Message Board Main Page Cleanup?

[The Golux]

The main page of the messageboards has a lot of active stuff at the top, and some active things near the bottom, but in-between are a lot of things that really have no reason to see current active use - Old playtest forums, alpha and beta discussion forums, and previous RPG Superstar forums. While I'd be the last person to believe or suggest that the old information shouldn't be kept available and accessible, it does seem to take up an awful lot of space. If they could be moved into condensed subforums such as Closed Playtests, Previous RPG Superstar, and Alpha and Beta discussions, so that they take up just those three entries of space on the main page instead of over a dozen (The categories would still be separated as they are inside those forums, this is only about how they appear on the main page), it might be a more effective use of space. It's probably harder to do than I think, and it might result in some broken links for old stuff, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to make the suggestion.

[Joana]

You know you can close forums you're not interested by clicking on the triangle to the left, right? I've had all those closed for so long I forgot they were there.

(It used to be easier because you could close a whole section with one click, but I think now you have to close each subforum separately before you can close the overall section. Again, it's been a long time since I've organized my messageboard view, so things could have changed.)

[The Golux]

I did not know that, let me check... And regardless it seemed like an organizational idea that might be worth something *shrugs*

[Vic Wertz]

Most of the things you list should be closed by default for new users, meaning they're only open for you because you had them open at some point.

[Marc Radle]

Yeah, those little triangles are awesome!

I do tend to agree though - things like those old playtest forums for books that are now in print take up valuable screen space and probably should be moved to some kind of Archived, Out Of Date section near the bottom of the page ...

[Vic Wertz]

I'm a bit confused.

All of the old playtests are already in a section that can be collapsed into a single small grey "Older Products" entry.

And even if you have the current RPG Superstar forum uncollapsed, you can collapse all of the previous year's subforums into a single "Previous Contests" entry.

[The Golux]

I'm pretty sure I never looked at them except to wonder why they were still there.

[Trinite]

Thanks for the tips! I never realized this before. They've all always been open for me. Now to close them up!

[Trinite]

I still don't see any way to collapse the previous RPG Superstar forums into a single "Previous Entries" entry...or the "Older Products" entry. There doesn't seem to be any such thing on my page.

[The Golux]

make sure you have ALL of the subforums closed, then it should show up. Well, did for me, anyway.

[Trinite]

The Golux wrote:

make sure you have ALL of the subforums closed, then it should show up. Well, did for me, anyway.

Ah, yes, that's what I've discovered. The higher-level categories only appear after all of the sub-categories are closed. Which is completely unhelpful if one wants to use them to close all of the subcategories at once. ;)

[The Golux]

Indeed, that could use a tweak, if it could be done easily.

[Vic Wertz]

Providing a control to collapse those with one click would mean making the "rolled-up" forum header visible to everybody who has any one of them open. It's a tradeoff; we could choose "more headers for some; fewer clicks for others" or "fewer headers for some, more clicks for others", and went with the latter. Sorry for the extra clicks, but you only have to do it once.

[chavamana]

I personally liked it better the "more headers; fewer clicks" way. Because I was able to leave the sub-forums I was interested in open and and when I had time all i had to do was click on the main header to open them.

The need to close all the sub-forums to collapse the main header just means I never look at the vast majority of the board.

... Which is probably why I completely forgot about the superstar section of the forum until the voting was half over

[Fabius Maximus]

Vic Wertz wrote:

I'm a bit confused.

All of the old playtests are already in a section that can be collapsed into a single small grey "Older Products" entry.

And even if you have the current RPG Superstar forum uncollapsed, you can collapse all of the previous year's subforums into a single "Previous Contests" entry.

I just did that, but it took me a lot of time, because the "Older Products" entry only showed up after I collapsed all the sections in it.

[Gary Teter]

I remember when we redid the user interface for hiding forums that it made sense to not show the parent forum for hiding until the children were all hidden. I don't remember the exact reason for it—I want to say it just looked far too cluttered—but we did actually try it the other way too.

I'm not sure when we'll get around to another redesign of our main messageboards page, but when we do we'll be sure to revisit the usability of this part.

[Trinite]

Well, since closing each subforum took the page about 15 seconds to process for me, I ended spending most of yesterday afternoon closing forums. But it's true, I'll never have to do it again for most of them :p