Heavy As Hell Blog

If you’re just now checking out the site, you might have noticed some changes! Heavy as Hell has been upgraded to version 2.0 of OpenVoter.  With this release there are plenty of new and exciting features.

1. Sharing

You can now share submissions with your friends.  Just click the share link, enter a personal note if you choose to, and click share.  Other users will now get an alert telling them to check out the submission.

2. Distinction Between Stories, Photos, & Videos

You can now submit a story, photo, or video as the actual submission, and browse by type.

3. Alerts

You can now be alerted either by e-mail, or on-site alerts, or both about new shares, comments, and private messages.  All you need to do is set your preferences in your account page. By default, alerts are only on-site.

4. Private Messaging

You can now send private messages to other users.  Just click the envelope button on the bar on the top of your screen.

5. API

Heavy as Hell now has a basic API. If you’re a developer be sure to check it out.

6. Subscriptions

You can now subscribe to comment threads to be alerted when a new comment is posted on a thread you’re subscribed to.  By default you are automatically subscribed to the thread when you submit the story or when you leave a comment, but you can change this in your account page.

7. Filters

You can now enter keywords in the filter page to hide submissions with these keywords from view. Don’t like stories on Radiohead, just add the word radiohead to the filter box and those stories will vanish from site.

8. Blocking Users

You can now block users to hide their submissions and comments from view.

9. Nested Comments

Comments and replies are now nested for easier reading.

10. General Improvements

The site has been generally improved and hopefully it shows.

Well thats a basic summary of the changes, and new features, let us know what you think and what could use improvement.

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News 2.0, newfeatures, openvoter

In case anyone didn’t notice, Heavy as Hell got some updates this evening! Here’s a quick rundown of the new features.

1. Automatically parse and retrieve story titles and descriptions during submissions - You know when you’re submitting and you have to fill in the title and give a description for your submission? Well now if you just want to copy paste, that’s pretty much all taken care of for you. Upon submitting a website, it should pre-populate the title and description for you. You can then either modify them to your liking, leave them as is, or if you want to enter your own, just clear the fields and enter your own. This might not work for every site, but for the majority it should.

2. Dupe Detection - Tired of seeing what is essentially the same story 5 times? Well now upon submitting a story, Heavy as Hell will search for potential duplicates as to try to lessen duplicate stories. Don’t worry if it pops up for your and your story is original, there’s a link to submit your original story instead…it’s a computer its not always perfect, but we’re trying to make it as perfect as possible.

3. Change and Canceling Your Vote - Accidentally vote a story up or down when you didn’t mean to? Well have no fear, now you can change your vote or if you want to cancel it, you can do that too. To change your vote, simply click on the opposite arrow. Cancelling your vote is done from either the story’s page or from your user profile.

4. Bands - Now bands can have their own profile unique to them. Bands can register on the site and create a profile letting users know their website, MySpace profile and more. Sorry, but as a band you can’t vote on stories, but if you want to participate as well, just create a user account! Now what do these bands mean for users? Simple, as a user, you can become a fan of the band. When you become a fan of the band, your sins transfer over to them (don’t worry, you keep them too) so try to get your favorite bands at the top of the sins list! To view what bands are registered with the site, just click the ‘Bands’ link in the category bar and you’ll be given a list of the bands registered.

As always keep enjoying the site and have fun promoting music that rocks!

If you happen to stumble across a bug, please let us know at http://www.heavyashell.com/about/bugreport

-Keith (DarkNemesis618)

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News, New Features heavyashell, newfeatures, socialvoter, update