idea for improving OS forum

pavlovs_dog

we are too clever for our own good. all our best ideas are taking up a hell of a lot of space in the form of stickies.

and so there i was perusing some of the forums less-read (by me, anyhoo) such as credit cards, mortgages etc, and i noticed that they all have a little blue bar at the top of the page containing hyperlinks to martins most relevant articles, and other salient info.

now on inspection, i noticed, for the first time (how looooong have i being using this forum, never having spotted this before ? ) that we also have a blue bar, but it is for shopping in general, not specific to, in our case, old style topics, as is the case on other boards.

would it be at all possible for us to have our own old style bar, hence freeing up some of the space currently taken up by stickies? does anyone else think this is a good idea (if technologically feasable?), or i am on my own on this one :rolleyes: ?

squeaky

We recently re-organised our stickies and currently have just four permanent ones, which is hardly a LOT; and then quite commonly have one or two temporary ones such as Martin's recent pleas, and a short while back Queenie's Double Duty thread when it was mentioned in the News Letter just to make it easy to find.

The Blue Bar is not under our control as BG's - it is set up via the webmaster. Any changes we might want to make as the forum grows and evolves would have to go through the webmaster too - and he has plenty of work already.

It's much simpler with a much greater degree of access and flexibility to use stickies. This is what they are there for in the first place.

Trow

The one thing that does annoy me is the way that the index works now - it reminds me of those awful phone things where you have to keep pressing buttons - with the indexes (well, the recipe index anyway) you end up with three open IE windows - is there any way of streamlining it?

Edinburghlass_2

The blue bar along the top of each board leads to Martin's articles and the Main Site. Within these articles you will links with * which means that if you use these links MSE gains a small contribution which allows Martin to keep the site ad-free, run the forums and donate to charity

So, we should all be pointing users to the blue bar and Martin's articles as they are how come there is an Old Style forum

squeaky

Trow wrote:

The one thing that does annoy me is the way that the index works now - it reminds me of those awful phone things where you have to keep pressing buttons - with the indexes (well, the recipe index anyway) you end up with three open IE windows - is there any way of streamlining it?

I've been looking at this - because I don't like more than three clicks to get where I want to be either.

The problem lies in finding a balance between clear and easily read (and often slower) or a quicker way which mean that all previous subsequent menus are all listed in the one post i.e. considerably longer, more cluttered, and so less easy to read.

At the moment I've still got a few things I'd like to add to each collection to finish them off and then I'm going to review layout and ease of use again.

You might have noticed that I changed the layout of some Indexes to make the most common hits easier to see (in quote boxes) and that I set up for readers to be able to view the Index, or join at the first post (to allow browsing), or to join at the last post (to make it easy to add your own)...

..I intend doing more of this in the other collections which might then make it easier to create a more navigable overlay in the not too distant future.

I know it sort of looks finished at first glance but it's really still a work in progress, honest

MSE_Martin

And by the power vested in me by (well me really) I hereby grant you three short links on the blue bar for stickies. Please decide what they are then one of t he BGs can let andrea know and you can have em added!

pavlovs_dog

oooh thank you martin, much appreciated!!!!

hopefully if these are to be added to the generic 'shopping zone' bar, we may just tempt a few new faces into the fold

apprentice_tycoon

pavlovs_dog wrote:

.

now on inspection, i noticed, for the first time (how looooong have i being using this forum, never having spotted this before ? ) that we also have a blue bar, but it is for shopping in general, not specific to, in our case, old style topics, as is the case on other boards.

would it be at all possible for us to have our own old style bar, hence freeing up some of the space currently taken up by stickies? does anyone else think this is a good idea (if technologically feasable?), or i am on my own on this one :rolleyes: ?

I think that the quote above that I underlined is key to this - if we lose the stickies and tuck them up into the blue bar then no-one will see them, newbies in particular.

There is the 'welcome - read me first' sticky, would that be left? if it goes into the blue bar a newcomer would be cast adrift never thinking that there was so much info in the blue bar, more so if the 'challenges' and 'collections' go too.

The 'getting to know you' sticky is a current ongoing thread that isn't locked so I assume that will remain in use and in vision

I have looked at other boards and not noticed that the blue bar held different info for each board - has anyone else really looked at these blue bars?.

Those stickies have a lot of accumulated man hours in them and they need to be on show. I'm not sure that freeing up 2 lines will improve the throughput of new threads. I think that it's going to be 'out of sight out of mind'.

Edinburghlass_2

On the Telephone Boards, the three boards have different articles in their blue bars pertaining to each particular board.

Collectively, with the Utilities Board they are named the Utilities Zone.

(better not let the MSE team hear that no-one ever looks at these Zones as a lot of time was/is spent making them noticable to the Chat forum users )

squeaky

MSE_Martin wrote:

And by the power vested in me by (well me really) I hereby grant you three short links on the blue bar for stickies. Please decide what they are then one of t he BGs can let andrea know and you can have em added!

I'll talk this over with Galtizz, thanks.

Three of our stickies - Welcome, Collections, and Challenges are stickies because they're full of information and the threads in them are in regular use. The fourth is Getting to Know You and is a popular thread based on the count of people who have read it.

As stickies they are all readily visible.

MSE_Martin

Sorry to disappoint, but i'm only giving you the space in the blue bar for this forum not all the shopping forums