03-24-2021, 07:39 PMCount Chocula Wrote: Why are there still no gold, silver,bronze iihf forum flair for users? It might inject some more prestige into the tournament, since it's current iterration is mostly a filler tournament. With some stakes and visibility it may get people more hyped for IIHF.

a few thoughts from a technical perspective. there is a limited amount of real estate in the awards area of a post for a number of reasons. we use a mybb plugin for the forum awards that appear on user pages and under the user's avatar. the plugin has a setting for the maximum number of awards shown under a forum user's avatar when they post. we can change that number however we want, but then we have questions of screen economy.

users with a long history on the site who picked traditionally successful IIHF nations and have a case full of challenge cup, 4sc, and donator awards will suddenly go from 10 awards to dozens. the number of awards per row is fixed at 4, so these users would have 6, 7, 8, or more rows of awards taking up space.

we could limit the number of awards displayed, but if we did that the plugin would display the x most recent awards. there's no user interface for the plugin or behind the scenes configuration setting that would allow a forum user to choose which awards display or in what order they display, and to my knowledge that's not something we can change with the plugin's features alone. i'm sure some folks would be bummed their 2k club award, donator award, first challenge cup award, etc got pushed off their posts for an IIHF bronze or silver (or in the case of a country like ireland winning 7 golds in a row or something, another IIHF gold for the pile).

we're pretty heavily bound by the capabilities of the forum awards plugin, since it's something we're using and not something we wrote ourselves. if we wanted to make changes to give an awards selection user interface or control which awards are displayed, that would be brand new work for web developers that are working on other key site features like shl trading cards and the index. there might be non-code solutions, and all my thoughts might be arbitrary non-issues in practice, but that's at least my initial thoughts as someone who's seen how the forum awards sausage is made. i 100% get wanting IIHF to be more impactful, just worried about the other implications of adding more awards (especially awards that one user can accumulate a lot of).