Filmaster introduces new activity stream, followers replace comrades

As we promised last month we’ve got for a good deal of new features and updates for you guys today. Comrades were replaced by Followers, Planet Filmaster changed its layout and…. well, just read on!
Planet Filmaster reorganized
Do you remember the filtering feature? You haven’t used it, have you? Exactly. Well, the idea to be able to personalize your Planet seemed cool at the time but it turned out too complex. Now we change the approach: we only have two tabs on Planet: All and Followers (more about the latter later in this post). There are more and more of us on Filmaster and the ability to show only the activity of the people you are most interested in starts to make sense so we’ve decided to provide it.
If you were actually that only guy who used filters on Planet Filmaster, we’ve got good news for you as well: they haven’t disappeafred completely. They are still available unde the “more options” tab.
Additionally, Planet Filmaster has a new block on the right with most interesting reviews. This is to promote the decent reviews so that they don’t disappear that fast in the stream of activity.
(details and source code: FLM-384, FLM-434)
Good bye Comrades, welcome Followers!
Soviet Union has been dead for a while so we’ve decided to finally kill the comrades. It’s a nice thing to have a comrade actually, but… it didn’t make much sense on Filmaster as it didn’t give you much.
Being a comrade is a symmetrical relationship meaning that if you are someone’s comrade, they are also yours. Sounds good but in the social media world, it’s often a barrier. Sometimes you’d like to follow someone’s activity but they don’t really care about you. Sad but true. Examples? Let’s say Robert Ebert decides that his blog sucks and signs up on Filmaster to write reviews. Everyone immediatelly follows him but he probably only wants to only follow a few people he’s interested in. This is where the new followers feature come handy!
The list of followed users (and the ones that follow you) is displayed on your Filmaster blog in the left sidebar. If you are a new user and you don’t yet follow anyone, we recommend you some folks that write good reviews so that you could start by following them, and then eventually add more people like your friends you invite to Filmaster.

This is what the new users see on Planet Filmaster / Followers tab
The followers replace comrades. If you had four comrades, they are now your followers and also you follow them. At any time you can decide to follow new users and other can also start following you (in the second case, you get notified about this fact via e-mail).
If you invite a friend to Filmaster (highly recommended!), then when they join, they automatically follow you as well.
(details and source code: FLM-382, FLM-383, FLM-421)
Updates and error fixes
Except for the new features we have also fixed a number of irritating bugs that you told us about. Here are a few of them:

• uploading and cropping avatars work fine now in any modern browser — before it worked flawlessly in Firefox only(details and source code: FLM-39),


• if you upload an avatar that is the exact size we accept (96×96 pixels), it automatically selects the whole area, so that you don’t have to be the master of manual arts in order to select the exact area and upload it successfully (details and source code: FLM-39),


• we’ve added many new movie posters thanks to integrating with The Movie DB (details and source code: FLM-242),


• spoilers (see: Spoiler tag & small improvements) are now automatically hidden on Planet Filmaster and on user blogs (details and source code: FLM-430)


• there was a bug which prevented from watching trailers on Planet Film (e.g. Planet: Sita Sings the Blues [2008]) – it works fine now (details and source code: FLM-430),


• When the film you requested (using film request form) is added to database, you get notified about it by e-mail (details and source code: FLM-301)
  
• When you log out and then click LOG IN in main menu and enter your credentials, it doesn’t log you out immediatelly anymore :> (details and source code: FLM-420