ANNOUNCEMENT: forum decluttering initiative

[Meister]

Way back after we'd transplanted the forum on a new server Brian asked us kindly

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/2248/verykindly.jpg (http://img687.imageshack.us/i/verykindly.jpg/)

if we could do something about decluttering the forums and make them more streamlined, and after spending some time debating how we'd go about this we developed a few ideas now that we're going to implement over the next few weeks and months.

STEP 1: we have a few subforums too many. Instead of a TV/Movies forum, a books/comics forum, etc. we're going to make one big Media Consumption subforum. Before we move any threads, though, we're also going to come up with a system that allows you to label threads appropriately so it's easier to find, say, movie threads in the whole shebang. It's a bit of a change but if it doesn't work out, we can easily go back to the old setup with separate forums.

We're probably also going to drop Crowd Favourites and make the stickies in there stickies in other subforums, as well as maybe merge one or two other forums.

While I'm at this, though, I want to ask you guys if there's any categories you'd like to have in other subforums. In Media Consumption you'd naturally have Movies, Books, Comics etc., so in General there could be, I dunno, Serious and Notsoserious? Feel free to throw out suggestions!

More steps to follow as we iron out kinks in the plans!

[rpgdemon]

Is the idea to make the entire forums more streamlined, and to make every subforum easier to access, or is it to make each subforum definitively have a purpose of existence, with more than just a handful of posts in them?

I only ask because it might make sense to streamline/combine the Nuklear Powered subforums, if you wanted everything to be more easily accessible to newcomers, whereas if you were more looking to do the second option, you seem to be good.

Sorry if this is unintelligible, it's 7 AM and my brain shouldn't be on right now.

[Meister]

Partly the latter, partly also so people won't have to pick one UND NO MORE ZEN ONE subforum for their thread anymore (especially for pop culture topics that have the potential to span several forms of media like Seil's Gobstopper thread - hmm, better make a General icon too), which I guess means partly also the first one since so many subforums could easily be a factor of intimidation.

Regardless though combining the Nuklear Powered ones is a splendid idea based on the low level of activity alone.

[Nikose Tyris]

Maybe changing up "Etc!" to be a More Marvel-Oriented title since it seems that's where Brian's big side projects seem to be based right now?

[Jagos]

Do you really NEED a subforum for every last comic of Kuro's? HIKYM hasn't updated in three weeks and we've kept the conversation to one major thread. You might as well archive some of those works to maybe two forums:

Marvel Projects
Current works

[Nikose Tyris]

I fully support the Statement by Jagos, with one alteration

Marvel Projects
Web-Based Works

Just retitles.

[Meister]

Most likely that's just going to be one big What Brian Writes forum with icons for 8BT, HIKYM and so on.

Kinda on the fence whether to lump video games in with everything else or make a Gaming subforum with Video and Tabletop icons. Hum.

[Nikose Tyris]

Games includes -everything games- from Tabletops like Warhammer, to RPGs, to video games.

It also looks like it gets the most activity next to General, so maybe leaving it seperate is a good idea.

[Meister]

Good point. And if it turns out there's 99% video games we can still merge it and have what few tabletop/PnP threads there are relocate to General.

[greed]

What about computers and technology, that doesn't really fit with the "Games" forum or the proposed "all other media" forum, so is that gonna stay stand alone or are tech support threads going to relocate to General?

Also if you're making icons for different thread types, do LPs merit their own icon in the games forum? Or should they just have the video game icon, or maybe whatever icon stories will have over in Arts in Crafts(I'm assuming that stays a separate forum, it wouldn't really fit in General I think) if you can reuse icons like that.

[Jagos]

I'd say put Discussion with Computers and technology. They both support the professional side of us that wants debate and needs logic. When you go into both parts, you have a better expectation of answers than you do with General.

[Meister]

shiney suggested merging the computer forum and the games forum, whereas I think they're rather different in content. I guess it's going to stay separate for the time?

An LP icon isn't a bad idea. Not sure about Arts & Crafts yet, it's definitely going to stay its own subforum but I'm not sure if there are distinct categories unique to it. But a Stories icon sounds like a good idea too.

For reference we're going to run this via post icons since hardly anyone uses them (and they're kinda generic anyway). In fact, when you make a thread or reply in advanced mode, you can see one for comics is already up. So yes, you'll be able to use any icon for threads in any subforum.

[Jagos]

I believe the merger with computer and games was tried before. It didn't work. The games marred out topics on computers.

Seeing as how Discussion and Computers are the slower forums, I still suggest those two but it's up to you.

[Meister]

Icons are done! For now, at least, these should do, but if you think there's a useful category missing, let us know.

Next step: applying these to at least the threads on the subforums' front pages. This is gonna be a lot of tedious clicking around and might take a while. Feel free to help if you have an active thread by editing the first post.

[Amake]

If we're going to have a Media Consumption forum, why not change the creative forum to Media Production? Maybe with a witty subtitle comparing the 90% fewer posts compared to the Consumption forum with the adage about 90% of all artistic endeavors being crap?

That's all I've got.

[rpgdemon]

Pretty spiffy new icons, but could I suggest that the "visual" icon get it's color changed slightly, to be more readable? I don't know if it's just my monitor's color settings, but it's showing as a really light pink border that doesn't really contrast with the white text.

Also, if I want to be REALLY nitpicky, I'd suggest maybe antialiasing the lighter colors, if only because against a dark background they look a bit jagged. Music in particular, really.

[Meister]

Yeah, they kinda do, at that. Let's finish the labelling and merging, then we'll have another look at what it's like when it's done, and then fix the icons that need to be fixed.

e: ugh, yeah, pretty sure almost all of those need to be a few shades darker to begin with.

e2: and Books and Comics need different colours altogether

[Meister]

I'm not gonna be able to fix any icons tonight anymore, but here are two zip files with .psds of all the new icons. If anyone wants to try their hand at improving them (or using them as a template for new ones), go nuts. Otherwise I'll just take care of it tomorrow myself. :)

If you do, you'll need this font (http://blambot.com/font_dispdroid.shtml), please keep the filenames and if you do new ones the dimensions (50 x 16), and try to use public domain or self-made graphics.

[Seil]

I think the icons clash with the original color scheme. Well, not so much "clash" as "look out of place. I would suggest turning the black or grey background of the site to white, but that would make the icons harder to see.

Hrm.

That being said, I think it's going to be difficult to change from a particularly organized forum (http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u59/Poetisch/RAWR-3.jpg?t=1273602711) into a forum where more threads are categorized more basically, it's going to be hard to find things, maybe harder to place things?

That being said I'll offer my services to help.

[shiney]

I do kinda feel like they're a little...garish.

Edit: the "fun" and "wtf" ones at least.

[Krylo]

I do kinda feel like they're a little...garish.

Edit: the "fun" and "wtf" ones at least.

/agree

[synkr0nized]

They're very... bright. Maybe my eyesight is getting worse, but I feel like the glow around the text and the text itself could have more contrast for the ones with lighter colors (e.g. look at "movies" or "music" and compare it to "serious" or "writing").


e: Otherwise, I like these. Better than having a category put into the thread title text.

[Meister]

Yeah, in retrospect I should have put these against the forum background colour at least once instead of just against the Photoshop background all the time. Gonna fix that tomorrow for sure!

[shiney]

Why would you, synk? Why would you type in black text.

[rpgdemon]

Why would you, synk? Why would you type in black text.

Clearly you're insane.

[Fenris]

Clearly you're insane.

It's coming up as black on my screen too.

testing

e: huh I don't get it. I quoted synk's post and it says synk used red as well

e2: [color=Tahoma]makes fonts black.

[synkr0nized]

Maybe you guys should get a better browser?

I mean, I have fixed it now, but before it was just showing red with the default post font.


And this is a test.

e: Yes, stop using MSIE to browse, I guess.

[Osterbaum]

I'm just seeing red.

[Fenris]

I use Chrome to browse.

[Ecks]

I am a member of the Firefox Master Race, so I have no issues with your antiquated Internet Explorer.

EDIT: I am also stupid for posting entirely off topic. Good job on the fixing things that don't work for some people front guys. I for one dream of a day when there will be no problems across all platforms ever, and we can do whatever with anything and not have it break.

[synkr0nized]

That wasn't meant to start some kind of browser argument. I had merely tested to see if IE made that black, which it does. I had thought Chrome, being based on Mozilla's code, would behave similarly to Firefox. Guess not.

In any case, that's a quirky behavior. <font color="Tahoma">words!</font> is invalid HTML, and I'd say ignoring that tag when rendering a page is the superior behavior, not defaulting to black or whatever it is doing and actually altering the color in any way.

[Meister]

Right, I think I managed to fix the most glaring (lolpun) issues with the icons. Do a hard refresh on a page that has them all (new thread or advanced reply).

[Seil]

Is there a list of what colors are available?

[Meister]

Not really. I just tried to a) have every icon a different colour, or at least keep similar colours to icon pairings that are unrelated (like Robo and Music), and b) have the colour match the image.

Additional info for everyone who wants to do up a new one: save them as .gif through the "save for web" option in Photoshop, and you can set a matte colour to blend the transparency with. You'll want that set as #222222.

[Archbio]

I'm not sure I agree with the arithmetic of the decluttering so far, really. Less isn't necessarily more simple. Substracting subforums reduced the numbers of items on the front page, but I think to some degree at the cost of making the forums actually less streamlined by throwing a lot of things in larger piles, which then need more of those new tags. It just seems less neat, overall.

I'm not saying that the former status quo was the ideal balance, but there seems to be a rush toward an extreme (altough I don't see there being no subforums at all.)

[shiney]

Yeah Brian saw a forum that never existed which only had 4 forums on it and he decided that's how things should be. We're trying to strike a balance between that and what we have now.

[rpgdemon]

Well, seeing this in practice, the icons make things seem a bit more cluttery than before... The problem is that there's no real way of sorting them out, and the threads pertaining to different topics are just randomly shuffled within eachother. I feel like it'd be easier if you could sort the threads by topic, or something like that.

[Seil]

I agree with Archie and RPG.

[Hanuman]

Forum Info and Forum Rules subforums can be made into Forum Rules and Info

At this point, is a Nuklear Powered subforum needed, or can it be squished in with the above suggestion of the combined thread under something like Forum HQ or some other silly name?

[Loyal]

I don't see how topics about forum administration and topics about Brian's works can be plausibly squashed into a single forum.

[Krylo]

Yeah Brian saw a forum that never existed which only had 4 forums on it and he decided that's how things should be. We're trying to strike a balance between that and what we have now.

The slimming down on categories is Brian's idea. As he is 'da boss' insomuch as we are still a forum dedicated to his great and magnanimous works, we'll have to at least try the slimming.

I'm not convinced it'll be so terrible once we get used to it. A lot of the sections getting folded together were pretty sparse, anyway. I do see where you guys are coming from, however.

Though I just browse via new posts all the time and never actually click into forums, so it's gonna be on you guys to inform me (or just go straight to the mods and skip the PR guy, I dun care) if it's totally insufferable once it's been done up like that for a few weeks. You know, let it have a good go, at least, as boss man says he wants it this way.

The icons are Meister's idea to make this slimming as painless as possible, in that you can glance to the left of any thread and see if it's books, comics, or TV in media consumption, for instance. They're are aware of how 'busy' and distracting the icons are up in mod land, so hopefully we'll figure something out on those that won't require changing them completely (as Meister did work pretty hard on them and they are kinda pretty). Some talk of maybe making them semi-transparent or deepening the colors has been mentioned.

So hopefully that'll be taken care of soonish as well.

[Seil]

EDIT After looking at them, I don't think it's the colors, just those emoticon ones. It's the emoticons that look off.

[rpgdemon]

Right when I shut my laptop to go to sleep, an idea and possible solution strikes. As a forewarning, if this seems like a crazy bad idea in retrospect, I reserve the right to claim it came along at nearly 2 AM, and totally isn't my fault.


Anyhow, the idea: Rather than having a thread for each individual update for the various comics, sticky one daily discussion thread for each. Sort the stickies by icon and subject matter (I'd suggest the rules being at the top, by the way), and then differentiate threads made by users by telling them to use the icons properly. It should pretty much get rid of the cluttery look that the forum has right now, and make the location of important info for the various comics easy to find and clumped together, but all on the same page.

[Meister]

I'm pretty sure there's no option to sort stickies by any other measure than "last date posted" but I'll look into it, maybe there's a plugin (and not being able to sort threads by icon/tag/whatever is something that bugs me too, so while I'm at it maybe there's a plugin for that as well).

[rpgdemon]

Ah, so if you post in a sticky, it'll move the others around? That complicates things.

[Donomni]

EDIT After looking at them, I don't think it's the colors, just those emoticon ones. It's the emoticons that look off.

If we get rid of them as topic icons, can we keep them as normal emoticons?

I mean, let's face it, the bongicon is pretty sweet.

[Meister]

... it's actually supposed to be a party horn that, in the wtf icon, is rather inexplicably on fire, but I guess bong works too for both categories.

[shiney]

It's pretty blatantly a spliff, dude.

Yeah I think maybe we can redo the emoticon ones, they don't seem to mesh as well. All the other ones are great. Also needed: "misc" category for just generic stuff.

[MasterOfMagic]

Only thing I can say is: Not a big fan of the new icons.

I'll get used to everything, of course.

[Meister]

Update: I may have found a way to vastly improve the icon system but there's no telling until we actually go and try it; unfortunately I'll probably be tied up until Monday. May find some time later today, may not.