It just feels strange because SNESdev was one of the most popular forums on this website.
You've just been 'otherized'.
(to be considered abnormal, no longer part of the 'us' but part of the 'them').
The site is NesDev, so any other systems would be considered other.
I guess it feels as odd because there isn't really a SNES counterpart to this site (so the better question would be: why not do that then?). But admittedly the biggest problem is that burying it inside another subforum will make it harder to reach when compared to the systems that don't have such a subsubforum.
EDIT: by the way, if we're going to talk about reorganization: shouldn't the homebrew subforum be placed higher? It strikes me as odd that it's the fifth link when the whole point of this site is to encourage making NES homebrew.
Sik wrote:
shouldn't the homebrew subforum be placed higher?
Well, that's for actual ongoing projects, and to begin a project most people have to learn about NES programming, graphics and music first, so it kinda makes sense. But then even the newbie section should be higher, and NESemdev lower... I don't know.
While that's true, it's also true that making the homebrew section more visible could encourage people to aim for that instead. (and yeah, the newbie section probably deserves being first, since whatever is the first link is what newcomers are going to notice first)
Two Bender avatars in a row made me want to read those posts in Bender's voice.
The SNES section could warrant subforums of it's own, it's unarguably related to the NES, and there are a lot of interesting stuff to follow with hardware, music, game dev posts. I'd imagine most regular users are using "view unread posts", but the different categories seem like it'd be more approachable to new users, because there's a lot there.
"View unread posts" is a link that's rather easy to forget about and I bet a lot of people are only interested on what's going on in a few subforums. Dunno what other people do, but I imagine that the most common thing is to actually check which threads in the subforums you care about have the unread icon. In this sense, subsubforums are actually quite annoying.
Does anyone even look at the sub forums? I just look at "View active topics".
I guess I'm the only one who does? =/ (probably because it's much faster to scan for orange icons without clicking on anything, if an icon is white then I know to not even bother checking further)
You're not alone, Sik; I do the same thing as you.
Me too. I scan for orange icons. Now there is weird icons and I don't undersand what's going on anymore.
Chiming in for "View unread posts". It's easier when your interest is broad enough to cover several subforums here, and when you visit frequently enough for the list to stay just one page.
OK so it looks like this is split into two major groups?
- Those scanning the icons
- Those checking a list of unread posts
The problem being for the former. There's no way to tell if the new posts belong to one of the subsubforums until you go into the subforum (or skip straight into the subsubforum and hope you guessed right). In either case it means an extra barrier that didn't use to be there earlier. I assume that this wouldn't be anywhere as bad if the subsubforums links still showed whether they have something new or not from the index.
That's one of those controversial things that are bound to split people no matter what. Should we vote on this?
Personally, I'm not bothered by the extra level because I'm not particularly active in any of the forums that got demoted. Not surprising, considering I'm very focused on NESdev'ing, and the demoted forums are the ones that don't have much to do with that.
Another orange icon scanner chiming in. As pointed out, this change has a disadvantage for those of us who do. Can somebody point out an actual advantage of this change? Slightly lower height of the front page is the only thing I can think of, but is scrolling so expensive? View unread posts has its uses, but doesn't really work for the same use case as icon scanning, if you're only interested in a few subsections. When looking for unread posts on the previous front page, the first sort (which sections have unread posts) is a low cognitive load operation. Scanning the unread posts list is a high cognitive load operation since it requires you to scan each item to figure out where it was posted.
nitro2k01 wrote:
Can somebody point out an actual advantage of this change? Slightly lower height of the front page is the only thing I can think of, but is scrolling so expensive?
If we end up having six different compos in none of which you are interested, scrolling past all of them could get tiring.
Compos? Competitions? Does each competition typically get its own subforum? And anyway, how many people actually thought the scrolling was a problem?
tepples wrote:
If we end up having six different compos in none of which you are interested, scrolling past all of them could get tiring.
There was a forum I used to go to where you could collapse entire groups of subforums (and this setting would be saved). Did this with the competitions group of that forum, incidentally (it had stopped seeing any updates for a long while and it was getting annoying). Of course doing this here would probably require messing with the forum's software...
This doesn't even sound like the best optimization though, given the bulk of the subforums are in the NES group anyway (and the "sites issues" group hasn't even been touched). If we're going to optimize out one of the most active subforums (for a rather minimal gain), then I propose that we start considering doing it on all the groups so at least the total reduction in space becomes worth it.
EDIT: or again of course the real problem is maybe that there isn't a SNESDev forum in its own site in the first place, that'd probably make the SNES subforum here quite redundant and more worthy of "other dev" =P
tepples wrote:
nitro2k01 wrote:
Can somebody point out an actual advantage of this change? Slightly lower height of the front page is the only thing I can think of, but is scrolling so expensive?
If we end up having six different compos in none of which you are interested, scrolling past all of them could get tiring.
If we end up having six different compos in all of which you are interested, loading each of them
would be tiring, increasing both the bandwidth used and time to read significantly.
Though we should not conflate 2 different issues. Hierarchical layout of categories on the main forum page is its own (very minor IMO) issue. Creating new or "too many" categories is a different problem entirely; no amount of reorganizing the main page layout can make having to load each subforum separately go away, that's just inherent in the use of new subforums. (The topic of
that other thread.)
What was the issue trying to be solved by moving SNES into a subfolder of Other Retro Dev?
Christ it feels like coming home with all my stuff having been removed from the house and put into the garage.
I guess change for the sake of change, but then why can't SNESdev and GBDev it just reside in "other" and not other/other/. Jeez something obsure like the Philips CDI deserves to be in /other/other/, not the NES's younger but bigger brother!
From the main page, there's clearly a link to SNES subforum. I don't see the problem.
True, you can still access it with 1 click from the main page, you just can't tell whether there are new posts.
I don't mean to be a dick to our fellow SNESdev'ers, but this is NESdev after all. The number of forums has grown quite a bit over the years, and is likely to grow even more with the dedicated competition forums. Grouping the things that are not directly related to the NES makes a lot of sense in an NES forum, and helps keep the main page clean.
If people are so upset about SNESdev's demotion, one way to bring it back up and not break the forum's organization is to make "Other Retro Dev" is own category, with forums for SNES, GB and Other.
If the subforum link can include some "data-" attributes then it won't change the default appearance, but it mean you can implement user scripts (with GreaseMonkey) to expand the ones you are interested in. Another alternative would be to have a setting in the user control panel to expand subforums or not. The third possibility is to to both, or to make the forum available by RDF and then you can use a local RDF parser (I wrote one in JavaScript and one in C) to display.
I don't like the subforums at all, as they aren't pre-expanded on the front forum page.
Did I handle this poorly by reacting too quickly to seconds and not leaving the topic open to objections long enough?
My guess is that it's a theme issue. Using a desktop or laptop computer, you can hover over each subforum link and read its title to see whether each subforum has unread posts. Or you can use the information in title in a Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey script that adds an icon. So it's clearly checking whether each forum has unread posts, just not using that information to display an icon.
tepples wrote:
My guess is that it's a theme issue. Using a desktop or laptop computer, you can hover over each subforum link and read its title to see whether each subforum has unread posts. Or you can use the information in title in a Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey script that adds an icon. So it's clearly checking whether each forum has unread posts, just not using that information to display an icon.
It just says if it is unread or not, but doesn't tell you when or by whom.
tepples wrote:
My guess is that it's a theme issue. Using a desktop or laptop computer, you can hover over each subforum link and read its title to see whether each subforum has unread posts. Or you can use the information in title in a Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey script that adds an icon. So it's clearly checking whether each forum has unread posts, just not using that information to display an icon.
This sounds very much like the old saying about government, how it creates a problem and then offers a solution for it.
As part of this site's government, I can extend the analogy:
- Government notices a problem that only it can solve, often a market failure.
- Government intervenes to solve this problem at the cost of a creating a second problem.
- Government describes how citizens can solve the second problem.
U.S. Affordable Care Act:
- Growth of uncompensated emergency room care by who cannot afford private insurance or who have been turned down by private insurers for preexisting conditions.
- Obamacare, which combines a ban on preexisting condition discrimination and subsidy for low-income private insurance with a "shared responsibility" tax on not being insured. It ends up creating a problem when state legislatures and governors controlled by the opposition party opt out of subsidizing insurance for many households below the poverty line, for fear that hard-line minarchists in the "Tea Party" will challenge the incumbent in the next primary election.
- The tax code is interpreted to grant an exemption such that affected individuals need not pay "shared responsibility" tax.
On NESdev BBS:
- Coming growth of Homebrew Projects causes users to have to waste time scrolling past forums in which they are not interested.
- Third-level forums, which end up hiding unread status.
- "View unread posts" and suggestion of using Greasemonkey to add icons for unread subforums.
tepples wrote:
... "View unread posts" and suggestion of using Greasemonkey to add icons for unread subforums.
As I have described, that is only a partial solution; it adds an icon for read/unread but not when or by whom. (Adding that information to the
title attribute would fix this of course)
Subforums can be indented a little, but be first class entries on the boards list, not hidden away.
In order for any of us to have a chance of doing anything about it, first WhoaMan would have to upgrade phpBB from 3.0.10 to the latest version (currently 3.0.14), as I suspect that the community supports only the latest release. And then we might have to end up paying someone with experience building phpBB 3 themes and MODs, unless one of us has such experience.
- One possible change would be to retrieve the author and date of the newest post in each subforum and emit them as attributes prefixed with data- on the subforum link.
- Another possible change would be to allow each user to mark each forum as collapsed or expanded in that user's logged-in view of the front page.
zzo38, are you willing to learn PHP and phpBB and make one of these changes? If not, I could revert the use of third-level forums, and then we could document somewhere that we agree to live with the added scrolling when each new competition adds a second-level line.
tepples wrote:
zzo38, are you willing to learn PHP and phpBB and make one of these changes? If not, I could revert the use of third-level forums, and then we could document somewhere that we agree to live with the added scrolling when each new competition adds a second-level line.
I do know PHP programming but have not worked with phpBB programming. If they can be indented as Dwedit suggested, by use of CSS classes, then the user can also use Stylish to collapse them, even if the forum software has no feature to do so.
Installing greasemonkey and using custom scripts to modify the forum behaviour from the client side should not be considered a workable solution to a problem that a lot of regular users are having.
Did anybody ever complain about having to scroll too much on the main page, or did you just offer it off the cuff as a reason to use the subforum feature?
Lots of people are complaining about not being able to easily see the current status of forums they like to check every day.
I think a hierarchical forum structure sounds nice in theory; it would be nice if things were grouped and organized, but this particular implementation is ungood.
In its current state, I think the third-level forum feature is a good way to "archive" a subforum that is no longer active, but that's about it.
I am
not trying to argue that the subsubforums are a good idea. I agree with rainwarrior here.
But I do want to point out that the subsubforums have class "read" and "unread" and adding the following CSS to the site CSS:
Code:
a.read { color: grey; }
a.unread { color: red; }
is all that's necessary to make it visibly obvious. (More sophisticated CSS could prepend the "new posts" icon instead of turning the text red)
To me, I would want to be able to see the time of the most recent message posted and who wrote it, so simply changing the CSS won't do this as it is now.
If indented subforums do display those information, then you can hide them by CSS and can be controlled by the "board style" setting in the user board preferences, so you can add a setting to there, might be one way to do quick customizations without needing to install other client-side software. Further customizations would then be possible by Stylish and GreaseMonkey by the users who do install client-side software.
rainwarrior wrote:
Did anybody ever complain about having to scroll too much on the main page
I don't think I ever said anything about it, but a long list of forums does bother me a bit. Not all forums interest me, and I prefer to scan for orange icons in the forums I do follow than to use the "view unread posts" page where everything is cobbled together. If there are a lot of forums in the main page, finding the relevant orange icons takes longer. Also, the main page now fits entirely on my phone's screen, so I can quickly pick a forum without having to scroll (and I have been using my phone to browse the web a lot).
This is from the perspective of someone that doesn't closely follows any of the 3rd level forums though, and I understand that my opinion may be a little selfish, so I won't oppose if enough people want to bring their favorite forums back up.
Well if enough people got upset I suppose there's a reason. Not many people seem to be complaining about GBDev.
Also huh if there's a way to make the subsubforums show an icon in the front page then that sounds like that'd solve the biggest problem for most people (i.e. deciding whether to bother checking it for new posts).
Sik wrote:
Also huh if there's a way to make the subsubforums show an icon in the front page then that sounds like that'd solve the biggest problem for most people (i.e. deciding whether to bother checking it for new posts).
Ok, I bothered to look up how to do this.
Tepples or any other mod could add the following CSS to however phpBB does styles.
Code:
a.read:before {
content:url(/styles/subsilver2/imageset/icon_post_target.gif);
}
a.unread:before {
content:url(/styles/subsilver2/imageset/icon_post_target_unread.gif);
}
Anyone who wants to try it out before then can open the firefox/chrome Web Developer toolbar and try adding it to the results of "style.php"
tepples wrote:
As part of this site's government, I can extend the analogy:
- Government notices a problem that only it can solve, often a market failure.
- Government intervenes to solve this problem at the cost of a creating a second problem.
- Government describes how citizens can solve the second problem.
U.S. Affordable Care Act:
- Growth of uncompensated emergency room care by who cannot afford private insurance or who have been turned down by private insurers for preexisting conditions.
- Obamacare, which combines a ban on preexisting condition discrimination and subsidy for low-income private insurance with a "shared responsibility" tax on not being insured. It ends up creating a problem when state legislatures and governors controlled by the opposition party opt out of subsidizing insurance for many households below the poverty line, for fear that hard-line minarchists in the "Tea Party" will challenge the incumbent in the next primary election.
- The tax code is interpreted to grant an exemption such that affected individuals need not pay "shared responsibility" tax.
On NESdev BBS:
- Coming growth of Homebrew Projects.
- Third-level forums, which end up hiding unread status.
- "View unread posts" and suggestion of using Greasemonkey to add icons for unread subforums.
So what exactly would the market failure be in this case? That subforums take up too much visual space? Or is this actually an attempt to thwart the actual
interest in those subjects, in favor of NES dev discussion? And to extend the analogy, should the "government" do this change even if no one in the "population" really thinks is a good idea?
What the hell are we even talking about any more? Good grief.
koitsu wrote:
What the hell are we even talking about any more? Good grief.
I made an analogy... which escalated beyond belief.
nitro2k01 wrote:
tepples wrote:
I can extend the analogy:
- Government notices a problem that only it can solve, often a market failure.
[...]
On NESdev BBS:
- Coming growth of Homebrew Projects.
So what exactly would the market failure be in this case? That subforums take up too much visual space?
In my opinion, yes. I went back and edited item 1 to clarify that the time spent scrolling is the failure.
OK so you can easily do by the CSS, the read/unread. But it won't tell you who and when is the last message! I would want these things to be added to the HTML emitted on the index page, even if they are hidden by default (such as in data- attributes or the title attribute); this way it can be accessed without downloading another page.
When I finish a conversation with my boss, I will try to find where to insert this fragment in the theme's CSS: whether it's something I can add to the Administration Control Panel or something I'd have to edit on the server's file system.
But I don't understand how knowing who posted the last message would help anyone. If the idea is that you would be more likely to open a topic if the user who posted the last comment is a user whose post you are expecting, then someone else could post a comment in a different topic and thereby destroy that information.
EDIT: During a break in the conversation, I found where in the ACP to paste in CSS.
tepples wrote:
But I don't understand how knowing who posted the last message would help anyone. If the idea is that you would be more likely to open a topic if the user who posted the last comment is a user whose post you are expecting, then someone else could post a comment in a different topic and thereby destroy that information.
Mainly so that you can see whether or not it is yourself. However, displaying the time of the last message would be much more important than who, so that you can know when the most recent message was, in case you haven't read all messages yet (maybe you don't want all messages anyways, or want to read them later instead, you might not mark as read), you can know how recent the last message is. So, the purpose is different; to tell you if there is a new one, rather than whether or not there is an unread one. (I myself always use the "last post" column and don't really use the read/unread icons, although I can understand that other people do, so it would still help them to have it.)
Thank you for removing the post icon from read subforums. I found it hard to immediately see from the front page which color the smaller icon was, compared to the previous layout.