Streamlining the Forums View

[musicianw]

On the current “Forums” landing page, we are greeted with a list of the forum groups and their respective sub-forums underneath.
Although it is good that we can directly access those subgroups, the current layout seems quite cramped, with the names and number of posts in each of them.
With more posts added daily, the list can get overwhelming and jarring to the average viewer.

It might be helpful to remove the subgroups on the Forums landing page and show just the descriptions of each subforum.
The average viewer will know what they will look to through your description. (I’m currently thinking of the VI-control-esque layout)

[peter]

@musicianw Sorry I haven’t replied to your post in so long. A good deal of forum platform layouts that you see when you visit various platforms aren’t the result of user customization, but the way a forum platform presents and structures information. Basically, each forum platform does things a little bit different than the other. I’ve been running pretty fast and things are starting to slow down a bit from the previous pace when I was focused on constructing everything and ensuring it was running smoothly. While I still have a bunch of cosmetic issues to get resolved, I will spend some time thinking about if there are ways to simplify the forum landing page.

Since your post, I have pulled a lot of the sections, simply because (1) many choices can be overwhelming for visitors and (2) new visitors seeing a bunch of empty forums can turn them off and result in their being less prone to post. I’d be interested in getting your thoughts on the revisions made to the forum since you made the above post.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

1

[musicianw]

Currently, the average viewer will still need to 1. scroll to reach the bottom of the page, 2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit.

Two suggestions I can think of:

1. To have a clearer stratification between the different levels of forums
   Instead of DAWs, VST, non-Music, etc as a long roll on bunch of words, maybe a small return key and color coding (changing them to grey maybe) can help
   i.e.
   Deals
   DAWs (123, 123)
   VST (345, 345)
   non-Music (789, 789)
2. Maybe show less of the sub-forums and have visitors come in the subforum itself to choose their desired place to go, so the visitor only sees one page of the big titles: Coffee House, Deals, Digital Audio Recording etc…

The forum is going in the right direction, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

[Brian]

I want to throw this out there, as I see it as related to streamlining the forum experience, so I am dropping it in here.  I am not a fan of large “sigs”.  I prefer that they be limited to one line (link fine, banners no).  I know there is a thread elsewhere discussing increasing the sig size.  When there is an active thread, it can seem that half of the scrolling space is repeated sigs.  Shouldn’t a click on the user name bring up a profile page with potentially copious biographical information?  Namaste.

1

[peter]

musicianw wrote:

Currently, the average viewer will still need to 1. scroll to reach the bottom of the page, 2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit. Two suggestions I can think of:

1. To have a clearer stratification between the different levels of forums Instead of DAWs, VST, non-Music, etc as a long roll on bunch of words, maybe a small return key and color coding (changing them to grey maybe) can help i.e. Deals DAWs (123, 123) VST (345, 345) non-Music (789, 789)
2. Maybe show less of the sub-forums and have visitors come in the subforum itself to choose their desired place to go, so the visitor only sees one page of the big titles: Coffee House, Deals, Digital Audio Recording etc…

The forum is going in the right direction, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Thanks for taking the time for all of that feedback.

– Re-reading your first post, there were some misunderstanding you had. As groups — I take it you meant topics — grow, that doesn’t add more text to the Forums home page, it just provides a number.

– I get your point of a leaner Forums home page, the down side is that it doesn’t create a clearly superior user experience because you’re creting additional pages to click though and making the user dig for info. Now, you might think that’s a strong defense of this design, it’s not. If I could change it, my changes would be mostly aesthetic. I’d layout the forum and subforum text more neatly and not bunched up next to each other, which creates the crowded experience that you’re noting.  I can, of course, shorten text, but that comes at the expense of user experience too and SEO as well. The current naming is fairly economical, but there are places that can be shortened such as the category for FREE things. I don’t think there’s a compelling case to do that. Maybe subjectively, you may hate it, but does it negatively impact the user experience? Very doubtful.

2. Much of this text is dynamically generated and again, this becomes a custom coding job which is beyond my budget and I don’t see a compelling case.

3. I get into the layout in an upcoming blog post that I’ll either publish tonight or tomorrow morning. If you could give that a read, I’d be game to pick this up then.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

[peter]

Brian wrote:

I want to throw this out there, as I see it as related to streamlining the forum experience, so I am dropping it in here. I am not a fan of large “sigs”. I prefer that they be limited to one line (link fine, banners no). I know there is a thread elsewhere discussing increasing the sig size. When there is an active thread, it can seem that half of the scrolling space is repeated sigs. Shouldn’t a click on the user name bring up a profile page with potentially copious biographical information? Namaste.

I’ll be super candid about the signature editing capabilities. It’s disappointing. There are a few very old that add some extras to the signature and I tried them all out — although it’s a bad idea to use a several year or more plugin, conflicts with other scripts and plugins and security risks. One ended up causing a problem I needed a server technician to fix (I sent out a site wide notice about that recently). There’s really no editing of the signatures that’s built into the platform. I even linked to the only decent plugin I know of and its $200 US and I frankly hit my budget, I have gotten some people who’ve said they’d contribute to the site, and I plan on setting an option to contribute and if people want some functionality that I agree would benefit the site and it requires an additional plugin or custom development, if they want to pay for it, I’ll manage it. But the reality is, I don’t have any revenue plans for this site because I just didn’t / don’t see that as realistic when the community is less than 10,000 or more. So I considered it not worth the hassle and the theme I’m using doesn’t even allow for advertising. I’m open to moving to a theme that does, maybe a year from now. Consequently, until then, functionality that can’t be achieved with the existing controls will not be happening in  the next 6 – 12 months.

What I’d personally love to do for signatures is be able to use the same editor that I set up for forum posts. But the only option for that would require spending $200 just for that capability and I hit the budget without putting it in there. Granted, I’ve had one person offer to contribute $150 to the site and if we want to do it that way, and it’s functionality people want I’m on board. As far as scaling down signatures, I ‘m aware of a way to do it beyond custom coding. But personally, I don’t have any objection to graphics in signatures and I would actually prefer that developers use their logo and I’ll tell you specifically why — and Greg from Orange Tree Samples suggested  that developers and contractors self identify in a post.

So why do I want it with specific examples, and Greg and many developers know these facts. Two contactors for Impact Soundworks have made attacks on  Impact Soundworks competitors at VI Control. Mike Greene is friends with the owner of IS and allows it, even joins in and eggs it on. But these contractors don’t disclose that they work for a competitor when attacking a developer. — which isn’t something I would ever permit, of course, but Mike eggs it on and that is how he operates. Add to this that one of the Impact Soundworks contractors also has a history of shilling, showering praise on Impact Soundworks libraries over competitors and not disclosing their employment with Impact Soundworks. So yeah, most of the bad behavior is by the same developer. The other Kontakt developers know this stuff, talk about it, but would never post about it like i just did because they don’t want a backlash, especially a backlash on VI-Control by Mike Greene.

So, I only have two developer here now. But to entice developers and their contractors to comply and to make it easy for them to be identified in the community as we grow, I would prefer that each developer and contractor to a developer (s) has their logo in their signature, that way everyone in the community can very quickly identify a developer or contractor with the related company and if we find any developers or their contractors engaged in the practices that Impact Soundworks contractors famously engage in on VI-Control people can easily report it and we can address it.

Ah, the beauty of owning this place is that I don’t have to worry about being banned for sharing some knowledge that most Kontakt developers know but most buyers of sample libraries have no idea about. Policies — as you know well — are often not written for the best members of society, but for the worst and that is certainly true of why I want a big identifier in developers and their contractors signatures. They like the looks of it, I like that it makes them easy to spot and any bad applies are easily identified, while ethical developers have no downside.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

1

[peter]

On peter said

musicianw wrote:

Currently, the average viewer will still need to 1. scroll to reach the bottom of the page, 2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit. Two suggestions I can think of:

1. To have a clearer stratification between the different levels of forums Instead of DAWs, VST, non-Music, etc as a long roll on bunch of words, maybe a small return key and color coding (changing them to grey maybe) can help i.e. Deals DAWs (123, 123) VST (345, 345) non-Music (789, 789)
2. Maybe show less of the sub-forums and have visitors come in the subforum itself to choose their desired place to go, so the visitor only sees one page of the big titles: Coffee House, Deals, Digital Audio Recording etc…

The forum is going in the right direction, and I’m happy to be a part of it!

Thanks for taking the time for all of that feedback.

– Re-reading your first post, there were some misunderstanding you had. As groups — I take it you meant topics — grow, that doesn’t add more text to the Forums home page, it just provides a number.

– I get your point of a leaner Forums home page, the down side is that it doesn’t create a clearly superior user experience because you’re creting additional pages to click though and making the user dig for info. Now, you might think that’s a strong defense of this design, it’s not. If I could change it, my changes would be mostly aesthetic. I’d layout the forum and subforum text more neatly and not bunched up next to each other, which creates the crowded experience that you’re noting.  I can, of course, shorten text, but that comes at the expense of user experience too and SEO as well. The current naming is fairly economical, but there are places that can be shortened such as the category for FREE things. I don’t think there’s a compelling case to do that. Maybe subjectively, you may hate it, but does it negatively impact the user experience? Very doubtful.

2. Much of this text is dynamically generated and again, this becomes a custom coding job which is beyond my budget and I don’t see a compelling case.

3. I get into the layout in an upcoming blog post that I’ll either publish tonight or tomorrow morning. If you could give that a read, I’d be game to pick this up then.

The Guy Who Started This Thing and Still Can’t Beat Larry at Getting Deals Up First

To hear some of the music I’ve recently recorded: https://soundcloud.com/user-345532605?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

I forgot to mention it, but I didn’t understand what you wrote here:

“Currently, the average viewer will still need to 1. scroll to reach the bottom of the page, 2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit.”

What does page 2 mean? There are no additional pages for the forum home page, just one page. Could you clarify you meant? Like any web page, how far you scroll is related to your browser settings. Since I’ve tightened up the forums home page, it’s going to be 1 page on most browsers unless someone sets their fonts exceptionally large due to impaired vision.

 

What does need to look to page two for their desired sub forum to visit. The layout of the site puts the forums and sub forums on the forums landing page. If you compared that to Cakewalk Forums the user goes to the home page, can’t find Deals anywhere on the page, however, if they were lucky enough to guess it’s a subforum of the Coffee House, it’s the next click, so it’s two clicks to the a subforum. LinkedMusicians is one click to the forums or subforums. My take from comparing Cakewalk Forums and LinkedMusicians is that there’s clearly more clicking for the user to get places at Cakewalk Forums. Clearly a user experience manager didn’t advise, or wasn’t listened to when it came to hiding the Deals subforum and having no reference for it on the forums home page. I think most folks don’t realize that because they’ve gone directly to the Deals subforum.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

[peter]

Last night and today I was tightening up the home page — largely eliminating the descriptive copy that was intended to simplify things for users but I have heard feedback that users felt it cluttered the appearance, and that text is/was easily removed, Whereas the other modifications you had suggested with require developer customization.

 

 

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LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

[musicianw]

Sorry I was too occupied with work recently that I didn’t have time to check my notifications.

The current forum landing page looks much more streamlined and straightforward.

For the “2. need to look for their desired sub-forum to visit.” I mostly meant that with the crowded words of the subforums, it might be challenging to find the exact one. It’s not impossible, but it just takes a little time to get used to their relative positions.

On another note, I do agree that creating extra pages to go through can also be jarring to the average viewer. That’s why we need different perspectives to start with!

[Author]

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