The New Posts indicator (orange alert) on the forums here is bugged.... it randomly loses them all then they then reappear upon the next refresh... it's frustrating doing double-refreshes just to see the new topics.

Theres definitely something wrong with the ratings and the 'Most Popular' lists.

According to the Firefox addon 'Sporescope' my cow spaceship has a user rating of 35, which would put it on pg2 of the most popular spaceships... but I can't find it in the list at all.

Of course it could be a problem with the addon, but its looking like the website is the more likely culprit.

Sorry about posting a thread, I didn't notice this till it was too late. :/ Here's the suggestions.

Well I love all these wonderful sporecasts and it's a great way to get new creatures, but I was wondering if perhaps some better sorting options would make them even better. First of all there are a lot of cool small sporecasts, but what I really needed were large ones, so I had to do a bit of digging to find a couple I liked for space creatures and regular creatures. I think there should be a # of creations sort with the options of highest # or lowest #, so one with 700+ creations would come out near the top.
Another method of sorting that would be a great addition would be a sort by what type of creations are in the sporecast. Like space creatures, vehicles or aircraft. If there is more than one type maybe there could be a mixed option. This would help when looking for specific things like buildings.
Also, sorting sporecasts by popularity or giving them the thumbs up seems to be bugged. When I sort by popularity it gives the same lists as by newest. So I think the thumbs up/down ratings need to be fixed on sporecasts.
That is all, I hope you guys like these suggestions and will consider them.

Ok, here's a suggestion I hope will be considered for the online Sporepedia.

It's a good thing having all intermediate creatures uploaded as they fill the early areas of the Creature stage so we aren't stuck with only Maxis creatures in the early areas and then finished user creatures only at the end of the stage. If you don't understand that, PM me and I'll explain further.

That said, having your Profile's Sporepedia filled with a lot of almost the same creature looks bad. There are 2 ideas that would solve this problem.

First, take and automatically group all creatures with the same name into a single "card" of the most recent creature with that name. When you click on the creature to view it, it will open up like normal, but will show all creatures of the same name in order of their DOB as well and allow clicking on each one to see it full-size. Think of it like a tree display in Windows, where you have it collapsed and then hit the + to expand and see everything in that category. This allows you to have only 1 of each creature showing in the Sporepedia, yet still let people view all stages of evolution for a given creature if they want to and still lets the game use the creatures to fill up the early stages of the Creature stage. The downside of this is that you might have 2 entirely different creatures with the same name grouped together. Of course, if you just avoid naming your creatures the same thing, that won't happen.

The second idea is very similar, but each creature would have a unique ID attached to the PNG. This ID stays the same for all edits of the creature, though it may add a counter to the ID to track the order of edits. Now, when you view them in the Sporepedia, they are still "collapsed" so that you see only the newest of each creature, but the ID lets you group them "safely" so that you even if you have 2 different creatures with the same name, it won't mess up. Another ability of this system is that you can then display basically an evolution tree of sorts for the creature showing how the creature evolved. This also gives the ability to show multiple evolutionary paths of the creature if you were to go back later and make different changes to the same creature. It would also allow easily tracking creatures that other people edit and share as it would have the same ID and whomever has the original creature with that ID would be the original creator and you'd be able to link them across accounts very easily this way and even show how the creature evolved over the course of ALL accounts that have edited or changed that creature by clicking on it on just one person's account.

The second option is by far the better option and offers a LOT more features that can be added to it. The downside is that unless creatures already have a unique ID with counter like this, all creatures that are made prior to adding that in a patch will not have this ID to use. Although you'd lose some of the features for these "older" creatures, you can combine the two suggestions such that any creatures without this unique ID will be grouped as mentioned above (but only with creatures without that ID would group together so that you could name a new creature that has the unique ID the same as the creature without that unique ID and they won't combine). This would keep the Sporepedia clean even with older creatures and would allow greater control over newer creatures. In either case, the display of the Profile Sporepedias would be greatly improved and the added features (especially the ones that the second option offers) would be very nice to have.

The nice thing is that this is really a pretty easy thing to set up or at least put into motion. You don't have to add everything all at once. If unique IDs aren't currently in the PNG files, they'd have to be put into the first patch so we can start having them available as soon as possible. Other than that, it's just putting in the various things (grouping first) into the Sporepedia. Later, things like showing how they evolves in a sort of "family tree" display can be added.

I would love to see the in-game Spore Guide on the website as well. I like to print off sections on things I'm particularly interested in. For instance I am in the space stage and would love to print off the sections on the space stage and the colony planner.

I like it, the new website design, we the game. With few clicks, finds one everything. Big praise, to you. I know how heavy it is, until everything sits.

There should be a "supersporecast" feature or something that lets you make a sporecast of sporecasts. It should appear the same as a normal sporecast, except you would drag-and-drop a sporecast into it to have it automatically add every creation in that sporecast. When a sporecast in the supersporecast is updated, the supersporecast should automatically update itself.

This will be a useful tool for a player who wants to use multiple sporecasts to theme his game. For example, someone might want to use the entire Mythology Sporecast Collection, which is a collection of sporecasts, each dedicated to a different country's mythology. By creating a supersporecast containing all of those sporecasts, the player can see creatures from all of those sporecasts during a single game.

Keep up the good work, and thanks in advance.

aaarrrggg wrote:Oh I thought of another...!

The up/down arrows for the left hand menu in sporepedia feel like they're round the wrong way. When you want to see further down the list you have to scroll up the page and press the down button.

Amen, Brother!

Two words:

Filter Results.

When I search for Star Wars creations, I don't want to sift through pages of Star Destroyers. Let me list "destroyer" as a "don't include this word". i.e. in Google and Ebay, such a search would look like this:

"Star Wars" -Destroyer

Hmmm...that reminds me of the issue of intellectual property rights, which I believe Spore has been promoting the violation of. I glanced over the Maxis creations, and found copyrighted characters, such as Tigger. I've been avoiding sharing my recreations of copyrighted characters, in order to comply with International laws. Also, who owns the copyrighted to the creatures we upload/don't upload? Does Maxis hold a copyright on everything? Do I? Is it a joint thing where I have limited rights? Somewhere on the website, there needs to be a notice about intellectual property rights-- and what is legal to upload.

Oops I didn't see this thread so I made a separate thread.
Anyway, here's my gripes:

This is a list of problems I have had for months with the Spore website/sporepedia.
I used to use Firefox 2, then I upgraded and all these problems persist.

- I am constantly logged out while browsing and doing things like choosing buddies, leaving comments, etc.

- Logging in takes several tries. I get no error, page just says done but I am still not logged in. I click several times and let it work, then after about 5 tries I am logged back in.

- My avatar constantly changes. I never know when I will log in to see a new one, and it's extremely annoying at this point. I'll even host it offsite if I must. Just please, I beg you, stop it from constantly changing. I've given up on making it unique and now just let it show whatever it wants.

- I can't change my avatar because everything is jumbled up at the bottom of the screen and makes clicking the change button impossible. This was fixed and then a few days ago went back to the way it was.

Using the Sporepedia on the website is a nightmare for me. It's slow, I get logged out, stuff doesn't load, etc.
In the game, it's smooth and totally fine and easy to leave comments.

Thanks for your time.

Freggi36 wrote:I like it, the new website design, we the game. With few clicks, finds one everything. Big praise, to you. I know how heavy it is, until everything sits.

Oh man I just had to quote this it made my day.

I know how heavy everything is, too. Especially until it sits.

morphosiscraft: Your problem sounds like a cookie setting issue... I use Firefox 3 and don't ever get logged out on the actual website. Check your cookie settings, and regardless of what they are set to, go into exceptions and add spore.com and set it to allow. Then clear all of your cookies and try again.

I would like to be able to increase the number of topics I can see per page on these forums.

It would be great if we could have our profile avatar for a forum avatar... put a face to the name so to speak!

This may be a little bug in Spore Profile Page.

When you click on a creation that display in Profile page. You can comment it but can't rate it. This problem apply to all display creation in Profile page include Feature content. However if you use Sporepedia instead. you can rate it normally.

I use Firefox 2.