needed for the moderators to edit the contents (that where "create and read only" before) for fixing the reported issues that may have arise. Expect that the new features announced to be in development (in a upcoming post) will take a lot less of development time.

However, I'm not entirely satisfied with the descriptive texts in the page of this new feature, if you found it confusing or you have a suggestion for a better version (even for the name of the feature itself) feel free to tell us so in the comments of this post.

Cheers !

Artist picture zoom

We have a tiny new feature: zoom for the artist picture.
It works just like the zoom on the album covers, just click on the artist picture (in the artist details page) to see it at full size.
Not very useful, but fun, and was easy to implement because it uses the same code as the album zoom feature.

Cheers !

Content rating and moderation tools, phase 1 of 2 ready

As we told you in a previous post, we were working on providing to our moderators the tools they needed for edit and delete all the kinds of contents, as opposed to only be able to accept or reject a set of metadata for an album or artist, that was the only thing they we're able to do until today, when we finished and deployed this functionality.

Now that they have the required backends to fix any errors, mismatches or missing data about the albums and artists, we're going to start with the frontend side, that is, the tools that will allow you, the user, to see and report the quality of the torrents and flag metadata errors.
This new stage should take less time than the backend one, it should be ready in less that two weeks.

This was a tedious but indispensable thing to do to keep our promise of always deliver contents of quality, and we hope to finish it as soon as possible to continue building more fun and useful features for the users.

Cheers...