Featured resources

[hazmhox]

Featured resources takes a bunch of place on the main page. That should be something that draws the attention to some great resources the past weeks... but at the moment I've seen almost the same resources since the hub is opened. And it's a shame to have a space as big as that, that doesn't use its full potential.

Why not doing something like this that could make the hub more alive and avoid you from being forced to maintain it manually : make a cron job that cleanup the featured resources every 1st of the month. Create a query in the database for the past 4 weeks were you pick 4 items every week which could be the most downloaded, the most reactions etc...

With that, cool creators and content can be highlighted for a month. You can prevent to have a resource stay for more than a month by checking the previous list and avoiding to put it in the next "featuring".

 

[meshedvr]

Yeah - good suggestion.

Currently featured resources are hand picked, but there has always been an internal plan to make this a bit more automated. It will be something we eventually get to, but it hasn't been a priority with everything else that is going on.

 

[hazmhox]

No problem ! take your time... i'm just trying to give a bit of ideas / feedback having been in webdesign for years

 

[Captain Varghoss]

I've been thinking about this for the last couple of days and instead of making a new thread thought I would piggyback on this one.

To me, a completely arbitrary automated system may not actually be the best solution since some of the 'featured' items are actually things that may want to be displayed to newer people. Examples of this would be plugins such as vammoan or timeline.

The downside to hand picked items is that it's fairly subjective to whoever is choosing the "best" looks or plugins, but the upside is that certain resources or guides that actually help the community can be highlighted, such as tutorials or widely used morph packs.

I don't know that there is a perfect solution without splitting it up into multiple categories like handpicked 'must haves' versus 'popular this week/month'. What I have noticed however is that since the hand picked choices don't seem to be updated very often, or at the very least not ever removed from the list, as a creator it sometimes feels unfair in a way. I'm not saying it's intentional, and ultimately it's just numbers on a page, but an example I noticed was a look that got released about the same time as one of mine. Because this look was featured a couple days later it has garnered over 25,000 more downloads/views than mine has. Mine is fairly popular in it's own right and up until the 'featured' addition, they had been performing about the same. This leads to kind of a rich getting richer (popular getting more popular?) scenario.
Again, I'm not pointing this out to be bitter or mad about it, just that it seems like the list should be swapped out a bit more often so that visitors to the site can see new and fresh things, but at the same time be presented with things they actually may need, such as a guide or a plugin.


That said, honestly I don't have a solution or necessarily consider it to be wrong or broken at the moment just wanted to put out my observation and opinions on the matter as I spend a lot of time on the hub browsing for new stuff and constantly see the same 10 looks over and over

 

[atani]

I was trying to find information on how the "featured" part works and came upon this post.
Reading earlier posts it's clear there's no perfect solution, each has its advantages and disadvantages. I am personally not a fan of the subjective manual picking of featured items, falling close to Captain Varghoss' viewpoints that it skewes creations very unfairly, which is then accentuated by infrequent changes to the list.

As this initial question was made in 2020 and the subject has so far been left as a low priority with uneasy solutions, the featured list is still in a very prominent area of the Hub.
My question then is, does the featured posts needs to be there or even exist?

Throwing now some options based on assumptions and no data to support anything, but here they go nonetheless:

The relocation option
Assuming most frequent users of VAM come to the hub to see what's new, interested first on the latest posts. To these the featured posts is repetitive and in the way of what they want.
As there's no more infinite scrolling, what if the featured posts was moved below the latest posts list?
The list is still on the homepage but less prominent. Users can still have the benefits of a featured list but doesn't get in the way of seeing what's new first.

The burn it option
Removing the list altogether would prevent - in part - the skewing of shared content. Personally chosen or automated by any single metric will all lead to discoverability skewing, but I think people perceive more fairness when they know the metric used. There's no way to know why something is there or is not.

The metric replace option
This is following from the above one in perceived fairness, but in this case the "Top resources" list that is on the left side of the homepage would take the place of the featured posts. This makes it clear that the metric is by Rating, but it can be also other metrics like latest rated posts this week, or any other available, as long as it looks like a transparent listing.

The media option
Having the "random media" carousel in that area. This may privilige looks, hair and clothes over other types of assets like plugins, etc., but a good suggestive image can stimulate new scene ideas which in turn use plugins and other not so visual assets.

Some of the above are oppositional, but also combinations of the above options are possible. Just wanted to give a few more ideas to the original topic.

 

[RandomVAMUser]

looking at all featured content...

Aside from being subjectively cherry picked, there doesn't appear to be any criteria or requirements behind it.

for example:
-is the content hub-hosted or not
-does content have: 500 or 200k download, 0 or 20 reviews, 20 or 120 reactions, 0 or 40 dependencies
-is there "how to use" or not (example: texture resources)
-is featured content by original creator or not

If there are some min.requirements before choosing featured content, it might be less of a subjective thing.
Sure it won't be auto-fix, but still...also if content is rotated by mods (maybe every 2-3 months)
idk... instead of having stuff from 2020 as featured.

...i would also love option to simply slide/hide or disable that featured banner (slideshow).

 

[ZRSX]

Just because people who quite like it won't speak up as much as the other: I do like this idea of having hand-picked resources on top.

You've got to think about the news users or the ones who don't come often to the Hub. There's a huge amount of resources of varying quality.
This allows to quickly get good ones - and that's reaaally important for news users to get their hands on quality stuff at first. This will strongly impact their perception of VAM and if they'll want to continue or not. And it's not obvious to everybody at first that all those resources are done by independent creators: starting with a poor scene could reflect badly on VAM, making some people think it's just a bad game.

At least the featured section allows VAM devs / mods to bring up things that makes VAM a cool sandbox. To me it doesn't matter if the resource is from 2020 if it's still unparalleled. A must-have remains a must-have. It has to be featured, otherwise people won't look back so far back.
Yeah, as a regular user, you'd wish to see different things regularly. But right now it seems it's changing quite frequently.

This being said, I do agree on having at least some public criteria on how the featured resources are picked. Being hand-picked, it'll still be subjective... but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm not sure about a mandatory download number or ratings. Yeah, most great stuff immediately have strong reactions. But some good stuff could have gone under the radar for most people - maybe it has not as much download as it should have for some reason... and such resource should be featured, at least for a little while!
And you know me: sure, the number of dependencies & Hub-hosted should be mandatory criteria!
Some explanations on how to use the resource also sounds like a good criteria to me.

 

[Shine]

I'm your average lurker and this is the first post I've made to these forums but I'm sorry to say it doesn't take a genius to figure out whoever is doing the featured content is all matey with Ark, Gilgamesh and Pogdaddy as they seem to the be the only creators in the last 6 months that have constant featured looks, one comes down and the next one goes up, Theres other creators you know! Just look at the public opinion and they don't do well enough to be featured content, Arks faces all look like they were based off a Damarmau girl and Gilgamesh and Pogdaddy are facegen mediocrity with the samey pear shaped looks recycled endlessly heck they are both so similar in look and presentation they could well be the same person double dipping for patreon.

Then you have stuff like Scamps milfs, been featured for a year and has 45 likes and 2 reviews and 11k downloads in a whole year...that is not or should never have been a featured resource by any metric other than personal bias from the admin. Honestly if a look hasnt got 50 likes and 8+ reviews in a day it should not even be up for consideration not when you have people like Ddaamm, Jackaroo, Juno, MonsterShinkai and Damarmau who might not be so active but produced stuff that completely eclipses the current breed of creators being featured. You featured a Juno look for all of 2 weeks and then she was gone and that was in reality the best received look so far in 2022...Sure if there's something great that went under the radar then feature away but I doubt the mods have the knowledge of the content to identify something like that.

For the other content types you do a great job featuring the best of the best but you fall flat when featuring looks which are you bread and butter content and therefore should be a higher number featured. Mix it up and have a selection of newer stuff but keep the best of your content creators in the list too as without your content creators VAM is dead.

If it were me I would look at it like supporting your best creators cos the mods clearly do a shit job otherwise. I would along with the newer looks just rotate a look from the back catalog of the best creators to promote the best vam has to offer, Damarmau, Juno, Ddaamm, MonsterShinkai Jackaroo all have god tier work and the real stars of this place and deserve the showcase 1000000%

The featured section should be the best of the best regardless of age, not a showcase for the hub admins pals and personal preferences, take yourselves out of the equation and look at public opinion. @VaMDeV @VaMRainey @DJ @meshedvr

 

[VaMRainey]

Hello Shine!

Thanks for making a post after lurking so long. It is nice to see we've caught your attention with something you feel strongly enough to post about.

I'm in charge of rotating the Featured Resources, and have been since March 2022. Before that, it was VamDev, and he is a very busy man who is hard at work on a million other little things, before he can even think about updating the Features. He gave it to me to take over, and a lot of it hadn't been updated in almost a year.

I've been working through it, and I can tell you because we keep a spreadsheet that is updated constantly that many of the things you have said are incorrect. Many of the features in rotation are guides, plugins, and textures that were decided by Meshed and VamDev themselves not to be taken down, which is why it looks like the features aren't rotated very often.

Looks, Hairstyles, Assets, and Clothing are updated often, with each item being featured for about a month before something else is chosen. The featured scroll bar at the top also only rotates a handful of the features at a time, until the browser is refreshed.

As for your comments about Scamp's Milfs - they've been featured since May 25, 2022 (I have a spreadsheet, as I said), and it's time to unfeature them to something else. Your comments about the other users looks being 'samey' is a little rude and, quite frankly, subjective. Everyone has their own tastes, and what you see as 'samey' is what other users might call a creator's 'signature'. Every creator's looks tend to have a style to them that tells us they did it - like an artist's style, because that's what each model is - art. You're welcome to create looks and provide them for VAM, too.

The featured content is also required to be free content only.

So, thanks for your feedback, and while I don't disagree about featuring the 'big creators' who are our bread and butter, their content doesn't need to be featured to be found - people know already. It's the smaller creators who need the boost.

Continue to enjoy the content, and remember that these smaller creators whose creations you enjoy could really use the ratings and likes - everyone deserves to feel appreciated for their effort.

Have a nice day.

Rainey

 

[pogdaddy]

Just look at the public opinion and they don't do well enough to be featured content, Arks faces all look like they were based off a Damarmau girl and Gilgamesh and Pogdaddy are facegen mediocrity with the samey pear shaped looks recycled endlessly heck they are both so similar in look and presentation they could well be the same person double dipping for patreon.

I’m sorry to hear that you find my content mediocre. I have worked a lot of long hours to get my skills up to where they are, learning many different tools and how to use them from all of the people that you praised so highly. I’ve even done a collab with most of them! I’ll try to do better and am always working to improve my game. Hopefully one day I can change your mind and be more than just facegen mediocrity. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[atani]

A upcoming feature of the Hub was announced by CitizenX in another post. Dropping this here as the feature is related and could be of interest to anyone reading this topic.

Are star ratings in reviews useful?

@Juno I fully agree, it doesn't always have to be about the money. But yet, you spend much time in it. I'm using VaM for like 2 years now and my characters still changes once in a while. Because i'm not happy enough. But I never tried external programs to be honest. So, I also spend many hours...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[soupface27]

I've only had one thing featured (which came as a surprise to be honest) but it did have a definite effect on traffic to that specific model - my stuff doesn't really generate huge download numbers so it was kinda easy to compare. The featured area should be a way to direct people to not only the "must haves" but the "up and coming" new people or those that do good stuff but just don't manage to garner the same reputation as others.

With that in mind i would say that a sort of mixed bag would be probably the best approach to the "featured" section , wherever it may be on the page (maybe it gets relocated to better accommodate it).
What i mean by this is having it be from multiple sources - you have your automated one that pulls in stuff from whats currently being downloaded/reviewed/reacted to a lot at the time. Sort of like the "whats hot" listing for the month or bi-monthly or whatever.

But you also have a more personal one that's hand picked - maybe not a ton, but a handful. This is your "staff monthly picks" kinda section. This is where things that people might overlook would get some attention.

If you wanted a third that just kinda stays pinned/permanent, you make this the "Essentials" listing where you place things like Timeline, Post Magic, Decal Maker etc and it never changes unless a new "must have" comes around you feel should be added. Most likely nothing here but mods/plugins/enhancements/guides - the other areas would be where assets /models /clothing go. This area should be something newcomers can easily see so they can get all the most used plugins and whatnot.

The single automated one would make things easier overall, but i am unsure it will be the nice middle ground everyone wants/needs.