Front page

Okay, so I noticed that the "tickers" on the front page that show the five most recent stories and five most recently active threads have changed.

Here is my two cents, for what it's worth: I would rather have more than five items show up than to have more fluff on the five items that do show up. Showing the first three lines of the stories isn't worth much because it's usually just a repeat of the title and maybe a few words from the first sentence. Since that takes up about three times as much space as the title alone, I would rather have more items in the list (maybe the last ten stories with the author name as well as the title).

Similarly for the most recently active topics. I don't particularly care about the avatar of the person who most recently commented, I would rather have more items show up in the list, since being on the front page tends to keep threads active and I would rather have more active threads than not.

I don't know if that's possible with the current set up, but that's what I think.

I run a board or two, and whenever we make software changes that our members complain about, we just tell them they'll get used to the new look, and 99 times out of 100, they do. Having said that, I have to agree that right now, what's on the top of the front page strikes me as terribly awkward and cluttered. Personally, I too much preferred the simple title lines for both stories and forum posts.

fats wrote: how does the page look now.

fats

I think there's more useful stuff at the top, so I like it.

I'm not sure the "Me, Myself, and I" section needs to be quite so prominent, since I rarely use it. But others may disagree with me, which is fine. Moving it down and to the left might make a little more width for the "Latest from the forums" section so that long titles do not wrap.

When Chrome is maximized on my laptop, it gives a usable area of around 1200 by 700 pixels, which looks like this:

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Moving the "Me Myself and I" perhaps below the tag cloud would give a little more horizontal room for the tickers and perhaps allow the top of the blog post to show. Of course, I don't know how typical my display is.

Since I'm working on a higher resolution (1920*1080) things look a bit different from my perspective. I think the smaller "Me myself and I" section is still fine in the top left corner with the tags right under them. For broader resolutions like mine it might also be possible to get the members gallery into the top right corner.

fats wrote: made the quick change, tell me what you think.

fats

Well, I like it.

njae wrote: Since I'm working on a higher resolution (1920*1080) things look a bit different from my perspective. I think the smaller "Me myself and I" section is still fine in the top left corner with the tags right under them. For broader resolutions like mine it might also be possible to get the members gallery into the top right corner.

Yeah, maybe the "Me Myself and I" belongs on the top row after all. It makes it more obvious where to go to log in.

Shortly before the site closed down for the virus cleaning, the site front page changed. IMHO, right before that change, the site front page was perfect. Everything I really wanted to see was up top, stuff I only occasionally wanted was less prominent. In particular, I miss the random-ish selection of images near the top.

That said, the current front page is quite nice as well. I like having more recent threads displayed instead of having a few lines about each one, and if the images are not at the top, they are at least close to it.

While the home page looks good as is, I've always wondered about the usefulness of the tag cloud measured against the space it uses. True, it gives a clue to new readers what the site contains, I'm unaware of any established protocol on how a story should be tagged (eg if you're like me and you forget, or just stick to the usual 'superstrength' etc, it gives it less utility).

Just an opinion

Rip Harden wrote: While the home page looks good as is, I've always wondered about the usefulness of the tag cloud measured against the space it uses. True, it gives a clue to new readers what the site contains, I'm unaware of any established protocol on how a story should be tagged (eg if you're like me and you forget, or just stick to the usual 'superstrength' etc, it gives it less utility).

Just an opinion

Yeah the usefulness of the tag cloud is rather vague right now but that's because most stories aren't tagged at all. The fact that they can't be added via the front end submission (the fields are there, but they don't work the way they're supposed to) doesn't help here at all. I bypassed this problem by writing the tags I wanted to the start of the story and have fats add them via the backend and I suggest everybody to do same for new stories. Since fats was so nice to give me backend access, I'll see what I can do when it comes to adding new tags to already posted stories. So if anybody wants certain tags for his story, just send me a PM and I'll add them.

As for rules about which tags to use, there aren't any official ones. The story length, character and superpower-related tags like super strength, invulnerability, flight etc don't need much of an explanation. Tags like 'One-' 'Series' have to be decided by the author, only he knows if he wants to continue a story.