New Skin system for downloads

[eezstreet]

You know what I bet people are tired of? Looking for a really good skin to use for themselves, or for others. Well, the JKHub skin selection is nothing to laugh at right now - just merely 300 ish files, but I suspect that the skin prospect could be much higher. I think JKHub needs to really press for more skins, as it has only about 1/10th as many as JKFiles. Although most skins on JKFiles suck, I do feel that there could be some ground to make there. Whenever JKHub comes across a large foray of skins, there needs to be some standards set in place which can make skin browsing that much easier.

 

For starters, no more giant lists with teeny little icons and only one category. No. Bad donkeh. Instead, we should have a better tagging system for skins, which can convey the general style of the skin: "Goth, Cowboy, Trooper", what have you, as well as perhaps some other things too. The author of the skin specifies the tags.

Secondly, what we need is a search bar which will search for the tags. Also, the list would have to be converted to a gallery, which makes use of javascript of some sort, and has larger picture of each skin. Think the iPod touch album menu (when in landscape view), but with pictures of people's skins. That would make browsing sooooo much easier, because now you don't have to click each skin to see if you like it. All you need to do is scroll past the skin to see if its good.

 

What do you guys think?

[therfiles]

This would be a great idea. I wouldn't just limit this to skins, but also to maps. It's really hard to trawl through map after map just to find one that has a certain element. I think the gallery idea is great to, if the user wishes to use it. A picture is worth a thousand words.

[Inyri]

I pushed for a more comprehensive tagging system however I believe we were stopped by the limitations of ip.board. The backend is not my thing, though.

[CaptainChar]

im also going to go out on a limb here, when they were gathering data from other mods at the time, i bet alot of those skinners modellers retired from the whole thing, or they couldnt be contacted to have their files hosted

[eezstreet]

That doesn't really matter though, because the tags would be kinda generic. Anybody can look at a skin and say "oh, that's a Trooper skin", "oh, that's a gothic skin", or "oh, that's a mando skin". So the staff could add the tags as they feel most appropriate.

[therfiles]

I don't know about the other staff, but I would definitely be willing to do some extra tagging. to make this work. Maybe even users could request a tag on a skin they like, and it is approved by the staff.

[Fighter]

I have no idea what this menu looks like and the almighty Google isn't being very helpful. Show me?

Cover Flow.

[eezstreet]

^ this, but with a menu on the top which has searching, tag selection, and stuffs. Basically instead of the albums, you have screenshots of skins, and you get a pretty fast view of the selection.