New Designs, New Ideas, Logo, SHA-256, Marketing, and More

Yo! How's life?

First off, to the new backers, thanks for helping out to get this project up and running!

I've added a bunch of new things, as well as changed and moved things around on DEG Mods, and started some activities. Let's get right into it.

Logo

Every now and then I spend some time figuring out a logo for DEG Mods. Can it be something related to mods? games? a controller of some sort? a coding sign perhaps. I didn't really feel anything was fitting to describe what this project offers, but then it hit me, I was thinking like your modern designer, and I was kind of tired of modern logos trying to be “simple” and “smart” in their designs, although I'm not dissing them, I just miss the fun logos of the past where it had some character to it. With that said, why not merge both of these mentalities?

Considering I already wrote up a basic mascot for DEG Mods (will reveal that info at a later time), and doodling around, I thought of creating another mascot that's attached to the first (it'll be understood when their stories get revealed) that'll act as the project's mark. As such, a fun logo was designed. Here's Degai! (or Degbot, I'm not settled on the name yet)

Bottom Navigation

Considering the epiphany I had about strengthening the connection between mod creators and gamers, because of how Nostr works, which led me to create a feed page where users switch between seeing the latest mod posts, blog posts, and normal short posts of the creators they've followed, this made me think of creating another element that would help users reach that conclusion and behavior, a bottom navigation bar.

This bottom navigation bar is similar to how smartphones look, as well as inspired by Umbrel, and some Nostr hub clients.

This bottom navigation will be visible for both desktop and mobile users, a daring approach I know, however, considering that this would interfere with some information on the site, I've made it so that it can be hidden/collapsable with a click.

Buffer on Nostr Actions

One of the more unconventional changes I decided to make, is having the re-post button as a single click rather than a drop-down menu that appears and giving you the option to choose between a normal repost or a quote repost, where I moved the quote-repost under the reply function (where you'd see two buttons: “Reply” and “Quote-Reply”).

Changing this process to how it was traditionally made resulted in having one less click to perform either a normal repost or quote-repost, however, considering that people are used to how it is usually done, this may cause an initial annoyance with most people, more so with Nostr users as almost all actions are kind of permanent.

That permanent thing for Nostr is an issue of its own, in regards to UX, and a much bigger problem than the initial annoyance for users if this was a normal social site (where you can undo the repost), with that said, the solution to this is to have a sort of buffer function where an action will be executed after a few seconds. Here's a video demonstration.

In this example, if a user clicks “repost” on a normal published post, then a simple loading bar will appear and it will complete after 4 or 5 seconds, giving the user the chance to click it again to cancel that action.

Download Mod

The download section on a mod's page has been slightly altered. Before it showed all download links that the created had submitted, but now it just shows the latest one, with an option to view old ones.

Another change is the addition of “Authentication Details”, for all download links, which shows two pieces of info: the SHA-256 Hash and the npub of the creator. This has been added after looking at how zap.store has done things. The mod creator adds these options pieces of info when they add the download link to the mod submission page.

In addition to that, there'll be a third field and piece of info as well where the mod creator provides a link to a malware detection scan of their choice, to help users see if there are any potential serious issues with the mod.

Settings

A new obvious page has been created. The Settings page, one that includes multiple tabs that lead to different pages. I moved where you edit your profile there, as well as the admin page (the admin page is for the project owner, like myself, to change what games to showcase on the front page, as well as choosing who can show their blog posts at in the DEG Mods's blog page). I've added a “log out” button, and a relay page for users to manage their relay list that they'd read and write from.

Lite Marketing

I've started to do some lite marketing, where at the moment I'm creating small long-form posts about previously censored mods and banned creators, directing people where they may be able to download these mods until DEG Mods is up and running, all the while creating the similar posts of newly censored mods as they appear, where I'll share these posts on X/Twitter to get people informed, provide them with this useful information, as well as having them curious about “DEG Mods” to get more followers, potential campaign supporters, and potentially having modders interested in it as well.

All the while shitposting here and there with relevance to gaming, mods, and censorship. That's just a given.

In terms of more marketing efforts, considering the effort needed, it may or may not happen in the current state of how I'm working on this project, but if I manage to do more, like a trailer, or a video series for example, than that's a plus.

Other Fixes & Additions

I've adjusted the image/screenshot gallery of a game mod's page where you can click on an image and it'll expand the image, as well as providing users with “next” and “previous” buttons to switch between images.

There's now a login pop-up along with various registration options.

An “edit” button was added for published mods and blog posts.

That's about it for now! Cya.