Hi Taffers! As previously, here is a short summary of updates made to our portal in July.

July 2020 has brought 65 change submissions from different active users. As always, you submitted missing FM genres, briefing texts or you corrected FM authors, missions that are included in campaign, mission relations etc... Thank you!

Also, (I don't think I shared this information before), we already have a total of 6 148 FM ratings!!! That's quite a database now!

All this is a very big motivation for me. I don't know when, but I plan to add much more to the website already. I have ideas how to display mission ratings and reviewing in more interesting and convenient way. But there are always other things keeping me busy, too. So we will see how future days will allow me to organize the time.

BTW a new FM sorting was added - now FMs can be sorted by controversy! Most controversial FMs have high difference between all existing ratings, while least controversial FMs correspond to situation where majority of users rated the mission very similarly. This is achieved by using standard deviation metric (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation). A low standard deviation will mean most of the players rated the mission closely to its existing average. So if every player rated a selected mission 10/10, such mission std dev will be equal to 0 and you will see the controversy value on FM list equal to 0.00.

I've also allowed to sort missions by other means than contest score, when limiting the FM list to selected contest missions only. Previously, such missions were always and only sorted by contest score.

This month I also added website caching in several places. Website loads now faster than before. Yet it's still not perfect and I should be able to play around with it a bit.

Other improvements:
- Rolled back FM releases and portal news subscription links (RSS and atom) - see the portal footer
- Add note in FM filtering search bar (currently showing that at least 4 ratings are needed to be able to sort FMs by average rating)
- Made it possible to order authors on FM pages (e.g. primary author is more important than helping contributors)
- Made it possible for FM authors to see who is the manager of the mission in case the mission has more than one author
- Visual improvements on help text near FM filtering
- A bit more aesthetic average rating number on FM pages (decimal numbers smaller)
- More aesthetic portal footer section
- Better look of change suggestions page - you will find more information there, too
- Added 404 "not found" pages in places that can be visited by robots, because pages existed before and now they generated website server-side error page (removed user, removed picture, video, comment etc.)

Fixes made this month:
- Fixed bug of choosing latest screenshot from user submitted screenshots, even if the user submitted screenshots list is empty and official screenshot list is not empty
- Fixed bug where sometimes videos are accounted as screenshots when looking up media used for a FM cover

Happy Taffing!

Can you add another sorting method for sorting FM's alphabetically by name A-Z and Z-A? That seems like a common search method that is missing.

I'll see what I can do :)

Done :)