A Call For Action

Ok, so I know its been a while since I've updated things on the site, but there have been a number of things calling on my time recently. However, although I still don't have a great deal of time, I do have some energy for getting Virtual Politics moving again.

I'd love to hear from any members (or non-members) of Virtual Politics to see how you would like to see VP develop from this point. What are the killer features you'd like to see to make it fly? There's no preconditions on this, so let your imagination run riot.

Either log in and send me a message, email me directly at info@virtual-politics.com, or leave a comment here on the blog.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Dave Meehan - VP Admin

New URL scheme

I've implemented a new URL scheme for policies and the directories, so that search engines do a better job of indexing the site. If you have bookmarks for policies etc you might want to update them to "/policy/nnn/" instead of "policy.php?id=nnn", although the old style will continue to work for the time being.

New Editorials and slight data problem

I've added a new feature under the 'my editorials' section of the site that allows you to see which users have added new editorials that relate to your policies. It also shows if the editorial is new or modified since your last visit, for easy reference.

There was also some data corruption at the end of last week, although it only appears to have affected the historical citizen chart data, which I've restored from a backup. There might be a whole or two in the data, but I think I've got most of its back. If you notice any other problems with data loss or corruption, please let me know.

New management features

I've just added two new management features which have been much requested. Firstly, there is now a 'My Editorials' section within 'My Details'. This allows you to see all of the editorials that you have written, so that you don't have to remember which policies you had written under.

Also, a much requested 'Delete Policy' option has been added. This allows you to remove policies that you no longer have an interest in, or have found to be unpopular. You can access the delete policy function from either the 'My Portfolio', or the policy pages.

New Chart

I've removed the Top Citizens By Capital chart from the homepage, and replaced it with a Top Voters chart. Measuring success by capital was not really one of the intentions of the site, and it appears to have defocussed people from actually voting, by causing them to think that the amount of capital that they posess is of more importance. Hopefully the new chart will encourage people to vote on policies, and that will help in making the overall support figures move to reflect a wider segment of the membership.

Bug Fix: Misdirected Internal Messages

A problem has been resolved with messages being sent to the wrong recipient.  This was caused if the user was browsing the site with two browser windows open.  Once the message was created in one window, if the user then continued to browse in the other window, the message recipient would be inadvertantly changed to a recipient identified in the second browse window, such as another policy owner.   Recipient information is now captured during the message creation, and so is not affected by other browsing activities.  Please let me know if you spot any issues with message delivery.

Policy Archive assist with reviewing changes

When you edit a policy, the system now keeps an archive of the previous versions of the policy.  This can be viewed at the bottom of the policy page.  Next to each entry is a 'compare' option, which shows the policy complete with added and deleted text (like revision marks) so that you can quickly see how the policy has changed from the previous or earlier versions.

This should make it much easier to follow policies as they develop, without having to remember the previous version or re-read the entire new version.