Homepage Redesign v3

Myrddin

Much, much better...sort of a hybrid of old & new. Never let it be said that feedback isn't listened to!

Boards.ie: Niamh

Thanks for the feedback guys, we genuinely appreciate you taking the time to give it. And we are reading it all

GLaDOS

Forum column certainly makes things better.

I echo previous posts regarding the thanks column and too much padding.

Still annoyed that it forces me to use the new skin, but I'm aware that's fighting a losing battle.

I find myself refreshing the page instead of using pagination. Would be in favour of increasing the amount of threads displayed further.

Thanks for listening to all the feedback.

Boards.ie: Nicola

With regards to having all the content on one line, when the team were working on this they went through all possible iterations of the forum/thread view; we've a huge variation in platform and screen resolution and we have to try and cater for everyone.

Implementing the current layout on one line isn't possible for smaller viewports; it would end up being far too cluttered. Having two lines of info is also consistent with the standard layout as well as Talk To forum view.

Mothman

Boards.ie: Nicola wrote: »

Having two lines of info is also consistent with the standard layout as well as Talk To forum view.

Then make the lower line as compact as possible. It doesn't contain much info though it does contain the down arrows which do need to stay at a reasonable size.

Dades

Mothman wrote: »

If sticking with the 25 per page then when you click to page 2 and 3 then it must bring one to top of page, not same position as the previous page which is usually bottom. I've been assuming that this "bug" is being dealt with but I haven't seen confirmation

Agreed.

The pagination is really annoying if you have to scroll back up to the top either before you click "next page", or after you click it.

IMO the pagination at the bottom should be more pronounced (I only just noticed it) and send you to the top of the next page.

Boards.ie: Rónán

Dades wrote: »

The pagination is really annoying if you have to scroll back up to the top either before you click "next page", or after you click it.

We've been playing about with a scroll to top once the new page has been rendered, doesn't quite feel right yet. It's being actively worked on at the moment though, we'll get it sorted as soon as possible.

hullaballoo

Boards.ie: Rónán wrote: »

Out of genuine interest, why the aversion to scrolling? Not saying it's a non-issue, just looking for some further insight if possible.

For me, it's not an aversion to scrolling. It's a matter of getting more threads onto the first page. If I'm scanning through thread titles, I now find I've only opened 3-4 of interest before I get to the bottom. Previously, by the time I'd reached the bottom of the homepage, I would have 15+ tabs open and that would keep me going for a while before I'd return to the homepage.

Now, when I've read the 4, go back to the homepage (instinct is to refresh), the most recent threads have changed. I'm essentially reading the same 5 threads and not progressing beyond that. It minimises my contribution and means I'm missing a lot of new posts in the forum I moderate.

But scrolling unnecessarily is also annoying.

Slutmonkey57b

Boards.ie: Nicola wrote: »

With regards to having all the content on one line, when the team were working on this they went through all possible iterations of the forum/thread view; we've a huge variation in platform and screen resolution and we have to try and cater for everyone.

Implementing the current layout on one line isn't possible for smaller viewports; it would end up being far too cluttered. Having two lines of info is also consistent with the standard layout as well as Talk To forum view.

This is a sensible point, but the standard layout does not have this extreme level of padding between entries, so if the concern was consistency, then.... well you can guess my point.

As to the "talk to" forums, these are places which are philosophically distinct from the rest of boards, and therefore they should look different from the homepage and forums. Extra padding makes sense in those forums because it's less of a communal discussion, and posts are distinct requests.

With regard to different resolutions and platforms, if boards can automatically redirect my phone to touch.boards.ie, can't similar information be used to redirect people to youneedabettermonitor.boards.ie which features more padding or pagination?

Slutmonkey57b

hullaballoo wrote: »

Now, when I've read the 4, go back to the homepage (instinct is to refresh), the most recent threads have changed. I'm essentially reading the same 5 threads and not progressing beyond that. It minimises my contribution and means I'm missing a lot of new posts in the forum I moderate.

But scrolling unnecessarily is also annoying.

I've found this on the touch layout too. If I go to page 2, most of the posts from page 1 are now on page 2 because page 1 has refilled with newer updated posts in the time it takes me to scan, decide I'm not interested, and move on. So what you end up with is a rolling race between me and the "status quo when I first started looking" where I'm trying to get ahead of the updates. It's frustrating and it can go on for 5 pages or so before I "beat the system" and see new content. If the new homepage is limited to 3 pages of 25 threads, then either I'm never going to beat the system, or I'm going to miss lots of potentially great threads.

Quazzie

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

I've found this on the touch layout too. If I go to page 2, most of the posts from page 1 are now on page 2 because page 1 has refilled with newer updated posts in the time it takes me to scan, decide I'm not interested, and move on. So what you end up with is a rolling race between me and the "status quo when I first started looking" where I'm trying to get ahead of the updates. It's frustrating and it can go on for 5 pages or so before I "beat the system" and see new content. If the new homepage is limited to 3 pages of 25 threads, then either I'm never going to beat the system, or I'm going to miss lots of potentially great threads.

Why not just stay on the first page so and refresh?

Boards.ie: Danny

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

I've found this on the touch layout too. If I go to page 2, most of the posts from page 1 are now on page 2 because page 1 has refilled with newer updated posts in the time it takes me to scan, decide I'm not interested, and move on. So what you end up with is a rolling race between me and the "status quo when I first started looking" where I'm trying to get ahead of the updates. It's frustrating and it can go on for 5 pages or so before I "beat the system" and see new content. If the new homepage is limited to 3 pages of 25 threads, then either I'm never going to beat the system, or I'm going to miss lots of potentially great threads.

I covered this in the initial launch of the home page - the desktop latest posts page does not operate like the touch site home page.

Flicking between pages on the desktop tabs will not show you the same thread that was on page 1 on page 2 or 3. This is because all three pages are stored in your browser when you initially load the page or tab. Your point of reference for latest posts is always the time you loaded the page/tab.

On the touch site when you change page you are asking the server for page 2 of the latest posts at the time of refresh (not initial page load) by which time what you had on page 1 may very well have been pushed onto page 2 or page 3 or even further down

Danny

Slutmonkey57b

Quazzie wrote: »

Why not just stay on the first page so and refresh?

Because then you're only seeing the threads which get updated every few seconds.

Dav

I just want to talk about this issue people keep reporting about "wasted space." First of all, I have a graph...



That's a breakdown of the screen resolutions that hit the site according to Google Analytics. You'll see that the overwhelming majority is 1366 X 768, but there are plenty lower as well as larger resolutions too. The page is designed to be viewed in a width of 960px. The page will stretch a certain amount if you've got a wider screen, that's to avoid excessive white space on the left and right of the content at high resolutions.

But keeping that in mind, the content looks good in those lower screen resolutions and that's the way we'd prefer to keep it.

So I hope that clears some of the reasoning for that particular decision up - we don't just decide on these things out of thin air

Newaglish

I have to ask, this thread is clearly being read and responded to: what's the story with the Thanks column? Forgive me if I've missed where someone has explained why it's there but I really don't get it.

Dav

Thanks column - pretty simple really, it's another visible element of how popular a given thread is and it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that it being a "Thumbs Up" icon reminds people of another hugely popular site that uses a thumbs up icon for something similar

WIZE

Dav wrote: »

Thanks column - pretty simple really, it's another visible element of how popular a given thread is and it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that it being a "Thumbs Up" icon reminds people of another hugely popular site that uses a thumbs up icon for something similar

I dont kow how this works.

1 post could have 200 thanks due to a single Smart ass comment.

or

You could have a Thread with 200 single thanks.

Would it not be a better Idea to use the Viewed count rather then Thanks count?

Boards.ie: Danny

WIZE wrote: »

I dont kow how this works.

1 post could have 200 thanks due to a single Smart ass comment.

or

You could have a Thread with 200 single thanks.

Would it not be a better Idea to use the Viewed count rather then Thanks count?

Views update once per hour, it's not live data.

Danny

Quazzie

Dav wrote: »

Thanks column - pretty simple really, it's another visible element of how popular a given thread is and it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that it being a "Thumbs Up" icon reminds people of another hugely popular site that uses a thumbs up icon for something similar

Remember that time when ye all played an April's fool trick on us, and released FaceBoards. Is this another one of those things?

WIZE

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Views update once per hour, it's not live data.

Danny

But "Thanks" does not make a Thread popular as I listed above.
Can you not set the View count to update every 30 sec as an example?

Thread views would be alot more acurate to guage the quality of a thread.

RichT

It's changed again!!

Will you just ever leave it alone!!!!

Princess Peach

The post number's aren't clickable, meaning I can't get to the newest posts that way.

Oh clicky buttons just appeared. Its all good!

Boards.ie: Danny

WIZE wrote: »

But "Thanks" does not make a Thread popular as I listed above.
Can you not set the View count to update every 30 sec as an example?

Thread views would be alot more acurate to guage the quality of a thread.

Views are open to abuse. At any stage we can be (and regularly are) hit by scraping sites like boardreader, search bots and any amount of non-genuine views. There are some user profile pages on boards with more than 100,000 visits, all caused by misbehaving scraping scripts/bots.

Indicators of thread quality isn't so black and white, both thanks and views have their draw backs. View counts not being live is done to reduce load on the server, 30 second updates would increase load significantly for little gain.

Princess Peach wrote: »

The post number's aren't clickable, meaning I can't get to the newest posts that way.

If you have new posts in the thread the down arrow to the left of the OP's name will bring you there. This behaviour is consistent with vBulletin's forum display.

Danny

RichT

Invisible down arrows?

coffee_cake

I'm a bit confused having the OP name and arrow below the thread because I thought it was the latest post!
maybe you could put it the other way around

It's better than your original "new" version anyway
I see what you mean about resolution, there's no blank space now on my work pc
Not that I use boards at work...


Oh you have a latest posts filtered by forum option now
That's interesting actually
And an unbolded if read thread title!
Good work

WIZE

So the Only way to rate the quality of a thread would be to have a rating box for the first time you exit a thread which would not appear if you accessed the thread again.

Guess this is to much hassle

Sarky

Ah, that's better. Much better. I can actually scan the page for what I'm looking for without a headache. Thank you.

Now just cram more rows in the vertical space so I don't have to go scrolling to see everything. ^_^

wnolan1992

I like the latest version.

A lot.

The only problem I have with it is pagination. I'd prefer the 75 threads to just be on one page.

Other than that I'm happy enough. Still prefer the old version, but I can make peace with this now.

wnolan1992

I'm a bit confused having the OP name and arrow below the thread because I thought it was the latest post!
maybe you could put it the other way around

This is the way it is in the CP. Changing it around would make it inconsistent.

Masked Man

How exactly are you guys deciding which threads are bolded/unbolded and have the latest post arrow? Why didn't you just use the same system that vbulletin does?