New Forum Design

Yeah, it looks good.

Only one issue i personally have with it. Have a few years experience of moderating game forums and well…it’s generally more clean and tidy if the subsections are seen on the main page.

As an example, right under “Support” it would be great if there was “New players” and “Technical support”, under “News and A.” there was “News” and “Patch notes”.

This makes it easier to quickly find the best place for posts if the user is not used to the forum structure. But that’s just a small thing, the rest looks very nice.

I was just making a suggestion, thought it’s better to do it now, while things are fresh, rather than say it in a month. But yeah, there will be an issue only when there are many threads and a lot of activity…and an issue mainly for the people moderating, not so much your average player.

In any case i think even at this stage it looks and feels better than the classic white forums that you trip over every other place.

Bah! I’m all vonfuzzled, so much so i cant even spell confuzzled right! Where can I see a list of the most recent posts, in chronological order?

It sounds ok, but to be honest, does not even come close to approaching the functionality and flexibility of a recent posts list like the last forum and many other forums have. With a list like the last forum had I can see exactly when the posts were made and if they had been made since I last logged on. The other benefit to a specialized post tracker page is I can go back in time for a while, so it is still useful to me if I haven’t checked the forums for a couple of days, which I tend to do when there isn’t a lot of new postings/news or if I feel like taking a break. With this forums, the way it is now, to check all the posts that had been made since I last checked I will have to navigate to every forum section, scroll down each list of topics and if there has been a lot of postings or there are a lot of stickies possibly navigate to the second or third page of some sections. Oh, and I almost forget, the subsections aren’t even accessible from the top level of the forums now, so that adds another click.

Let’s crunch some numbers here. Let’s say I have been away for a bit and check every English forum section and one foreign language section. That’s five level two sections and 15 level three sections. Now, let’s say four of those sections have no new posts and another three have enough new posts to go to the second page. That’s nine user inputs just to switch between all the level two sections (five to enter each level two section and four to go back to level one and enter the next level two section). Now, eleven sections with a page or less of new posts, that’s a minimum of 21 user inputs and three with two pages of new posts, which is another six inputs for the back and forth. Add all that together and you get 36 user inputs just to navigate to all the pages that list new posts.

Now, with a dedicated tracker page you just have to flip between pages and each of those page only contains new posts, except, most likely, the last page. So I will estimate that each one of those sections with new posts had half a page worth and each one with two pages of new posts had one and a half pages worth. Eleven sections with half a page is five and a half and three sections with one and a half pages is four and a half. This makes for a total of ten pages, and nine user inputs, as the first page is where the user would start if they navigate right to the tracker page, as I always used to do.

So in the end it takes 400% more time/user inputs (9 vs. 36) to navigate to pages listing all the new posts now, than with a dedicated tracker page. Granted the estimates I made are very rough, but if the game and forums become active, this example shows how quickly the user inputs increase for a user that likes to check a large portion of the forums and doesn’t check the forums on a daily basis (or more often depending on how active the forums are).

• This reply was modified 245 days ago by  Tazuras.

Hmmm, I can’t seem to figure out what user groups are or how they work, at least not from looking at my settings pages… And as there is no documentation… Not very accessible…

P.S. I looked at your profile page and figured out some stuff, have no idea how to create a group though or how to see a list of groups.

P.P.S. Ha ha! I found http://www.dawntide.net/groups/ by doing some url editing! Don’t see any links that go there anywhere though….