Improving Navigation

[Ronin Storm]

We've noticed and received a few comments indicating that people are having a little trouble finding things on vBulletin. The Admin Team have been talking through options and angles over the past week or so, looking to understand the problem and come up with some options.

The problem seems to be in two parts:

1. It's not easy to see when there are new posts in sub-forums of sub-categories, such as the Battlefield 2 forum under the Shooters category.
2. Some information is simply not sufficiently obvious (or sufficiently near to the top), such as new private messages or the need to join usergroups.

I've grabbed a chunk of one of my posts from our discussion thread enumerating some options, based on my available time to implement them and their relative benefits. Quoted below.

Stuff I Can Do Quickly

1. Bring the majority of the forum down to a single level, rather than the nested approach used to date.
   • Forums such as Battlefield 2, Alien Swarm and Civilization 4 would all appear at the same level as Games Announcements and ...Other Games.
   • Last posts will then be clear, for all individual games, rather than being obfuscated behind the second-level categories.
   • The link-forums beneath many of the games would remain nested.
   • The THN Servers category could/should be pulled up to the top too.
   • Downside is that the list of forums becomes very long for some people, but for people who only track a few games (I track 3, for example) there will be very little functional difference.
   • May actually simplify the permissions configuration for forums, as Games sub-categories don't require their current weird-ass permissions.

Stuff I Don't Have Time For Right Away

1. Two column style, bringing upcoming events to the top of the page in a side column, and pushing THN branding/logo into the sides not the top.
   • Events are an important piece of understanding and should be visible on first impression of the page.
   • Branding to the sides, not the top, will bring the entire page upwards allowing people to see more of the forum before scrolling down.
   • Side bar also allows additional things to be integrated into that first impression of the page.
2. Recent Topics module integration.
   • Probably the most-used piece of functionality from IntegraMOD.
   • For the new style, can integrate into the side bar.
3. Private Messages block more obvious, with twiddles to make it obvious when there are PMs waiting to be read.
   • It's tricky to see when a PM has arrived if you don't receive the "you have new PMs" popup for some reason. It's small text shoved into a corner. Needs to be more obvious.
4. Redraft THN_amber theme to include new functionality.
   • THN_amber is owned by Haven so I don't want to be changing that without him.
   • I can provide all code changes required by new functionality, however, or provide the new style's framework back as a template for redrafting THN_amber.
5. Redraft or remove THN_blue theme.
   • I'm tempted to clone new themes off the base functionality I'm writing into the new style. This may make maintenance simpler, as style-inheritance is a feature of vBulletin.
   • THN_blue offers a lighter colour and a scalable width. These features need to be maintained, both separately and together, whatever happens to THN_blue.

Stuff I'm Not Sure Whether It'll Help

• CMS Front End
  • Not sure what we gain from this. We don't actually need much (any?) additional content, I believe. I think we just need to re-sort the information that we already have and make some of it available nearer to the top of the forum or on the forum home page.
  • Contrarily, there are a small number of pieces of information that it would be useful to keep at the top, such as the current donations balance and our server IPs, TeamSpeak, etc. For the donations, I can't see a good way of doing that in templates (yet) but for the links and text this can all be templated as it doesn't change much.
• Sub-categories to show last post
  • This requires core code hacks. If we go down this route then we put our board outside its support agreement and suddenly a big advantage of vBulletin is nullified -- support and quick-and-easy code upgrades. I'm not keen to make this harder!

I've not done any vetting on my post so please consider it "raw thinking". The thing I am most keen to get feedback on is the very first item "Bring the majority of the forum down to a single level, rather than the nested approach used to date." I've added a poll to gather a quick idea of what people think of this idea, at least as a resolution over the near future. If you have any other thoughts on that, or on the other propositions, let us hear them.

 

[BiG D]

I like how the forums are laid out over at BCG http://forums.blackcatgames.com/

Nice and simple, easy to quickly look over and see where the posts are at. I think a big issue here is we simply have too many forums. I know it's set up like it is for a reason, but it seems to me there's too many forums for not enough content.

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

I like how the forums are laid out over at BCG http://forums.blackcatgames.com/

Agreed. Although the THN_amber layout is much more pretty.

 

[Haven]

I think we can lose the distinction between shooters and roleplay games- it doesnt really serve much purpose. I dont think its viable to move all the games from both those sections to the top level - the front page will be huge if we do that. We could either create a single "games we are playing" container and put them all in that or make them a sub-forum of "Games announcements". Of those two thoughts I think the first is better. I think we should try and limit forums to no more than 2 levels depth - once we get sub-sub-forums then we've an issue with navigation as there is a lot of drilling down to do.

So everything on the frontpage in one flat level seems like a mad idea to me that will just make the frontpage ungainly a too large to navigate (scroll hell).

If you can hold off on chages then I'll get the dev forum setup tomorrow - I've been lax doing this so far and it would be nice to be able to evaluate changes before they happen for real.

Hows that sound ?

 

[Ronin Storm]

If you can hold off on chages then I'll get the dev forum setup tomorrow

I'm resting today. Not got time to do this until, er, Tuesday evening next week, so I was just going to let the poll run 'til late Monday and see where we'd gotten to.

So everything on the frontpage in one flat level seems like a mad idea to me that will just make the frontpage ungainly a too large to navigate (scroll hell).

It's a fair concern, but I think it may well be mitigated by the fact that some (many?) only subscribe to a subset of all those games. Super Moderators and people subscribed to all the groups will be the most affected.

I think we should try and limit forums to no more than 2 levels depth

For reference, there are no forums that contain posts at a depth greater than 2 levels at the moment, if one ignores the fact that first level categories and first level forums actually appear at the same level. The only depth 3 items are links to other sites.

We could either create a single "games we are playing" container and put them all in that or make them a sub-forum of "Games announcements".

Collapsing all the games into a single category really doesn't gain us anything, I feel, and even makes permissions administration more complex. The issue there is that we still don't get to see the last post in any of those forums and so we're, at best, just losing two categories from our list.

Bringing the games to be sub forums of the Games Announcements forum offers more functionality, in that the last post from any of them (based on an individual's subscriptions) will bubble to the top and the container has a useful purpose in containing posts. I hadn't considered that and it may well be a way forward.

 

[Gopha]

haven is like the main man, all bow and praise the great master

 

[Ronin Storm]

I like how the forums are laid out over at BCG

Yeah, I had a feeling a Black Cat was going to point me that way. You have a good point that they have a really clean layout held at a single level, where THN feels much more muddled. I've been looking at forum redundancy here but I want to handle that in a separate pass, if possible, to keep the changes incremental and understandable.

Your point on content is fair, for sure. I am holding, in the back of my mind, one ongoing thought: if we collapse forums into each other, will we produce, in a single day, sufficient numbers of threads to overflow a single page of threads? If so, that's a problem as posts are going to start getting lost as people hit their reading tolerance in that section. I suspect we're not there yet (not looked at it seriously) but I want to remain watchful for that circumstance.

 

[Fi$hy]

I agree, I generally like the nested forums, and whilst some might be hard to spot (i.e Bf2) I'll find the posts anyway as I nearly always use the "new posts" feature.

The only issue I can see is that by some forums being less obvious, it's a bit of a turn-off to new users.

I also think, hiding forums within each other is a good idea.
Using BF2 for example, it is currently set out like this:

BF2 main (though hard to see as it's a subforum)
BF2 mini-league (obvious as main forum)
BF2 Clan (again obvious) then within BF2 Clan Admins (nicely not given as much emphasis as the other forums, sub-forum of CA's.

BF2 obviously uses a lot of forums, could you consider making Bf2 main a main forum and then putting all the other forums within it? Might reduce clutter and make BF2 main more obvious.

 

[Ronin Storm]

could you consider making Bf2 main a main forum and then putting all the other forums within it?

Yep, that's a possibility. Battlefield 2 is easily big enough (~60% of THN members say are subscribed) to warrant a section of its own but I'm not planning these changes just to impact BF2 in this instance. The core concept of allowing individual sections to grow without drowning out other sections is something I want to keep running with for the time being. I'm looking at the big picture on first pass.

 

[Fi$hy]

I worry I wasn't clear enough, I didn't mean all other forums, just all other Battlefield 2 forums, so it works like this


BF2 Main
=
BF2 Mini - League = Mini League Challenges
BF2 Clan = The Bunker (CA's)

 

[Ronin Storm]

[mod]Extended the poll closure date by 4 days to 7 days. 3 days of polling over a weekend is much too short and I'm out of time over the next few days.[/mod]

 

[Blammo!]

About pm,

For Pm make a new message received blinking red button thingy... I dont know what happends when I receive a pm (havent gotten one yet) so mb I'm just talking nonsense, but on aniother forum this works great.

 

[BiG D]

My two cents (which admittidly I got a little carried away with ) Don't mind the fact that half the text got messed up, either...

My main observation here is that forum descriptions are absolutely killing us space-wise. Shorten them down to one line, and you'll fit a lot more on one page. The other thing that might start stretching some forums is the moderators column, is it necessary to see the moderators on the main page? I would think the list inside the forum should suffice. I also dragged the recent post box a little smaller, to allow for more description space.

Link hive was dropped. Not that I have anything against it, but the community section has 4 forums where 1 or 2 could do, in my opinion. I know each one serves a very specific purpose, but I'd recommend combining at least some of them until a time when it's obvious we need to separate things to keep them organized.

The rest of the page I think I covered in the picture.

So my main reccomendations:

• bring most or all forums to the top level, they're much easier to see at a glance that way.
• shorten the descriptions a bit, or find a way to make them take less vertical space

Good luck, layout is always a tough game

 

[Ronin Storm]

Thank you for these thoughts, Big D. A picture says thousand words.

 

[Blammo!]

Btw that blinking diamond thingy next to the forum name should probably be more handy if it said "New posts since last visit" Instead of "unread posts". This way you don't have to open up the forum if you've just visited when checking new posts (or while your reading other subforums). You also dont have to use mark all topics read just for that purpose.

 

[Fuzzy Bunny]

About pm,

For Pm make a new message received blinking red button thingy... I dont know what happends when I receive a pm (havent gotten one yet) so mb I'm just talking nonsense, but on aniother forum this works great.

I just sent you a PM, so feel free to tell us what happens

 

[Blammo!]

zOMG just received a PM! Me scrolls up for purdy flashing effects!!!...... Hmz.... thats disapointing... Looks exactly the same as always .