New BFMS Dashboard!

Over the past few years, Bravo Fleet has expanded to offer a plethora of activities and achievements for our members. We have an integrated writing system, competitions, and a comprehensive ranking and awards system that play an important part in our members’ experiences in the fleet. Previously, all of these tasks existed on separate pages that added extra layers of work for our members to view and take action upon – one of the last benefits possessed by competing software like Nova.

I’m proud to announce today we’re releasing a brand new dashboard that will revolutionize our members’ experiences with the fleet! Here are a few highlights of the changes we’ve made:

• Stories: Stories are an important part of our fleet, and are one of the many ways members connect and share their ideas. The new dashboard includes quick access to all of your drafted stories, pulling all of the functionality from the writing panel (you’ll be able to view who’s currently editing a post, and when someone else has saved it).
• Promotion Tracker: Most of our members want to rank up as quickly as possible, which is why we’ve added a promotion tracker to the dashboard. You’ll now be able to view how long until you’re eligible for your next promotion, and how many criteria you’ve completed, directly from the dashboard.
• Quick access to the Academy: For our new and returning members, or for those who want to learn more about our fleet, the Bravo Fleet Academy is an immensely important resource. Now, for those members under the rank of Lieutenant Commander who have not completed our two academy courses will have easier access to them from BFMS.
• Quick links to activities: The three most used functions on BFMS are creating a story, reporting activity, and recording gaming achievements. That’s why we’ve included those three links at the forefront of the dashboard, allowing members easier access to those essential services.
• Active users: The new dashboard builds upon the active Discord users panel offered previously and gives members the ability to view who’s logged in to BFMS and which members of our Discord server are listed as playing Star Trek Online (and a quick reminder to those of you who play STO, don’t forget to connect it to Discord so you can let other members know you’re playing!).

The new dashboard also comes with adjustments to the site’s design. While these changes are purely aesthetic in nature, it provides a more uniform appearance that’s far easier to navigate. The new style is present on both the dashboard and your activity monitor, and will eventually make its way to other logged in functions. Here’s a quick preview of what the new design looks like:

Another small housekeeping update includes a filter on our competitions page, where you can now sort competitions by their status (active or complete) or their type. We’ve also included an updated list of available competition types, which you’ll be able to see and select when creating a competition. The new competition types will allow members to easily differentiate between various other types of competitions, including the recent ribbon races, poetry, and trivia we saw in the recent fleet action.

We hope you enjoy the new dashboard! As always, if you run into any bugs, feel free to let me know via Discord or through a service request.