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This is the place where I bitch about the site.
So I've never really brought this up because I don't want to gripe about something that I'm not actively offering to help change, but maybe if I put this on the table we can talk about it and go from there. I have issues with the way Glorious Trainwrecks is laid out; my two major problems -- though they're not mutually exclusive -- are with the hierarchization and accessibility of information, and the visibility of new or dynamic content.
Visitors to the front page don't see a whole lot of activity going on -- they're presented with a big ol' jpeg of a trainwreck that was pulled from wikipedia and an (awesome) mission statement/call-to-arms, neither of which have basically changed since the site's creation. They're also shown a mess of links along the sidebar by which they can access the bulk of the site. (Some of these links are mostly rendundant: "Forums" shows -- and it's the only place that shows -- the one- or two-line descriptions of each of the four forums, but they're each directly accessible in the sidebar; "Wiki" also provides short descriptions of its sidebar sub-links, though the page has a link missing from the sidebar and the sidebar has a link missing from the page; etc.) Finally, tucked in the lower-left corner, they see the only variable content: a table of upcoming events (there's generally just one, of course) and a list of users currently online.
I wouldn't exactly say that it's uninviting. But it doesn't do visitors (and especially returning visitors) any favours in terms of letting them get at games we've made or presenting them with interesting recent happenings on the site. I think it might be more interesting and engaging to devote frontpage space to new developments, and perhaps a rotating or randomized spotlight on less-recent games that we think are still worthy of attention. Breathtaking Triumphs has already been established for essentially the same purpose -- except that, by virtue of being just another link in the sidebar, it hasn't given these games much greater visibility. The frontpage manifesto is important, since it conveys where we're coming from and what we're about. I'm just not sure it needs to be the first thing people see, especially now that we're established and have been around for a little while. Maybe there could be a prominent, attention-getting "HEY YOU! MAKE GAMES!" button that leads to a page containing it, plus ways to get involved with the site.
Let's go back to the sidebar for a second. There's a lot of stuff there, even for users who aren't logged in. It's not atrociously confusing or unintuitive, but I think it makes the site a bit more difficult to navigate and explore than it needs to be. It might sound a bit trifling, but it is the primary way to get at the meat of the site. It's less of an issue for regulars who mainly use the RSS feed or Recent changes page. Again, though, it's not doing visitors any favours. Aside from the little redundant bits I mentioned, there's also a few items that don't need to be there at all ("Search," for example, when there's a search bar right below it. Provides access to an advanced search, yes, but that should just be accessible under the search bar itself.) and the remaining items could be grouped and arranged a little better to emphasize frequently-used functions.
There are a few other things I could go on about, but I'll stop there. I'm not even sure how easy Drupal layouts are to tweak, and I don't want to sound like an absolute wankhat bitching about difficult-to-change peculiarities of the system or something. (Too late?) In any event, I just think that we have excellent things going on here, and I don't want them to be harder to get at than they need to be thanks to difficult site design.
I would say our beloved
I would say our beloved SpindlyQ takes site criticism well and has made some great user-recommended changes to the place, though it's hit or miss if he finds the time and gumption to get stuff done quickly.
(It was similar thoughts that got me to make the FAQ, and then after some nagging got SpindlyQ to make it a direct sidebar link)
That said I agree with pretty much all of this. The sidebar is a bit too intimidating... I've always sort of had my doubts about breaking already low traffic forums into topics, though it seems to be working ok... but I think it mostly works ok because of features like "Recent Posts", where I can keep up with what other people post w/ a casual disregard for where it's posted at.
(I know people tend to project how they use the site onto others, but... I find "Recent Posts" so much more readable and friendly than "Recent Changes" and "RSS Feed" that I think it would be n00b friendlier to switch the order a bit, and put Recent Changes and RSS Feed as subitems to Recent Posts - maybe even hide them altogther, and/or make them a link off the Recent Posts page (though I know some people like 'em, so I dunno))
I think right now, the Klik of the Month Klub is the most engaging page, in terms of explaining what we're aiming for here in a visual kind of way - it would be a strong candidate for some kind of incorporation into the front page, maybe through that "rotating spotlight" idea.
I think I've brought up this general idea to SpindlyQ before, but between this and the issue of "harvesting metadata is a pain in the ass and so we might not do a year 2 compilation", I really think what we need is a slightly formal "enter your game" form/database, with fields for like title, description, screenshot, and of course the binary/zip, and then it would grab details like author and date. Ideally it would somehow be melded w/ the event specific KotMK entries... sort of a more formal/reversed process of how the Klik of the Month Klub page is harvested now
Yeah, I think your comments
Yeah, I think your comments re: breaking the site up are pretty accurate. The divisions between the four sub-forums -- and between the forum/devlogs/wiki -- are all logical, but given the amount of stuff we post, it seems a little diffuse. And the recent changes/posts page makes the divisions mostly moot, except in terms of keeping an organized archive.
A "submit game" page would be helpful, yeah. Ideally it would make submitting stuff easier than it is now, or at least no more complicated (i.e. auto-append the game to the relevant event page, if any, etc.) I think the reason we tried having folks make a wikipage for each game they uploaded was to make metadata easier to scrape, but it ended up being a pain in the ass because then you had to link to it from the event page or devlog anyway.
All criticism is welcome;
All criticism is welcome; I'm no web designer. Remember the bright red links? Ahh, good times.
Here are my thoughts:
Thoughts? Agreement? Disagreement? The more vehement, the better.
This is going to be a
This is going to be a partial reply for now -- I'll respond to the other stuff as soon as I get the chance.
The wiki's definitely less welcoming because of the lack of easy talk/commenting, yeah. That said, I prefer the format to having sticky threads, and it also frees the thread creator/mod from the obligation of having to update it themselves. I think there are two potential options for making wikipages a bit more inviting to edits: one, promote a more informal format, like the ic recommends section of the insert credit wiki, for pages where it's appropriate; or two, introduce meta/talk pages like Wikipedia has, whenever it'd be useful.
You mean this page and its sidebar tree, right? I really don't see why we need it; it's more intuitive to go to the appropriate part of the site and then add content from there ("post new blog entry" from one's own dev. diary, for example; ditto "new forum topic" from the forum of choice.) It doesn't even make sense from a train-of-thought approach: nobody says, "Hey, I want to post about xyz!" and then stops and has to think about which type of item they want to publish. It only really seems useful for an admin who would want to add one of the more obscure pagetypes -- and even then, there's no reason, say, "Add event" couldn't just be here -- but I think it's kind of useless for most users.
-Another possibility for the forums is to put a concise explanatory subtitle in subtle, grey plaintext under each forum link in the sidebar- just adding "social board" (or something cleverer but still brief) is probably less fun than the explanations on the forums page, but it gets the message across quickly and effectively.
-This is kind of more minutiae, but: I think we should really get rid of individual-page RSS feeds where they're not obviously useful. On the frontpage, for example, there's a little icon at the bottom for a feed of just the frontpage itself. Noise! (It also means that it's the default feed for this site, I think, so if you just plug glorioustrainwrecks.com into Google Reader or something, that's the feed it'll retreive for you. Not handy!)
I guess my general thoughts in terms of layout are towards more simplified and arranged design, and away from bulleted list-style structure. But I guess Drupal makes the latter far easier to achieve than the former, so...
Talk pages are up on the
Talk pages are up on the wiki, now! They interact poorly with the Recent Changes page, but they're there.
I'm looking and looking and I can't find a supported way to turn off the RSS feed on the front page. It's just not customizable. However, I can probably find the place in the code that generates it and comment it out, and there IS a plugin that lets you put custom RSS feeds in the HEAD tag of the site's html, so we can get that working.
There's a similar problem for adding a "Post event" link to the generic event page -- to put it in there, I have to edit code. While this is fine, I've done it lots, it's irritating.
Do you have any thoughts on making the sidebar into something less intrusive, like putting it as a pull-down menu at the top of the page or something? Because man, it takes up a SHITLOAD of screen real-estate.
I don't think we can get away from the fact that we have three areas of the site: The wiki, the forums, and the blogs. The wiki might count for more someday; certainly we want a prominent link to the Klik of the Month Klub, and probably an "about us"-type link to the manifesto. I'm sure we can trim the sidebar menu down a LOT; I just need some ideas of what the navigation model should BE. Part of that is probably having a Drupal theme that isn't ass.
more
A drop-down menu along the top could work really well. It'd be less obtrusive but still show the main divisions of the site at a glance, with easy access to subcategories. I've been looking at a few 5.x-compatible Drupal themes: Sky seems really slick; Zen with a sub-theme might be easy to tweak; Wabi, A3 Atlantis and Pixture could be decent as well. Is there an easy way to set up some sort of sandbox to test themes/layouts? Would partially cloning the install to somewhere else work...?
As far as possible dynamic front page items, I figure a blend of mostly auto-generated stuff plus a little manually-updated content would be reasonable. That way, the page provides a quick overview of recent/past activity without too much recurring legwork, but can also serve to highlight things that are of particular interest. With a two- or three-column setup, there'd be a bit of breathing room to arrange a few different types of content without it being too cluttered, I think.
So yeah, I'd lean towards something like:
Thoughts?
also
Are talk pages supposed to be implemented site-wide, now? I can't seem to add comments to wikipages where there aren't some already.
wait, never mind. just
wait, never mind. just realized you have to hit "add comment" at the bottom of the wikipage proper to do it. trying to go to the talk page when there are no comments shows nothing, which is what confused me.
BLASPHEMY??
I dunno... there is absolutely a train-wrecky quality to the front page, so I'm kind of loathe to mess with it, but...
freeing up all that space in the main section?
Of course this trainwreck image A. is less rhinocerous b. fails to capture the PLUNGE INTO GLORY attitude.
Perhaps too steep a price to pay!
On the other hand:
A. it seems like better use could be made of the front page B. this photo has a picture of a guy on a horse
PS are there any klip art trains?
Regarding the submission of
Regarding the submission of games for the KOTM, here's an easy solution: Add a checkbox to the comment form to indicate that you're making a submission to the event. This could be used to automatically place a link at the top of the page, using the title of the comment (needs a note to make it clear that 'subject' = 'title of game'), and possibly the thumbnail of the image you uploaded. Well, not sure if it's easy, but it shouldn't involve that much messing around.
Adding news posts to the front page, provided they're short blurbs, would do a lot to make the site seem more like a community. Just posting about some fun happenings, like the possible upcoming Pirate Kart for the B-Games Compo 2, and general updates, would be enough. Some selected members could be tasked with the posting, whenever they feel like it.
minotaur food
18:19 < increpare> The glorioustrainwrecks site makes me feel like I'm going to end up minotaur food sometimes.
18:20 < agj> it does
I think the increased participation rate since the Pirate Kart and new one-game-per-page system is making this problem more important to confront. I haven't thought too much about it yet, but would like to hear about what people want to do when they come here, and how they find their way around the site.
Myself, I head straight to Recent Changes, 99% of the time. If there was something posted recently that I wanted to reply to, I used to just hit up Recent Changes to find the link, but with the amount of posting now this is pretty much impossible. I suspect I'm not alone in this method of working. For example, where's the Kartwork thread? Once it fell off the recent changes list, people stopped posting to it.
Thoughts?
I didn't use recent changes
I didn't use recent changes at first and couldn't understand how other people could be posting on current pages, so I think everyone must be using it. A mini-feed of recent changes at the top of the sidebar might be a good stopgap for new peepels?
The old game-in-comments system was confusing, but the new one is kind of double confusing because people are still posting their games as comments in addition to making a page, and since everyone does it's not apparent how things really work. Right now, if you don't post a comment your game will probably go unnoticed, making the cool new system almost superfluous.
Something I've been meaning to suggest is integrating the games list for an event into the top or bottom of an event page to take out the extra commenting step and make the whole thing more obvious.
Also, while I'm here: about the email signups confusion, it could probably be solved simply by changing the text of the signup link. eg "Sign up for KOTMK #N" becomes "Sign up to be reminded by email for KOTMK #N!"
Navigating the site would be a whole lot easier if it were a slim message board type setup rather than a wiki thing, but that might be throwing the baby out with the lawnmower a bit.
yeah, i actually like
yeah, i actually like comment posting a lot better than the new little database system.
I like how all the games get
I like how all the games get organized into one place now, and I can fave particular games, but the issue I have is with comments. We sorta have two places now to comment on games, and it's not consistent. Part of the reason why I make trainwrecks is so people can comment on them - I comment on others' trainwrecks as well. The comment posting approach I think generated more trainwreck comments than what we have now.
I do think, though, that the database system is necessary for much larger projects. It worked really well for the Pirate Kart II. It's a bit less effective for KotM, which to me is more of a monthly social gathering than an event.
Maybe some kind of
Maybe some kind of integrated view?
The submit form is great for making it easy to submit a game and for the db to know about it.
Maybe there could be some kind of new event page that in effect looks a lot like the current event pages, but really it's an amalgamation from all the individual pages and their comments?
I dunno. Maybe tough to implement.
The other thing is, I tend to use Recent Posts not recent changes, but now with the new db system, I tend to get a bit swamped, and it stops me from keeping up w/ stuff in general the way I'd like.
Here's a band-aid fix for
Here's a band-aid fix for Recent Posts; this one shows the site activity minus new games and bios. EDIT: Which maybe doesn't actually work all that well because of course you'll miss comments to games and bios. Argh.
EDIT EDIT: Also I would really love for event pages to actually list the games and show you the comments inline; I'm hoping that's possible, but I'm not sure how well Drupal supports it yet.
Hm. Is there any way to make
Hm. Is there any way to make 2 or 3 lists, one with everything but games and bios, then having games and bios either in one or two seperate lists? (3 might be ideal)
Yeah, list games and comments inline would be HAWT
Quote:The old
Yeah, I'm going to try to find a way to display the games inline on the event page somehow, because it's pretty apparent that the new system didn't really work for KOTMK.
I'm reluctant to change the signup text simply because the only means of doing so appears to be modifying the plugin source, which makes upgrading Drupal harder. I've got to figure out a way to deal with that anyway, though, since I've already modified plenty of the plugins that the site uses, and I no longer have any idea what I did.
I don't think the site itself is inherently overcomplex; it's just the navigation that's really fucked. At the very least, there needs to be one place where you can see all of the areas of the site, and whether or not there's new stuff in them; there's simply no non-firehose way to see what the hell is happening here. For a long time the firehose was sort of good enough, because there wasn't a lot of activity. Now there's a lot of activity.
why not put the recent
why not put the recent changes on the frontpage?
i'd also like it if events
i'd also like it if events stuck around on the sidebar for a few hours after they finish, because i'm always looking for links and posting about outcome of the event after it's over. (plus people finish late.)
I don't think we can
I don't think we can reasonably put the firehose feed on the frontpage, but I agree that it needs sweeping changes.
As I see it, there are three things you could come to Glorious Trainwrecks to do:
MAKE GAMES
PLAY GAMES
TALK ABOUT GAMES
Is... is that a sane breakdown? I feel like the wiki is a little underrepresented, but maybe the wiki isn't all that useful, I dunno.
I kind of see this as three giant buttons at the top of every page, that have kind of mouseover pulldown menus underneath them. If you click on the button itself, you would be taken to a page that, as well as listing the relevant links, talks a bit about what we're all about in that department.
We also really need a simple list of the different sections of the site, along with a summary of what's new in each of them; that should be on the frontpage as well. I've started to post the really big stuff to the frontpage; maybe events should always go there too? It seems like the biggest "news" is what events are happening; the Klik of the Month Klub is so core that it really probably should be more prominent.
Anyway, thoughts on these thoughts are welcome. Also if anyone has any web design / Drupal theming skills at all that they're interested in lending out, that would be hyper-awesome.
What you have there plus the
What you have there plus the recent and upcoming events looks like a very good sidebar to me!
A prominent 'Recent Events'
A prominent 'Recent Events' section to go with 'Upcoming Events' is what I'm always wishing it had.
This is a great idea; I've
This is a great idea; I've added it.
This made the site like 10
This made the site like 10 times more usable for me :)
I used to always use Firefox's autocomplete dropdown thing to find things on this site.
Unrelated: The way the subject line gets automatically filled in is often very entertaining somehow.
Re: autogenerated comment
Re: autogenerated comment subjects, I know, right? It's such a terrible design decision, and yet I can't help but love it.
I can't help but love it too.
I can't help but love it too.
Dunno if this is the right place to put this but
I was trying to submit a game to the 15th Klik Jam, and the site bugged up on me! The game and screenshot previewed fine, but when I clicked the "Submit" button, all I got were these errors:
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE cache_content SET data = 'a:4:{s:11:\\"field types\\";a:10:{s:13:\\"nodereference\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:14:\\"Node Reference\\";s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodereference\\";s:10:\\"formatters\\";a:4:{s:7:\\"default\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:12:\\"Title (link)\\";s:11:\\"field types\\";a:1:{i:0;s:13:\\"nodereference\\";}s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodere in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE cache_content SET data = 'a:4:{s:11:\\"field types\\";a:10:{s:13:\\"nodereference\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:14:\\"Node Reference\\";s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodereference\\";s:10:\\"formatters\\";a:4:{s:7:\\"default\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:12:\\"Title (link)\\";s:11:\\"field types\\";a:1:{i:0;s:13:\\"nodereference\\";}s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodere in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE sessions SET uid = 1080, cache = 0, hostname = '216.249.73.61', session = 'timezone|i:-14400;imagefield|a:1:{s:16:\\"field_screenshot\\";a:1:{i:0;a:7:{s:8:\\"filename\\";s:19:\\"Victorian House.jpg\\";s:8:\\"filepath\\";s:15:\\"/tmp/tmp_3z8KEp\\";s:8:\\"filemime\\";s:10:\\"image/jpeg\\";s:8:\\"filesize\\";i:506293;s:6:\\"source\\";s:23:\\"field_screenshot_upload\\";s:3:\\"fid\\";s:6:\\& in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174
Was it because I submitted it two days early, or something along those lines?
Nope, not your fault at all
Nope, not your fault at all - weird site bug that I thought I'd fixed. Apparently not! Agh! Thanks for posting the errors; the messages are saying that they couldn't save to the log, so I'd have no way of knowing what was going on otherwise.
I'll look into it!
Yay, I was helpful! :) Also
Yay, I was helpful! :)
Also augh what's causing these comments to be displayed in italics?
Everything's in italics!
A bug combined with something in the text you pasted, I guess?
Apparently my HTML filter is
Apparently my HTML filter is terrible and doesn't automatically close tags :/
Might go in and fix that eventually, but for the moment I've cleaned up the stray italics tags in the post.
Aaaarrrgh, it happened
Aaaarrrgh, it happened again!!!
Here's the error message, in case you need it again:
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE cache_content SET data = 'a:4:{s:11:\\"field types\\";a:10:{s:13:\\"nodereference\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:14:\\"Node Reference\\";s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodereference\\";s:10:\\"formatters\\";a:4:{s:7:\\"default\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:12:\\"Title (link)\\";s:11:\\"field types\\";a:1:{i:0;s:13:\\"nodereference\\";}s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodere in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE cache_content SET data = 'a:4:{s:11:\\"field types\\";a:10:{s:13:\\"nodereference\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:14:\\"Node Reference\\";s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodereference\\";s:10:\\"formatters\\";a:4:{s:7:\\"default\\";a:3:{s:5:\\"label\\";s:12:\\"Title (link)\\";s:11:\\"field types\\";a:1:{i:0;s:13:\\"nodereference\\";}s:6:\\"module\\";s:13:\\"nodere in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174
Warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes query: INSERT INTO watchdog (uid, type, message, severity, link, location, referer, hostname, timestamp) VALUES (1080, 'php', 'Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes\nquery: UPDATE sessions SET uid = 1080, cache = 0, hostname = '216.249.73.61', session = 'file_previews|a:0:{}imagefield|a:1:{s:16:\\"field_screenshot\\";a:1:{i:0;a:7:{s:8:\\"filename\\";s:19:\\"gaiden_screen 2.png\\";s:8:\\"filepath\\";s:15:\\"/tmp/tmp_N8eCLE\\";s:8:\\"filemime\\";s:9:\\"image/png\\";s:8:\\"filesize\\";i:27056;s:6:\\"source\\";s:23:\\"field_screenshot_upload\\";s:3:\\"fid\\";s:6:\\& in /home/jeremy/glorioustrainwrecks/drupal-5.21/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 174