Paizo Website

I blame it on fanservice.

We're fans. Of their service. That's what I meant. Right.

It is slow. Very slow. Almost to the point where I can't be bothered to browse it, almost. I suspect that less interested people will be turned away because it is as slow as it is. (in fact: I know many of my friends in my gaming group don't bother with paizo.com - simply because it is slooow)

I don't know if this is spesific to me and mine (I live in Norway) but I suspect it isn't.

The best external comparative reference I know of for such things is Alexa, which currently lists our average page load time as 1.503 seconds, which is considered average for the internet (better than 51% of all sites). And we'll have some new hardware coming online in the coming months that will help speed that up a bit.

The search-engine is bad.

I do most of my shopping by searches, I usually know what I'm looking for, and that's what I want.

Have you used it much since we did a major rewrite late last year?

While I see, and support the need for custom messageboard-software, I think it could be handled better.

As they are today, it is hard to find the messageboard you're looking for, and posting in the correct one is just as difficult.

Do you have specific suggestions?

(somthing you paizonians should have noticed by now, I see all the topics you're moving around..)

I think a lot of that is because there are a lot of similar forums, but that's kind of necessary.

Oh, and to leave on a positive note. I really like the actual buying process on paizo. From shopping cart to finished order is smooth, easy and well thought out :)

Thanks!

Brian E. Harris wrote:

Kellendil wrote:

- It is slow. Very slow. Almost to the point where I can't be bothered to browse it, almost. I suspect that less interested people will be turned away because it is as slow as it is. (in fact: I know many of my friends in my gaming group don't bother with paizo.com - simply because it is slooow)

I don't know if this is spesific to me and mine (I live in Norway) but I suspect it isn't.

Occasionally, something will be slow, which Gary fixes pretty quickly.

Overall, the site is quite snappy.

Kellendil - Yeah at times the site is slow. Most of the time for me it is fine but some days it is ungodly slow. Normally as Brian said it gets fixed pretty quickly, though sometimes I think it is due to a bunch of people once a month DownLoading their paizo products makes it slow. Hmm does that mean the site is female? What some one else was going to say so i just beat you to it.

The slowness might be because of location (Norway). I'm not knocking Norway, at all. But if your traffic comes through the East coast of America, that can be a sign it is location.

Here is why:

The Paizo site is very slow for me, usually. Without stopwatch timing, it appears to take as much as 3x as long as (most) other sites to load. And then there are the extra slow times that squash that multiplier.

I can't blame this on Paizo, because I always have difficulties with West Coast sites. So, I am pretty sure there is an infrastructure problem between the West Coast, and the Mid America somewhere that just intensifies any problems with the site.

Common first load times for the Paizo website for me are around 5 to 10 seconds. Once that connection is made, average page loads are between 1.5 and 3 seconds to load. With occasional spikes back up to 5 to 10 seconds. And if it is the Download of the Month time (or one of those days where the servers get cranky), it isn't even worth visiting the site - unless I pack a lunch.

Disenchanter, I was curious about what you've been seeing so I pulled the logs for the past few days for your IP address.

For the most recent two hundred requests processed, the average time the server spent between receiving the request and generating the response is 0.44 seconds.

Six of those requests took two seconds or longer to process, with a maximum of 9.7 seconds, and if we set those aside the average response time drops to 0.30 seconds.

If you're seeing 5-10 second load times, as you've surmised those problems are apparently downstream of our servers and out of our direct control.

Of course I am not pleased with those six two-second-plus response times and it is one of our top goals to reduce the occurrence of those overall. This is an ongoing process and just this week I have fixed several problems that would contribute to long page generation times.

The main improvements I would like to see are based around mobile readability, and PbP Support:
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• Consistent CSS: Because I generally read the forums in a low-light environment, the black text on a white background really used to do a number on my eyes. I've reskinned the site as best I can using Stylish for Chrome, but the images with white (rather than transparent) backgrounds, and the tables with explicitly defined white backgrounds still leave the bright-white "Messageboards" box on the left. Also some of the "blurb" styles are used inconsistently. Try changing the background to get the store looking nice and other areas becomes unreadable.
  
• Mobile Friendly: I quite frequently read and post from my Droid. It would be nice if the forums fit the width of the screen instead of having the left-hand bar taking up real-estate. Yes, I can zoom in and pan over, but it's still annoying. Also, on the PRD site, it is DAMN NEAR impossible to reliably click on the TOC links reliably because they are in such a small font and the vertical spacing is so tight. I must zoom to about 8-10× magnification to do make a selection without risk of error.
  
• PbP Avatars: Opening-up custom avatars to just anyone would be a moderation head-ache, I get that. However, those of us who buy your products and use this site to run them would really love to have up-to-date avatars. :) My solution doesn't involve ANY coding: Make a new email acct for the submission of avatars and set it to reject all but approved senders. (To get approval, you'd post/email noting your games, etc. as proof that you are a long-running, upstanding member of the community.) Approved senders could then handle most of the avatar legwork for you. Submissions would need to fit specific criteria: image sized and cropped appropriately within a specific size range, book and page/URL references (Paizo products only), and appropriate search keywords for gender, species, class, type, name of character, etc.
  
• Thread Export: Yes, sometimes some of us just really would like to be able to save our entire PbP thread for all posterity. Right now, the only way to do this is to install AutoPager, manually scroll thru an entire thread, and then save it. For games with posts numbering in the thousands, that takes a while. ;)
  
• Formatting Buttons: It's already been mentioned, but it bears repeating. Not everyone is good at formatting their posts. Even for those of us who are, trying to do so on a smart phone is a completely different matter. Unless you setup pre-defined macros using something like FireKeys, trying to type in lots of square brackets is likely to induce rage.
  
• Alias Sets: OK, this one is probably pie-in-the-sky but... It would be nice if we could specify group lists of aliases, then, when making a post to a particular thread, specify to only show aliases from a specific set. I don't need to see NPCs from an old Crypt of the Everflame PbP when posting in a Serpent's Skull game. I don't need the SS aliases when I'm posting as the only character I play in someone's homebrew.
  
• Lists: Please, let us hide the tutorial at the top of the lists page already. :)
  
• Emoticons: Keep 'em gone. Text-based smileys work just fine and we all know what they mean. We don't need a yellow circle to know that you're joking, ;) works, and people are much less likely to spam 10 ascii emoticons in row than they are with graphical smileys. All the graphical emoticons do is break-up the flow of a post when you're reading it.
  
• Sigs & Images: The profiles on the site blow away signature blocks so there's no need for them. As for inline images... Well, yeah they could be handy, but I'm perfectly happy linking to them off-site. It doesn't break-up the flow of the posts as much, and I don't have to worry about whether or not I need to bleach my eyes before a random troll decided to link to goatse and it hasn't been moderated yet. The fact that the forums themselves are 100% work-safe is a benefit that supersedes this feature IMO.
  
• First Post Editing: In the various game forums, it would be great if the contents and subject line of the first post remained editable for all time. It's a perfect place to include a read-me for players and readers, but there's tons of stuff that can get forgotten or that might change over time.
  
• PRD Quick-Spoilers: A new tag (or set of tags) that allowed the inclusion of PRD content within a spoiler would be great. i.e. [spell]Magic Missile[/spell] would create a spoiler called "Magic Missile" and populate it with the contents of the magic missile spell from the PRD site. Too much coding? I'd settle for a tag that auto-linked for me.

*warning* *severe rant approaching* *warning*

Do not, repeat, do not summon ugly ghosts of designers who made White Wolf, Wizards or IGN. Whoever made those pages, they should burn in Hell #1001, That of a Web Developer Who Has No Shame.

Examples:
- atrocious mishmash of external and internal styles
- total mix of presentation and data
- navigation system based on russian space program with numerous clickety click items
- heavy graphic content, low textual content

Let the numbers speak for themselves:

WOTC (www.wizards.com):
Size of main page: 70 738 bytes
Number of in-line elements: 116 (1 376 425 bytes)

It bears repeating: By opening first page, you load up over 1.4 MB of useless stuff. Only ENWorld's worse in terms of page economy.

WWGS (www.white-wolf.com):
Size of main page: 21 350 bytes
Number of in-line elements: 29 (111 836 bytes)

It has also all the grace of a waltzing rhino. Or flying anvil. It's small, functional and as inviting as Nosferatu clan representative's smile.

Paizo (paizo.com):
Size of main page: 17 546 bytes
Number of in-line elements: 58 (494 294 bytes)

It's like a porcelain doll. Dated, yet beautiful. Handle with care or it may otherwise break (famous post monster events, weird post limits, no PMs, no Ajax post edit features).

----

Okies, now that the criticism are over, time to be a bit constructive (I will be merciful and skip IGN mentioned several posts earlier).

The site must be functional. Is Paizo site functional?
Yes, for certain values of functional.

It's very simple, so if you know what to look for, you'll find it.
However:
- you cannot subscribe to content (to find out latest additions of your favorite companies)
- you cannot PM your friends
- you cannot PM your clients or favorite people
- if you have only a vague idea of a thing you want, you cannot do an easy search for tags or rated content
- no content rating except reviews (automatic or single-click feedback is all the rage these days) - it would make a lot of difference if it was possible to rate people, companies and products... and posts, and threads
- no people/content rating filter (aka I want my phone to check to best new posts today)
- no personal ban list (aka I don't want to see Mr X posts again)
- no temporary or thread ban list (this thread is off limits to: ...)

If I were to make a recommendation for a more modern site outlook, I would propose the following inspirations:

The general page:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

The community page front page (note how the whole table of contents fits a large page):
http://www.ubuntu.com/community

(Ubuntu shop page is nothing to write home about - it's way too simple to handle Paizo commerce)
(ditto for Ubuntu forum pages - Paizo forums are cleaner in design)

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. One could write an essay on how the things should be done. It's easy to point out flaws. It is however my understanding that switching to overabundance of pretty pictures and messy code is not the way Paizo.com should go.

PS2. I like about Paizo's page how it features several important things - blog, latest posts, my menu. I do not like how difficult PRD documents are to find (I always prefer to Google for "Pathfinder PRD") and how problematic it is to follow interesting threads.

If you're seeing 5-10 second load times, as you've surmised those problems are apparently downstream of our servers and out of our direct control.

It is nice to see your numbers.

I only have a very rudimentary understanding of how internet traffic works, but since I moved out of Northern East Coast over a year ago things like this have tempted me to learn more so that I might figure out a way to "force" packet routing to improve some speeds.

For those curious, from Northern East Coast I didn't see any problems with the Paizo servers. Even when others were complaining of severe speed issues, my experience was fine. Rare, occasional hiccups to maybe 3 second page loads during those "worst case" times.

Since I have moved to the Southern Mid America, I see pathetic performance from West Coast based sites. When others I have known have complained about performance, it routinely is someone in Mid America, or Southern East Coast, trying to connect with a West Coast site. (Usually California based, but some in Washington and Colorado.)

And as I've mentioned a couple of times on these forums, there is at least one server on the path from my location to the West Coast that doesn't even handle ping requests properly - so any trace route requests I do die there.

So, if you know your path cuts from Mid America / Southern East Coast to the Paizo servers, that is the source of your performance issues. Even if you suspect it might travel that route, the odds are good that your issues are not the fault of Paizo, their code, or their hardware. (But occasionally, it is. ;-) )

Alexa ... currently lists our average page load time as 1.503 seconds, which is considered average for the internet (better than 51% of all sites). And we'll have some new hardware coming online in the coming months that will help speed that up a bit.

I should also mention that Alexa's page load times *probably* include data collected by robots; here at paizo, we identify robots and send them to their own version of the site in which queries are often processed at a lower priority than human users. Which is to say that anybody who factors in page load times from bots is going to end up with a higher average than human users alone would see.

Laithoron's list:

Consistent CSS: That's one of the motivations that will drive the project.

Mobile Friendly: The problem there is that every mobile browser is different, so what seems like an improvement on one phone might make things worse on another... and we also don't have the ability to test those changes on most platforms ourselves either.

PbP Avatars: You solution may not involve coding, but it does still involve people time. I'd rather spend the people time doing it ourselves to our own spec than checking and implementing the work of others.

Thread Export: Sounds reasonable to me... what's the destination format you have in mind?

Alias Sets: Generally, we don't like adding features that take more than a sentence or two to explain, and what amounts to a specialized listmaker for aliases sounds pretty complicated. Marking certain aliases so they don't show up in your pop-up might be simple enough, but grouping them, ranking them, and displaying them based on context are probably less likely.

Lists: This is one of the few exceptions we've made to the "more than a sentence or two" thing, and because it's not really like anything else out there, it's important to have that explanation visible by default. Maybe we can give experienced users the option to hide it, though.

First Post Editing: We really, really don't like the ability for people to rewrite history. Also, everything we do here is predicated on the notion that new information always comes in at the bottom—"edited" posts can be missed by people who follow the boards wit that in mind—and they'd be missed by mechanisms designed to inform people when content has been added, including "(X new)", dots, and RSS feeds. My recommendation would be to use lists to collect relevant posts. When stuff changes, edit the lists.

PRD Quick-Spoilers: The idea of making it easy for people to dump the full text of the Rod of Wonder into the forums makes me very, very nervous. Auto-linking tags sound more reasonable, but I'm not sure that it would be sensible to implement that, both in terms of making it functional and in terms of the programmer time it would take to do it well.

From ruemere:

- you cannot subscribe to content (to find out latest additions of your favorite companies)

Yes, you can. Each company (almost every store section, actually) has RSS feeds for Upcoming and New Releases, and Top Sellers (if they have enough sales to justify a top seller list). Visit the appropriate page and look for the orange RSS icons at the top. (And if you meant new posts from their employees, we have RSS feeds for every individual poster, found on their profile page.)

- you cannot PM your friends
- you cannot PM your clients or favorite people

We'll probably allow that someday. The abusability of such a system still makes me nervous.

- if you have only a vague idea of a thing you want, you cannot do an easy search for tags or rated content

Can you give me a specific example? (We do want to use more tags, though.)

- no content rating except reviews (automatic or single-click feedback is all the rage these days) - it would make a lot of difference if it was possible to rate people, companies and products... and posts, and threads
- no people/content rating filter (aka I want my phone to check to best new posts today)

Implementing more positive content rating is likely, but allowing people to "thumbs down" posts, people, or companies is far too mean-spirited for this community.

- no personal ban list (aka I don't want to see Mr X posts again)

There are many threads where we've responded to this request. I'm not going over the reasons again, but it is quite simply never, ever, ever going to happen here.

- no temporary or thread ban list (this thread is off limits to: ...)

Thread bans are silly—if I can't trust somebody to post in one thread, I frankly can't trust them to post anywhere. We do use temporary bans when the moderators feel somebody needs a timeout. That's between us and them, though, so when we do that, we do it privately. Unless the poster himself reveals that when he returns, it need never be known.

Vic: Thanks for the thorough responses, especially during the weekend.
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Consistent CSS:

Nice, glad to hear it.

Mobile Friendly:

From what I'm seeing the three main platforms in terms of North American market share are Blackberry (30%) followed by a near tie between iPhone and Android (25% each). I'm guessing that your web servers log what browsers make each request so you can probably pull data that's more accurate for your customers. Regardless, things like keeping links spaced adequately so finger-tips can touch them without pressing adjacent links/buttons, and eliminating (or collapsing) side-bars while keeping the main body set to size dynamically to the screen-width are the biggest design factors I'd shoot for.

PbP Avatars:

Fair enough, just looking for a way to leverage some 'distributed computing' (if you will).

Hopefully a more timely solution can be found at least. It really is a downer having great artwork in the APs and then having to 'settle' for other images because several months have gone by without an update. Not a big deal for folks who sit around a table, but for those of us who ONLY do PbP, it can be a pretty big disappointment. The forums may be a free service, but we're using them to run products that have already been paid for.

Thread Export:

I'd say HTML and PDF would be the best formats to shoot for.

Alias Sets:

Revised Idea: Allow users the option to override their default alias with a thread-specific default. Couple that with the ability select which aliases to hide/show in the drop-down, and that would be fantastic. :)

Lists:

A way for experienced users to hide that blurb would be greatly appreciated.

First Post Editing:

I actually use the list method to handle that. It took a few days (when I started my current game) to setup the menus in the 1st post to link to alterable off-site resources as much as possible. My main concern was for less tech-savvy GMs.

Revised Idea: Table of Contents This optional field would be editable only by a thread starter and restricted to the actual PbP forums. Readers could collapse it out of the way, but upon being edited, it would un-collapse. No dots would be harmed, and changes would be easily visible.

PRD Quick-Spoilers:

I believe that there is already a FireFox GreaseMonkey script floating around in here that does auto-linking. Sadly, that doesn't benefit users of Chrome, IE, or Safari. Maybe starting with that would be a possible avenue of development at some point...

Vic Wertz wrote:

Thread Export:

I'd say HTML and PDF would be the best formats to shoot for.

What do you want *in* it?

What do you want *in* it?

If the export could dump the actual forum/thread-body into HTML without the menus/sidebars, that should be sufficient. Given how long an HTML page like that would be, some sort of table-of-contents (or even page-links like we have on the boards) would be helpful.

If that's still unclear, I'll put together an example and provide a link.

The best external comparative reference I know of for such things is Alexa, which currently lists our average page load time as 1.503 seconds, which is considered average for the internet (better than 51% of all sites). And we'll have some new hardware coming online in the coming months that will help speed that up a bit.

Sound like we're the ones that's getting the bad end of things then.

Have you used it much since we did a major rewrite late last year?

I have. I've actually only been on paizo.com since Jan. 2010 (and spent alot of money here since then. You guys do rock, even if I'm not too happy about the actual site ;) )

Do you have specific suggestions?

Sure.

I think a lot of that is because there are a lot of similar forums, but that's kind of necessary.

Possibly, but dividing your forums into-sub categories might help.

Oh, and to leave on a positive note. I really like the actual buying process on paizo. From shopping cart to finished order is smooth, easy and well thought out :)

Thanks!

I'm actually quite impressed by this, few sites manage to make this process as painless as you do. The only ones I can think of that does it better, is amazon, and play.com.

I work at a online bookstore myself, and our buying process is unfortunatly alot less streamlined :)

Collapsable and compact categories.(as it is today, it takes too much scrolling to get to a forum I want. Especially when all the "old" ones (previous tests etc) get in the way

You can click the triangles next to the forum names to collapse any forums you are not interested in. This will also remove those threads from the recent posts box on the front page of the site.

Collapsable and compact categories.(as it is today, it takes too much scrolling to get to a forum I want. Especially when all the "old" ones (previous tests etc) get in the way.

The little triangles next to each forum and subforum do exactly that, and as long as you're logged in, we'll remember which forums you like to have collapsed.

Ability to add a forum to my favourite (that way those forums appear on the top for me when I enter the site logged in)

Hmm.

Aleternate colors for forums and posts, so it is easyer to determine where one forum / post ends/starts.

Color and shading make for a lot of ugliness—note that many of the previous posters in this thread have specifically identified the current color scheme as a plus. We use indents and boxes for this purpose, as well as variations in header text.

Possibly, but dividing your forums into-sub categories might help.

We already have tons of subforums.

Are you, by any chance, not going to the main messageboard page?

From ruemere:

- you cannot subscribe to content (to find out latest additions of your favorite companies)

Yes, you can. Each company (almost every store section, actually) has RSS feeds for Upcoming and New Releases, and Top Sellers (if they have enough sales to justify a top seller list). Visit the appropriate page and look for the orange RSS icons at the top. (And if you meant new posts from their employees, we have RSS feeds for every individual poster, found on their profile page.)

The RSS mechanism is not something I cherish. It is highly specific, prone to spamming (in case of sources with frequent updates) and does not allow for easy participation. To me, RSS and Twitter are ultimately exercises in watching television. And so I prefer to rely on more interactive access to content.

Consider hot-top mechanism currently used on Paizo subforums - the content is delivered by random folks posting within certain category of content. You're free to browse and participate using familiar forum mechanism.

That's why, if I really need to rely on RSS to follow something, I usually do so for general news sources with highly consistent quality and limited to certain topics.

EDIT: I have realized that I didn't express myself clearly. Let me try again - my preference was to employ fuzzier methods for filtering or aggregating information. For example:
- I like reading press releases. No exception. This is the only way to spot a rising star.
- I do not necessarily want to read every post by Mr X, even if the Mr X posts are on the par with luminaries of this forum. But I would like to read posts of Mr X on certain subject.

Hence, RSS is not the solution (for me).

- you cannot PM your friends

- you cannot PM your clients or favorite people

We'll probably allow that someday. The abusability of such a system still makes me nervous.

Adding ratings filter and privacy settings should take care of this.

For example, assuming -2 to 6 star rating for posters (-2 - banned, -1 - warned, 0 - newbie, 1 - standard poster, 5 - star poster, 6 - admin, Paizo staff) one would have by default allow PMs only from specific friends and posters with at least 2 stars.
Official company representatives would have the barrier set to 3 stars and be 3 star posters themselves.
Specifically "friended" folks would be able to PM always unless below 0 stars.

- if you have only a vague idea of a thing you want, you cannot do an easy search for tags or rated content

Can you give me a specific example? (We do want to use more tags, though.)

Allow content publishers to add tags to products. Allow content publishers to create new tags on the fly.

And so if I was looking for a specific new product for my campaign, I would look for something like:
- pfrpg, location, map, ***+ (rating: 3 stars or more)

Example:
- Google Maps is a stellar example of effectiveness of tag system.

The reason for such use of tag system - most small publishers unleash virtual salvo of small, highly specific products. The description and reviews seldom allow to sift effectively through such content. And so, to speed up the search and quickly find the small product one needs, tag system would do a lot to help.

The tags would probably made it easier for your to monitor categories and gave you more accurate information on current state of the market.

- no content rating except reviews (automatic or single-click feedback is all the rage these days) - it would make a lot of difference if it was possible to rate people, companies and products... and posts, and threads

- no people/content rating filter (aka I want my phone to check to best new posts today)

Implementing more positive content rating is likely, but allowing people to "thumbs down" posts, people, or companies is far too mean-spirited for this community.

Then restrict thumbs down option to highly rated posters. Like Dark Mistress, for example. Also, limit the frequency of thumbs down actions per given object (for example, no product can be "thumbed down" more than once per hour). If you're worried about sock puppets, see first sentence of this paragraph.

Restrict advancement of posters to be made only case by case basis (i.e. in recognition of posting high number of highly rated reviews).

At this moment, the star ratings are not effective as quite a lot of people publish reviews which do not accurately convey quality of the content... I would name a few glaring breaches if it was a private post, but for now it suffices to say that I am sorely tempted to post purely negative reviews to bring more balance to the force... err... the to reviews.

- no personal ban list (aka I don't want to see Mr X posts again)

There are many threads where we've responded to this request. I'm not going over the reasons again, but it is quite simply never, ever, ever going to happen here.

No problem, your game your rules. You might want this to be added to FAQ.

- no temporary or thread ban list (this thread is off limits to: ...)

Thread bans are silly—if I can't trust somebody to post in one thread, I frankly can't trust them to post anywhere. We do use temporary bans when the moderators feel somebody needs a timeout. That's between us and them, though, so when we do that, we do it privately. Unless the poster himself reveals that when he returns, it need never be known.

One thing I absolutely adore about ENWorld are temporary bans or frequent tone-volume-down-please posts by mods. Sometimes there is no better way to make people reflect than to make them leave thread for a few days.

Again, this is your game and your rules, so no bad vibes from me.

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. I have reedited this post multiple times for clarity and errors.

Hence, RSS is not the solution (for me).

What sort of solution are you looking for, then?

For example, assuming -2 to 6 star rating for posters (-2 - banned, -1 - warned, 0 - newbie, 1 - standard poster, 5 - star poster, 6 - admin, Paizo staff) one would have by default allow PMs only from specific friends and posters with at least 2 stars.

We're absolutely not going to tell other people when we've given someone else a warning or a temp ban. And identifying people as newbies isn't much of an idea I like either—there's a reason we don't display post counters on every post. I think you're looking for a much less egalitarian community than we're trying to promote here.

I'm with you there, Vic. I detest ratings - I read what people have to say and make up my own mind about the quality of what they are saying, and respond accordingly. Displaying numbers of posts made and any cumulative assigned rating of them for me is a complete turn-off (she says, searching for a polite term that is useable in public!).

Actually, the same goes for reviews. Stems from being a teacher and marking students' work. Students get obsessed with "What grade did I get?" and don't bother to read your remarks about what was good and how to improve.

On my own site, I don't assign 'stars' to reviews. When I post to other sites I perforce have to conform to how they want reviews presented, but I'd really like an option not to have to rate the product when I review it.

When I post to other sites I perforce have to conform to how they want reviews presented, but I'd really like an option not to have to rate the product when I review it.

You can actually post a review here without a rating—we'll ask you if you're sure you really meant to do that, but you can do it.

ruemere wrote:

Hence, RSS is not the solution (for me).

What sort of solution are you looking for, then?

Anything allowing for easier sifting through content.

For example, here is a simple usability case for browsing shop for products:

• Let's check latest products from Louis Porter Jr. Design:
  SHOP / By Company, click, scrollity scroll, click, Browse 212 products, click, In Print, click, Sort by Newest First, click...
  
• Let's say, I'd like to check series of companies for latest products, the products must fall within Pathfinder Compatible category.
  SHOP / Games / Roleplaying Games, click, scrollity scroll to Pathfinder RPG Compatible, click, 54 companies to choose from... giving up.
  
• Let's say, we try do search...
  SEARCH Products for Pathfinder RPG Compatible, Sort by Newest First. Success... or is it? We have quite a few results to browse through, in order to get press releases or interesting announcements, we need to go elsewhere, the results are difficult to filter unless you know specific and accurate search keywords.
  
• Find Bialystok (random city in Poland) using Google Maps:
  Type "bialystok, poland" and press ENTER.
  

The Paizo version of search for about anything new could look like this:
"pfrpg compatible, latest"
With hints enabled (yet another strike for Ajax) filling the search form would be easier.
The "latest" would be a tag corresponding (for example) to content added within last two weeks (or 100 hits).

The next logical step would be to save most common search tag sets, to produce content type desired.
For example:
"pfrpg, faq, latest"
"maps, latest"
"sales, latest"
"press, latest"
"third party, latest"

NOTE: tag based search is hardly a new thing. The biggest issue of generic search - lack of common terms. One has to guess to get decent SEO rating.
Adding tags to items allows for standards, and unless someone abuses the system by staffing every conceivable tag into their article (post, product, profile), the tags are much more intuitive to use.

ruemere wrote:

For example, assuming -2 to 6 star rating for posters (-2 - banned, -1 - warned, 0 - newbie, 1 - standard poster, 5 - star poster, 6 - admin, Paizo staff) one would have by default allow PMs only from specific friends and posters with at least 2 stars.

We're absolutely not going to tell other people when we've given someone else a warning or a temp ban. And identifying people as newbies isn't much of an idea I like either—there's a reason we don't display post counters on every post. I think you're looking for a much less egalitarian community than we're trying to promote here.

Your approach is likely work as long as the traffic remains manageable by staffers reading posts. With forums expanding however, you may begin experiencing situation where overworked Ross or Liz (or someone else) are unable to react.

The rating systems are just one of several proposals for implementing community based control mechanisms. You're already using some alternative solutions for Pathfinder Society - coordinators ("captains"), codified Pathfinder Society rules and so on.

I'm glad that folks around here are not causing such problems. I'm a cynic though, so my opinion follows that of old revolution principle - beyond certain stage revolution feeds on its children. I.e. by growing, Paizo community will reach stage at which kindly staffers may find themselves besieged by hundreds of post to judge.

And, given some experience on that matter, I find that reading posts for a living is hardly satisfactory.

Regards,
Ruemere

That's odd, Vic.

I just posted a review of a product that I wasn't sure how I'd rate, so tried not selecting a rating... and the board just accepted the review without even checking that I wanted to omit a rating!

(The Quickstart Job for the Leverage RPG, if you're interested, my dilemma is it is very good if you already know the TV show, but serves as a poor introduction if you are new to both show and game!)

That's odd, Vic.

I just posted a review of a product that I wasn't sure how I'd rate, so tried not selecting a rating... and the board just accepted the review without even checking that I wanted to omit a rating!

To be honest, I haven't thought about this since we introduced ratings many years ago.... maybe it's that we check when you try to submit a review with a rating but no text. We should probably do both...

Color and shading make for a lot of ugliness—note that many of the previous posters in this thread have specifically identified the current color scheme as a plus. We use indents and boxes for this purpose, as well as variations in header text.

Perhaps, that was just a suggestion though, and I understand that it is a matter of preferance.

We already have tons of subforums.

Right you are, I actually didn't notice you could collapse them until I was informed of it. :)

- you cannot subscribe to content (to find out latest additions of your favorite companies)
- you cannot PM your friends
- you cannot PM your clients or favorite people
- if you have only a vague idea of a thing you want, you cannot do an easy search for tags or rated content
- no content rating except reviews (automatic or single-click feedback is all the rage these days) - it would make a lot of difference if it was possible to rate people, companies and products... and posts, and threads
- no people/content rating filter (aka I want my phone to check to best new posts today)
- no personal ban list (aka I don't want to see Mr X posts again)
- no temporary or thread ban list (this thread is off limits to: ...)

Like.

While I realize Paizo is faster than a lot of the competition, and I love Paizo and Gary and Vic and Ross and you're stuff rules--I do have problems with the site that I don't often have with other equally economical sites.

When I concur that the stylesheets needs modernizing I don't mean changing the look or feel of anything (aside from maybe giving us a better social experience see my like above) because look and feel is simple beautiful and almost perfect.

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

Though I am sure the website could use features here or there, it works. Maybe it lacks some eye-candy, but I guess the books ate it all up ;). Also it has possibly the best feature EVAR, actual people like Vic who come and answer your concerns.

While I realize Paizo is faster than a lot of the competition, and I love Paizo and Gary and Vic and Ross and you're stuff rules--I do have problems with the site that I don't often have with other equally economical sites.

When I concur that the stylesheets needs modernizing I don't mean changing the look or feel of anything (aside from maybe giving us a better social experience see my like above) because look and feel is simple beautiful and almost perfect.

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

Good to know that I'm not the only one. I get it too at times when the server seems sluggish.

I often read these boards from my iPhone and I appreciate the fact that they're uncluttered and relatively quick to load. The last thing I want to see is a site that abandons that. If things have to get "fancy", I'd appreciate a minimalist mobile option.

Kruelaid wrote:

While I realize Paizo is faster than a lot of the competition, and I love Paizo and Gary and Vic and Ross and you're stuff rules--I do have problems with the site that I don't often have with other equally economical sites.

When I concur that the stylesheets needs modernizing I don't mean changing the look or feel of anything (aside from maybe giving us a better social experience see my like above) because look and feel is simple beautiful and almost perfect.

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

Good to know that I'm not the only one. I get it too at times when the server seems sluggish.

Do you mean that the stylesheet isn't loading?

That's what it looks like, from Kruelaid's screenshot.

Cosmetic, rather than content/functionality; but not what you WANT to happen on our screens.

Odd that it doesn't load at all, I have seen - not on this site but elsewhere - a site load looking more like his screenshot, then it kinda blinks and the proper version displays once the stylesheet kicks in. (As example, the BBC website does this sometimes, but it's a notoriously slow loader, even for a UK based person using broadband!)

Urizen wrote:

Kruelaid wrote:

While I realize Paizo is faster than a lot of the competition, and I love Paizo and Gary and Vic and Ross and you're stuff rules--I do have problems with the site that I don't often have with other equally economical sites.

When I concur that the stylesheets needs modernizing I don't mean changing the look or feel of anything (aside from maybe giving us a better social experience see my like above) because look and feel is simple beautiful and almost perfect.

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

Good to know that I'm not the only one. I get it too at times when the server seems sluggish.

Do you mean that the stylesheet isn't loading?

Correct.

That's what it looks like, from Kruelaid's screenshot.

Cosmetic, rather than content/functionality; but not what you WANT to happen on our screens.

Odd that it doesn't load at all...

Yes, it is odd... especially because we pretty much have just one stylesheet (apart from the PRD), and it's attached to pretty much every page, so frequent visitors to the site will almost always be loading the stylesheet from their browser's cache. I therefore suspect that it might be a browser caching issue. Next time it happens, try clearing your browser cache and reloading.

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

I've looked this over closely and see no difference between this screenshot and what I see every time I visit Paizo's messageboards. This is true both at home (Windows XP, Firefox) and at work (Windows XP, MSIE 7.)

Can someone post a screenshot of what it's "supposed" to look like?

Megan Robertson wrote:

That's what it looks like, from Kruelaid's screenshot.

Cosmetic, rather than content/functionality; but not what you WANT to happen on our screens.

Odd that it doesn't load at all...

Yes, it is odd... especially because we pretty much have just one stylesheet (apart from the PRD), and it's attached to pretty much every page, so frequent visitors to the site will almost always be loading the stylesheet from their browser's cache. I therefore suspect that it might be a browser caching issue. Next time it happens, try clearing your browser cache and reloading.

If there's one thing I'm very anal about, it's clearing out temp / cache files. Once in awhile, it'll get bad where I'd get 'screen-crapped' where I start seeing all the html coding spit out, but if I refresh a couple times, then it's back to normal.

I'm not saying it's a frequent occurrence, but only when things are really dragging & I resist to urge to 'stop' the process for the page to load.

EDIT: I'm using Chrome, btw.

Kruelaid wrote:

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

I've looked this over closely and see no difference between this screenshot and what I see every time I visit Paizo's messageboards. This is true both at home (Windows XP, Firefox) and at work (Windows XP, MSIE 7.)

Can someone post a screenshot of what it's "supposed" to look like?

The main visible difference is that it's using default fonts instead of the ones we ask for. And if the stylesheet isn't loading at all, there would also be a lot of mostly minor issues related to text alignment and spacing.

I'm not saying it's a frequent occurrence, but only when things are really dragging & I resist to urge to 'stop' the process for the page to load.

Do you have a way to verify that the dragging is caused by unresponsiveness from our server, as opposed to failing cache fetches? (You'd probably have to be monitoring network activity to spot the difference between the two...)

Urizen wrote:

I'm not saying it's a frequent occurrence, but only when things are really dragging & I resist to urge to 'stop' the process for the page to load.

Do you have a way to verify that the dragging is caused by unresponsiveness from our server, as opposed to failing cache fetches? (You'd probably have to be monitoring network activity to spot the difference between the two...)

You're aware of the issues involving certain posts being duplicated w/o the intent of the poster to do so, right? I'm trying to figure out how in the world I was able to duplicate a post .... four minutes apart.

Here.

Yes, that's something we're working on but it's kind of tricky.

As long as I'm not being delusional.

EDIT: Okay, completely delusional.

I am not entirely sure that

(found on this page)
<tr>
<td nowrap height = "12" />
<td />
</tr>
is valid markup. While "<td>" can be used by itself (i.e. without closing tag), as a part of html 401 specification, or as a part of html5 (and xhtml) specification, there seems to be no valid syntax containing "<td />".

Reference links:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html#the-td-element
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/td.html

Regards,
Ruemere

Oh our HTML is terrible. We know that. :) Making it better is kind of far down the list. As long as browsers display it OK, I'd rather put resources into making the store work better.

Kruelaid wrote:

Anyway... while I am here... I get this A LOT.

I've looked this over closely and see no difference between this screenshot and what I see every time I visit Paizo's messageboards. This is true both at home (Windows XP, Firefox) and at work (Windows XP, MSIE 7.)

Can someone post a screenshot of what it's "supposed" to look like?

You poor man. I only get this about 2-3% of the time.

Which in itself is bizarre.

You're supposed to see this... I think.

...2-3% of the time...

Whoa. Is anybody else who sees this seeing it anywhere near that often?

What's your browser/OS?

Mine is Chrome, I'm using Windows 7, 64-bit.

Kruelaid wrote:

...2-3% of the time...

Whoa. Is anybody else who sees this seeing it anywhere near that often?

What's your browser/OS?

I get this on Firefox. The 2-3% is a guess, and I'm tlaking about lately. I've gone for months at a time without seeing this in the past.

Also, I'm connecting from China, and the problem is at its worst during high traffic (RPG Superstar I'm looking at you). May not be your fault at all.

However... it is worth considering that I don't lose stylesheets for other websites when I've got a bad connection.

Vic Wertz wrote:

Kruelaid wrote:

...2-3% of the time...

Whoa. Is anybody else who sees this seeing it anywhere near that often?

What's your browser/OS?

I get this on Firefox. The 2-3% is a guess, and I'm tlaking about lately. I've gone for months at a time without seeing this in the past.

Also, I'm connecting from China, and the problem is at its worst during high traffic (RPG Superstar I'm looking at you). May not be your fault at all.

However... it is worth considering that I don't lose stylesheets for other websites when I've got a bad connection.

I don't lose the stylesheets elsewhere, either.

Mine is Chrome, I'm using Windows 7, 64-bit.

ditto. I do sometimes have slightly longer load times, but blamed this on my isp which sucks. Doesn't bug me much though.