|
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
Hi,
Disclaimer: in order to read and fully understand this post, you should really click on at least some of the microbadges that I provide as examples throughout the text. They're not necessarily the best of examples, but should be reasonably representative of the whole thing.
This month marks the first anniversary of the existence of microbadge wiki descriptions. For those that don't know what a microbadge wiki description is, it's simply an editable field that is shown when viewing microbadges' pages (e.g., click on  , it's the Description field below the microbadge's details and above the microbadge's owners list), used to describe whatever the specific microbadge is all about or refers to.
Ever since wiki descriptions were introduced, I've slowly been adding wiki descriptions to every microbadge, and last month the number of unique microbadges to which I've added wiki descriptions passed the 10000 mark (I've only got less than 8000 to go!  ).
The ultimate goal
The ultimate goal with all this is to make people actually want to click on microbadges by providing a simple way to get more information on the 'Geek in general and people's preferences in particular, making it a new and fun activity in and of itself; in a way, microbadges are slowly become a very small little encyclopedia, which users can jump around in, if they're so inclined. I have gone out of my way to not divulge this in any site-wide manner (I assume this blog is sufficiently out of the way for the vast vast vast majority of users to not make any difference ), as it should all be more or less complete before users are invited to start clicking on badges or else people will click on two or three, see nothing, and never click on any ever again. If it'll be in any way or form a successful endeavor in becoming a cool new feature of the 'Geek, only time will tell.
Well, in general, I've been trying to make microbadge wiki descriptions have three characteristics:
Microbadge wiki descriptions should be informative
Nobody knows everything, and there are also a lot of people on here for whom English is not their first language, so microbadges should provide information on whatever its subject is, be it a specific geek in-joke or a general real-world subject. Some things are really really basic (e.g., if someone doesn't know what popcorn is, the internet is probably not the best place to find out anyway), so the information provided should not only cater to people that know little to nothing on the subject but also provide little tidbits of extra information for people to read if they're interested.
Related to this, microbadge wiki descriptions should not contain vast duplicated information (duplicate in the sense that it's information already present on the 'Geek; duplicate info only serves to make it outdated) and certainly not be the central location for any given information. For example,  should not, and does not, contain all the info already present the Geek of the Week wiki entry, but it does provide a very very quick overview of what it relates to, pointing users in the right direction to get more info. This has meant that every microbadge that relates to a database object (game, family, company, person, podcast, what have you) usually simply links to the appropriate 'Geek item. More info on this further down.
Some examples:           
Microbadge wiki descriptions should be entertaining
Heck, we all like to be entertained, right? If a microbadge description gets a smile from people, it's done a fantastic job as it is. I've been trying to do this mostly at the expense of youtube videos and images, although sometimes I also add little something special in the text.
Some examples:           
Microbadge wiki descriptions should reference further reading material (i.e., provide link(s) to other stuff)
Wiki descriptions shouldn't really be that long, so links to further reading material should be provided. These are usually in the form of links to *GG itself (be it the wiki, database objects such as games, people, companies, etc) or to wikipedia (which requires links back to it anyway, when its articles are quoted). Furthermore, there are numerous interesting, silly and funny geeklists, articles and whatnot on the geek related to many subjects, so microbadge wiki descriptions should point users in the direction of stuff that he or she might be interested in whenever appropriate.
Some examples:           
The Music category
The Music category is the best example of how all of this will look like. Besides the board games, RPG and video games categories (for which wiki descriptions are different and much simpler in nature), its the only top-level category in which every single one of its ~1000 badges has a full wiki description. As the vast majority of badges in that category are artist related badges (Jethro Tull fan, etc), what you'll usually find for each is a youtube video of the band, an excerpt of wikipedia's article on the artist and a link to said article. This allows users to, amongst other things, quickly get an idea of what type of music their geekbuddies like by simply clicking on any geekbuddy's music microbadges and listening to the music, if they don't the band.
There are quite a few other categories or sub-categories that are complete or nearly complete (Ideas, Literature and Arts, Comics, etc) and for those I now consider microbadge submissions to be incomplete when no wiki description is provided. Unfortunately, the current microbadge submission form is really terrible for setting wiki descriptions upon microbadge submission, but the new beta redesign will solve that.
Wiki description classes
For the purpose of these wiki description thingies, I've broken down microbadges into three different classes:
 Microbadges that relate to *GG database items (games, people, companies, podcasts, etc) usually only get a link to the appropriate database item, to allow the user to get more information there (and to simultaneously make sure the user knows what the microbadge that he or she is buying or looking at really represents). This also leads into the beta site's new Microbadge Item Links functionality. These badges are basically present in the Board Games, Role-Playing Games and Video Games categories, as well as in the Board Game Related, Video Game Related and Video Game Related categories, for artists, designers, companies, etc, such as in           .
 Microbadges that relate to stuff on 'Geek sites but aren't necessarily related to any item in particular. Most badges of this type are present in the BGG, Board Game Related, RPGG, Role-Playing Related, VGG and Video Game Related categories. These can be further broken down between badges that relate to a specific item such as a geeklist or feature of some kind (Geek of the Week, overtext, etc), and badges that are simply generic (cat destroying games in progress). These last ones are the hardest badges to provide wiki descriptions for, as they imply searching for relevant (informative and/or silly) information on the geek sites, which can obviously take some time. A subset of badges of this class were the non-purchasable microbadges (awards, archived and whatnot), which were the first badges to be handled. There should be no award microbadge in the whole database without a wiki description of some kind explaining how it came about or what it's for.
 Microbadges that relate to everything else, such as popcorn, facepalms, music, comics, food, etc. Badges such as these usually get excerpts from wikipedia articles and/or excerpts from the 'Geek itself, giving a special focus on using sources that won't disappear very easily.
What others have done
Initially there were a couple of users that added some helpful descriptions to badges, but apparently that mostly died down quite quickly. Some designers have added descriptions to their own badges too, which was very cool of them, but the number of designers doing so hasn't been particularly significant, which was/is a shame (for the ones that did add them, we should all be thankful to them  ). Initiatives such as Quest: Microbadge descriptions were very valuable, but unfortunately ended up being somewhat limited in scope, apparently due to general disinterest. In any case, and as time went by, and especially after all the wiki descriptions for the board/video/role-playing game badges were done, and I had started adding them prior to microbadge approval, a few users caught on (and continue to do so) and started doing it themselves upon submission, which was tremendously cool! Hopefully, this trend will continue, and as more and more badges have wiki descriptions, more designers will add them as a standard part of microbadge submission.
What you can do
Well, microbadge wiki descriptions are editable fields, anyone can create new wiki descriptions or improve existing ones. This can be done very easily, and everybody's handy work is naturally very much appreciated! The Wiki Formatting wiki entry is an invaluable resource to anyone editing wiki descriptions, and you can also use the wiki template posted at the end of this post as a base for creating new microbadge wiki descriptions (you can also look up wiki descriptions for similar badges to get a better idea of the whole thing). If by any chance you've got a lot of time on your hands and/or would like to help me out in this endeavor in a more widespread manner, doing lots and lots of microbadge wiki descriptions, please get in touch with me via geekmail to arrange it.
What I'll be doing
Well, as already stated, I now consider microbadge submissions to specific categories to be incomplete without wiki descriptions, and I add the appropriate descriptions prior to microbadge approval. Furthermore, besides adding a random wiki descriptions here or there sometimes, I periodically update complete categories or sub-categories (I create the wiki descriptions offline, and then submit them to BGG all in one go), and over time the number of badges without any info will continue to be reduced. With around 8000 badges to go (the number is a little lower than that, it's in the 7000 and something range), I don't expect to end all this during 2012 without some help, but hopefully it won't take that long to complete all of this
Wiki description template
Most wiki descriptions that I've added use the structure shown below (youtube video or image to the left of the text), so if you ever want to add a microbadge wiki description, you might want use this template by simply copy-and-pasting it and adjusting it accordingly (the link's source, non-existence of video or image means that the table isn't needed, etc):
---- Start [it looks kind of strange because you can't see the wiki formatting here] ----
{| border="0" cellpadding="5"
| [youtube=XYZ] or [imageid=XYZ small]
| Blah blah blah.
More blah blah blah.
[size=10]''Source: Wikipedia, "[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something Something]", available under the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ CC-BY-SA License].''[/size]
|}
---- End ----
Happy microbadging 
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
In my previous Size matters blog post, I wrote about there being lots and lots of oversized images being used in microbadges (if you didn't read it, you should at least skim it before proceeding). All that extra superfluous image size impacts *GG's bandwidth and whatnot, so something had to be done!
What I did
Out of the 17800 non-hidden microbadges that exist today, a little over 6000 were reduced in size. The size reduction consisted of removing superfluous header information and other types of unneeded file information, whilst also adjusting the number of bits per pixel to the number that was actually needed, according to the number of colors used in the image. I did this in two stages, first converting the ~1400 badges that were larger than 2048 bytes and now going through another ~4600 badges, and situation ended up as such:
Total microbadges:
Average microbadge image size:
Median microbadge image size:
Total microbadge image size:
Before
16860
1078 bytes
403 bytes
17.33 MB (18175592 bytes) Now
17800
467 bytes
324 bytes
7.93 MB (8318641 bytes)
The total size of the complete microbadge database was cut by more than half, so not only were there many many oversized microbadge images, but they contained quite a bit of unneeded image information.
Curiosities
The largest non-animated microbadge is now  at 1348 bytes, and unsurprisingly the smallest of all is  (yes, it's there  ) at 55 bytes.
One of the side-effects of my file reducing antics was that quite a lot of microbadge images changed format, with the current situation looking as shown in the pie chart on the right.
In the past images not sized at 16x16 pixels had been accepted into the microbadge database (the current submission form doesn't allow it anymore), so the nearly 40 badges that weren't 16x16 had to be manually resized to standard microbadge size. This meant that, for the first time since virtually the beginning of microbadges on BGG, every single microbadge is 16x16 in size! Using up only 154 pixels (11x14),  was previously the smallest ever accepted badge, with  topping the other end of the scale having been previously sized at 18x18 pixels.
Animated microbadges
I didn't touch any of the 37 animated microbadges; all but four of those 37 badges are larger than largest non-animated microbadge (), but they're generally ok in terms of file size, given that some of them have quite a large number of frames. Apart from the non-technical reasons of not having large amounts of animated microbadges (making the ones that are extra-special and not making everything move and distracting whilst using the forums and geeklists), animated microbadges should continue to be rare, as they not only take up a much larger file size, but they also can't be optimized with the large microbadge image tile map (see Size matters for info). The largest animated microbadges, and indeed now the largest microbadges of all are  and  , the only two badges that go over the 8KB file size. The smallest animaged badge is at a mere 832 bytes.
New microbadge submissions
Well, as I previously said, you shouldn't worry too much about your microbadge submission sizes, as I'll be periodically going through them and converting them as time goes by. In any case, most imaging applications have options to reduce image file size (sometimes camouflaged as "optimized for the web" or similar), so you should try to use those settings as much as possible. Furthermore, unless you actually know what you're doing , the easiest format to use is PNG (also due to the way it handles transparency in comparison to GIF files), and you should basically never submit microbadges in JPEG format.
If your microbadge image is larger than 1348 bytes, the largest one now on record, it's very very very likely that it can be optimized further.
Cheers, happy microbadging
Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:52 am
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
As some of you may know, the Beta BGG Redesign's microbadging system has been implemented by yohanleafheart, and disregarding a few problems that need ironing out, is now complete and fully functional. The new site's microbadging system is very similar to the previous one, albeit generally easier to use and prettier, besides having a few cool little features, such as the fact that microbadges' categories are shown when searching for microbadges (might not seem particularly relevant, but trust me, it is!).
There is, however, an entirely new feature: microbadges can now be linked to the geek sites' database objects, such as games, families, companies and people. A picture says a thousand words, so here are a couple thousand words worth:
18EZ's game page showing all linked and related microbadges 's microbadge page, showing the linked item link
What this means to you, as a microbadge enthusiast or buyer
Essentially, much easier access to the complete suite of microbadges for any given geek related subject. Not only will you be able to easily find microbadges through the game, game family and similar pages, it'll also be easier to see other microbadges related to the same subject, even when they're not grouped together for some reason, such as expansion, publisher, designer or genre microbadges.
Non-grouped microbadges related to the same game are now much more visible
What this means to you, as a microbadge designer
For starters, long gone will be the days of editing games' (and similar) wiki pages to add microbadges, as the process will be fully automated, and any Space Marine wiki wars will become a distant memory. Moreover, when submitting new microbadges, an option to link microbadges to objects is available for microbadge submitters to do just that (and will be yet another pain in the neck for me, as I muddle through my pending microbadge corrections  ). Microbadges will also be consistently present throughout the entire site, so you can generally expect more visibility for them. Publisher and designer badges, which were relatively hidden before, will jump into the spotlight, and feature on many many game information pages.
Black Friday's information page's microbadge section, including badges for its designer and publishers
What I've done up until now
I've now linked upwards of 6000 microbadges (ballpark number) to geek database items, including virtually all board/roleplay/video games, as well as most of other related badges (publishers, designers, etc). But just to be clear, I have not finished linking everything, so don't expect everything to be linked yet Anyway, at the very least, BGG's beta testers will get some more color in the game pages, with microbadges popping up in their information pages
The rationale for linking items to microbadges has been simple, items are linked when they refer directly to a geek's database object, meaning that a Twilight Struggle fan badge is linked to the Twilight Struggle game, but a literature A Song of Ice and Fire microbadge is not linked to all the games related to the book series. This may change in the future, but for now let's keep it that way, as it's simpler to handle.
Microbadges with IDs over 22000 have not been linked, on purpose, as I'll be doing those all in one swoop when I completely move from the current BGG to the beta BGG (i.e., when I start exclusively using the beta's microbadge pending queue). 22000 was just a random and relatively recent cutoff point that I chose, there's no real significance about the number.
Update: new cutoff point is 23848, at a little under 7000 badges linked.
I don't foresee that many mistakes in microbadge item linking... we'll see! Role-playing games microbadges might have a higher error rate than usual, as I had somewhat less control over which microbadges were linked to what and due to the higher presence of families as opposed to simple games. In any case, if you have access to the beta site, please let me know of any mistakes either through geekmail or by posting it in the Microbadge Fixes wiki page.
Decisions, decisions...
If you look at Chuckie Egg's related microbadges, you'll see the microbadges concerning the game's genres are present as related to the game. That's all very well and good for video games and RPGs, but board game mechanics and categories have literally hundreds of microbadges, so for now I've made the judgement call not to link those badges to the board gaming mechanics or categories, so they won't be displayed as Related microbadges in the games' pages, as those microbadges would completely drown out the related microbadge item lists. For example, a microbadge for fans of a wargame's family series would get completely lost in the middle of dozens of generic wargaming microbadges. A solution to this would be to link the series fan microbadge to both the game's family and all of the family's actual games, but this would very quickly become completely unmanageable and outdated.
I applied exactly the same rationale to microbadges not directly related with the geek's database objects, but related to similar subjects. Although it does sound cool to have all 50 or so generic Star Wars microbadges linked to all Star Wars board games, video games and role-playing games, they would completely drown out the badges that do in fact directly relate to the board game, rpg or whatever, hence the decision not link them, at least not yet.
Carcassonne's information page's microbadge section, including badges for its expansions and publishers
The same rationale was applied to many other microbadges, as to whether the microbadges should be linked to the main board game or board gaming family. Carcassonne was one of those cases; as shown above, its microbadges are linked to the main game, not the family, so as to not dilute all expansion and version specific microbadges in a sea of generic Carcassonne microbadges.
Naturally, all of this is new, and will be adjusted as we move along
Happy microbadging
-
Young & Lawful Good
United Kingdom
Redhill
Surrey
Support comes in many forms: community involvement, forum posts, submitting data, word-of-mouth advertising, financial donations... All of these are vital to this site, and you have my sincere thanks for participating in any of them.
Currently: banned as per http://rpggeek.com/article/9104203#9104203
-
In Microbadge administration rights, João described the admin view of moderating microbadge submissions. There's another aspect to microbadges that is restricted to certain admins and that is granting them.
Someone with this power is technically called a User Gift Manager. This admin right covers the ability to give microbadges to users for free, whether those badges can normally be purchased for GeekGold or not. This right also grants the power to give users GeekGold directly from the system as well, so it is rightly a closely controlled privilege. A third feature of the User Gift Manager is the ability to set and remove the "GAME DESIGNER" and "GAME PUBLISHER" uberbadges. I'll only go into the mechanics of handling microbadges here, as the rest is off-topic.
Microbadges can be assigned in two ways: individually to a user, or in bulk to many users...
Giving a single MB to a single user
Admins have an extra set of controls that are visible to them on user avatar blocks:
What you see
(standard avatar):
What I see
(toggle for controls):
And with the admin
control box opened: The exact collection of controls that appears depends on the individual admin's set of rights. The last icon on the top row (that looks like a star-shaped medal) is the "Give MicroBadge" button.
Clicking on that brings up the normal view for purchasing microbadges. Except that instead of the "All Microbadges cost 8 GeekGold" message at the top of the page, I see "Give microbadge to" followed by the user's avatar. And further, instead of "Buy" buttons there are "Give" buttons.
Importantly, because restricted microbadges can only be assigned by admins or established systems, all microbadges are visible to an admin in this view. So Gift Managers automatically gain the ability to see all microbadges in the system.
An aside wrote: An interesting consequence of this power is that a Gift Manager admin can of course give themselves any microbadges that they'd like. (In practice, I have chosen not to do this for myself, but the ability is there.) So the view when I go to buy microbadges for myself is slightly different: As you can see, I get the "Buy" button for any purchasable microbadge as you would expect, but also the "Give" button for every microbadge so that I can set myself up with endless free badges... if I was so inclined.
So what happens when I click on the magic "Give" button? The following page loads:
 If I don't enter a message, then the target user gains the target microbadge but gets no notification whatsoever. Secret pixellated ninjas deftly insert the microbadge into the user's profile without that user ever knowing.
If I do enter a message, then the user gets the glorious "You have a new Microbadge" GeekMail. All of these messages come from the system user, BoardGameGeek, so if I don't identify myself in the message then the originating admin remains anonymous to the user. Further, and this is important, this method of granting microbadges does not actually identify which badge has been assigned. So when granting an individual microbadge, the admin should make sure to insert the badge itself into the message.
The message uses standard formatting as per forum posts and GeekMails. But you can see that there is no toolbar for formatting options, emoticons, or link insertion. The admin must insert tags as appropriate manually, or copy and paste the text from a fully featured editor (such as for forum posts or GeekMail).
Bulk Give - one microbadge to multiple targets
Granting individual microbadges is all well and good, but sometimes you need to hand out a particular badge to dozens or hundreds of users. That's where the Bulk Give functionality comes in. This is what I see on the page for a given microbadge:
All very familiar, except for the addition of a "[Bulk Give]" link at the top. Clicking on that brings up this view:
This is similar to the individual microbadge granting form, in that there is the option for a personalised message to go out to users. Again, the admin must format their post manually.
The big difference is the additional text box for the list of users. All that should go in here is a list of user IDs, with each one on a separate line. No other extraneous information or formatting.
Another crucial difference is that the system-generated GeekMail always tells the target users which microbadge they're getting (so there is no need for the admin to explicitly mention it in their message). Indeed, whether an optional message from the admin is included or not, a system-generated GeekMail goes to the listed users.
The message begins:Quote: Congratulations, you have been given the following microbadge. Below you can find a message from the sending admin. Followed by the microbadge being given, followed by any additional message from the admin.
The admin gets a results page as well, that includes entries looking like this:
Results are listed for all users in the order in which they were listed in the text box, so the admin must scan down large lists manually to check for any anomalies. Users that already have the badge won't receive the accompanying GeekMail. It's a fairly manual process, but it's not an onerous job. The results output is pure text, so if needs be I copy and paste into a spreadsheet and parse the text for easier sorting.
Final thoughts
Why do you need to know any of this? Well, the most useful lesson to take from this is that if you're asking an admin to bulk assign microbadges to users (perhaps as participants of a contest) then the perfect information to give in your GeekMail is a copy of the microbadge (so that the admin can reach the Bulk Give link quickly) and the relevant users listed one per line without any extraneous data in the list.
Several admins have the power to do this for you (including me). Usually all such requests can go through the relevant microbadge admin. In most cases that's cscottk supported by Bail Organa. On the RPG side of the site, feel free to contact any of wavemotion, Stelio, stargate, Purple.
skippen
United States
Greeley
Colorado
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
Dave Bernazzani (@rpggeek)
United States
Plainville
Massachusetts
I wish to provide legendary service to the RPG community to help grow our hobby and enrich the lives of gamers everywhere.
Young & Lawful Good
United Kingdom
Redhill
Surrey
Support comes in many forms: community involvement, forum posts, submitting data, word-of-mouth advertising, financial donations... All of these are vital to this site, and you have my sincere thanks for participating in any of them.
Currently: banned as per http://rpggeek.com/article/9104203#9104203
Old & Chaotic Evil Bob
United States
North Attleboro
Massachusetts
do you want to be my new host
I am EVIL, do not try to change my alignment
Emile de Maat
Netherlands
Hengelo
Overijssel
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
Yeah, I couldn't resist the cheesy title, sorry
This blog post is about microbadge image byte sizes, the situation we currently have and what that means.
Significance of microbadge image size
All those little images we love so much are basically everywhere on BGG and other GeekDo sites. We see them below people's avatars in threads and geeklists, we see them in user profiles and when we browse a board game in its information section. For you to be able to see the microbadge images, the image has to travel from BGG's servers to your own computer, so that your browser can show them to you; as you might imagine, each individual microbadge's size impacts BGG's bandwidths needs, as it's one thing to provide very small images, and another to provide very large images.
Fortunately, there are a number of caching mechanisms in play here; for example, your browser probably doesn't request any given microbadge image each time it needs to displays it, as it probably saves a temporary copy on your computer, that it can use for a time before requesting it again. Furthermore, BGG has been using a large grid of the most owned microbadges for quite some time now, which also helps a lot in optimizing the whole situation.
Please note: this explanation was extremely simple; technically there are more variables and things at play here, but the idea was only to provide a rough idea of the whole thing.
Microbadge tile map used in Geek sites
Current microbadge image size
I had noticed that a few microbadge images' sizes were out of whack, so I took a look at the 16860 non-hidden microbadges and this is what I found:
Total microbadges: 16860 Average microbadge image byte size: 1078 bytes Median microbadge image byte size: 403 bytes Total microbadge image size: 17.33 MB (18175592 bytes) data is a few days old, but that's completely irrelevant for this type of thing
Not particularly worrying data, although those 223 badges larger than 4096 bytes aren't particularly great news, given that there are very few animated microbadges (which might take up more space) and that there is little reason for a 16x16 image using 32bit colors in any of the 3 usual image formats used in microbadges (PNG, GIF and JPEG) to use up so much space.
If we look at microbadge size over time, this is what we get:
Size capped at 48KB, although there are quite a few larger than that.
We can clearly see (around the 9500 microbadge id mark) when the microbadge submission form was put in place.
The microbadge image size champions
There are a great deal of microbadges whose sizes are exaggerated; this was obviously not the designers' intention, it was probably simply the result of how the image was saved in their image software. In any case, there are three badges that stole the show:
 at 101KB.
 at 105KB.
 at a whooping 436KB.
To get an idea of the possible size decrease, just opening up in Paint.NET and saving it (with no visual difference whatsoever) made it go from 445848 bytes to a much more reasonable 3462 byte size. Stripping out the image file headers and whatnot made it go to the small 788 byte size, with no distinction from the original whatsoever.
Size reductions of this type aren't that meaningful - although I assume they're certainly not negligible - either a microbadge is very much used and it's in the tiled microbadge image (so the individual image's size is mostly irrelevant, apart from a couple of less used pages where microbadge images are directly linked to, such as the microbadge's individual page) or, well, it's not as used. But badges with few owners, but whose owners are very frequent posters, could and can make a small dent in BGG's bandwidth, so why not improve this if we have the chance, right?
What I'll be doing
Besides starting to pay attention to this in my daily rounds while going through the microbadge pending queue, over the coming week(s) I'll be going through the biggest offenders and converting them manually. When that's done, I'll probably cook up a little application to go through each and every microbadge and see the possible size decrease that can be (easily) achieved for each one, to try and optimize the microbadge database as a whole. But let's not get ahead of ourselves I'll try to improve the worst cases, and then, with time, improve the rest. Stay tuned.
What you, a microbadge designer, can do
Well, to tell you the truth, not much. Although it shouldn't be much of a concern, before submitting a new microbadge you can check its image's file size. In general, if it's less than 4KB (4096 bytes) in size, you shouldn't really need to worry about it. If it's more, and especially if it's much more, you can try opening it up in another imaging program and simply saving it as-is to see if the file size decreases to a more acceptable value. If the file size seems very much exaggerated and you are unable to solve it, post in one of the microbadge threads (see the Microbadge Design and Submission wiki page for details, although I can't possibly fathom that you reached this point of the post and don't already know the links to the threads!  ) asking for help.
Update
Just out of curiosity, I "optimized" every microbadge image file in the microbadge database, and was able to chop off over 50% of the total image file size. The largest non-animated file capped at 1372 bytes! So, this marks the start of my microbadge image size reduction project
Happy microbadging
Tue Nov 29, 2011 11:50 am
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
The current microbadging system has been in place since late 2009, and was a vast improvement to what microbadge administration entailed prior to that. Before the new system was in place, the microbadge administrators had to submit microbadges themselves, whereas now we have the very handy microbadge submission form that any user can use to submit his or her microbadges for later admin approval. It dawned on me a while back that most people don't know what operations can be done with microbadge administration permissions, nor how they're performed, so why not start this blog off with a small and simple overview of what things look like behind-the-scenes?
The microbadge pending queue
If you're reading this, you're probably well aware of the microbadge pending queue. That's where all microbadge submissions go to before they're approved or rejected.
A typical microbadge submission looks like this in the pending queue:
Well, from the microbadge administration point of view, things look slightly different:
There's all the editing options that you'd expect to see, as well as the possibility of approving/rejecting microbadges with or without the notification geekmail (upon choosing to approve or reject a badge with the notification geekmail, a small window pops up so that a custom message can be sent to the user in the geekmail).
I try to keep the microbadge database as clean as possible, so a few months ago I consistently started going through the pending queue performing all the necessary microbadge corrections before they're approved, as it was very frustrating to be constantly cleaning microbadges (microbadge text fields and their consistency, grouping, categorization, and now microbadge wiki descriptions, etc) with new incorrect and inconsistent microbadges continuously flooding in. So you now know who to bash and complain to about those changes made to your microbadge submission.
The microbadge submission shown above has 9 individual mistakes; although they might look anecdotal, they're actually representative of usual issues in microbadge submissions, but that's a topic for another post.
Microbadge editing and category creation
Every microbadge's page has a link that leads to a microbadge editing page, which has the same options as what is available in the pending queue:
Microbadge category creation is a simple process, and can be performed by editing a microbadge's category and requesting that a new category be created, as shown above.
Microbadge category renaming and deletion
There was no way (apart from going directly to the database which I assume and hope very few people can do) to rename or delete microbadge categories until March 2011 when Jester very helpfully added those options.
Not a great looking set of functionalities, for sure, but invaluable in microbadge clean-up and reorganization In the screenshot you'll also get to see something different: non-buyable microbadges are present in microbadge lists (I also used this as an opportunity to show the complete list of Archived Microbadges [well, besides the Magic mana symbol ones that is] ).
Just a final note to say that handing out microbadges is a different type of site permission altogether, and not the same as microbadge administration rights. As the new beta is shaping out (the site redesign is ongoing as we speak, and yohanleafheart hasn't finished the microbadge part yet), functionality will remain more or less the same, although it will be prettier!
That's about it, really. Hopefully the screenshots shown above gave you a clearer picture of what is available, and what can be done in regards to microbadge submission, clean-up and organization.
Happy microbadging!
-
Portugal
Lagos
Algarve
I've been offline from BGG for the last couple of weeks, but I'll be back very soon!
I'm that weirdo that keeps track of how many badges Kaffedrake has sold prior to yesterday
-
Hi, and welcome to Microbadging Along, a small blog about the microbadging world.
I've been thinking of creating this blog for quite some time now, so that I have my own personal space to rant on any given microbadge subject if I so desire, and also to provide information which isn't particularly suited to any existing microbadge thread or wiki page. Besides, this is a cozy little space that I can use to organize some stuff a little better than having a random post here or there lost in the middle of a thread somewhere.
This blog will certainly not be appealing to the casual microbadge user, but is really aimed at me  and any of the other hardcore microbadgers out there that might be interested in reading it. I don't promise a barrel of laughs nor even that any posts will be that interesting, I'll simply be providing some of my opinions on what goes on in the micro-niche that is microbadging, information on what makes the whole thing tick (probably with some statistics once in a while, of course) and possibly on my own microbadging projects (note: any relevant information will still be posted in the appropriate threads, this blog might just provide my ideas or further info). As I'm making this up as I go along, I don't know if I'll post with any regularity or if I'll end up thinking this blog thing is a dumb idea or something... we'll see
Btw, if you'd like to rant on any microbadging subject in this blog, just lmk and I'll provide you with the appropriate blog permissions. I'd be surprised to see this happen, but it would be interesting
If by any chance you're lost and don't know what on Earth a microbadge is, nor what microfun you can with them!, check out the Microbadge wiki page. If you're an aspiring microbadge designer, take a look at the Microbadge Design and Submission wiki page and join in on the fun at the Microbadge Focus Guild.
|
|
|
