I'm a little worried about these linkwords. Their likely to cause the asylum's google rankings to degrade as the google bot will possibly think we have multiple pages with the exact same content, which causes ranking penalties. It's also not a good idea to have multiple URL's which display the same content regardless, as we'll then have multiple URL's with the same content competing against each other on the search engines, not to mention the possible confusion it could cause to us humans.
Perhaps it would be better to simply re-direct to the appropiate URL rather than mask the linkwords to the same content?
ps: there also seem to be a lot of extra horiz. lines in the new forum, lots of seemingly empty table rows or somehting, espically in the profiles.
ps: there also seem to be a lot of extra horiz. lines in the new forum, lots of seemingly empty table rows or somehting, espically in the profiles.
Yeah, I'm not too happy about the cell's look yet either, it was just the best I could do in the short time... If you have any specific ideas for improvement let me/us know, nothing's really final yet.
The double lines are overkill IMHO. It creates too much confusion as the eye tries to run down the page. The same thing appears in pertty much all the pages actually, but I was mainly refering to the profile/cell page as being the most obvious example.
Actually, it's worse when it appears in pages like this as not only does it add unnecessary visual clutter and confusion, they often break the vertcle dividers (like the one between "login Options" and "Your Text" in the reply section), which makes things look even more messy and boxed off than they need to be.
I'm petty sure all of these double lines weren't in the old verion of the asylum.
ps: I also see that you're turning the ' character into an entity reference, which isn't necessary as it's part of the standard ASCII set and not considered a "special" character in HTML/XHTML.
I don't mind it so much in the bottom of this page as I do on the profile page though.
Can't speak on the ' issue.
Tyberius Prime
Paranoid (IV) Mad Scientist with Finglongers
From: Germany Insane since: Sep 2001
posted 04-15-2004 15:51
but turning ' into the entity does save us from having to add slashes to each and everything, and slashes can be quite a nightmare.
Most of the double lines have been added for stylistic reasons, and they seperate the common from the not common parts of the forms. (edit: the cells are overdoing it a bit, though)
At the beginning, the linkword urls did redirect to the id ones - but then no one would be linking via the linkword ones.
Let time tell if we drop down in googles ranking. I doubt it. google loves the asylum. (and it will have to deal with the faq's urls changing anyhow. So far, the fact that the faq seemed to present each page 3 times (with different sorting) didn't lower it's search ranks - though all 4 pages could be found via google.
Most of the double lines have been added for stylistic reasons, and
they seperate the common from the not common parts of the forms.
Well, that's nice in theory, but I don't think it's working. There's just too many lines.
I realise this is all just nit picking at the little details, but I think their still kind of important.
The "separation" you speak of is already present in the background. Creating another sub separation within the tables really is overkill and it looks awfully confusing. It's also messing with the zebra striping as each "separator" seems to be visually presented as the "next" row when is should be a "separator". This adds to the confusion and further breaks the flow of the aesthetic.
I'm almost certain it would be much easier to read the table structure without them given the "full black" background and whole table row spanning of the headings, which should be the only thing your separating. Just compare a typical faq entry with a forum thread & the reply table/form, the faq is simple and east to flick through, the forum, in comparison, is looking pretty messy.
I also think the line under the "Search QuickChanges Forums FAQ Archives Register" menu isn't necessary. They sit outside of the "box" thus I see no need for there to be yet another horizontal line.
Lastly, the footer seems a little odd. What merits the extra "box" down the bottom, and why the gradient/fade? It's the only "content in a box" that doesn't contain any content, just links. Which actually makes it more of a menu, but as a menu this is a little confusing as many of the options are quite ambiguous and not actually of any use to the majority of the forum users. You also have "search" at the top, and "advanced search" at the bottom, why?
Some titles and better divisions of the menu links between the top & bottom of the page might help to clear some things up.
I'd also like to see some kind of uniform styling of links. For starters, you have what looks like form buttons which sometimes submit a form and sometimes they link to an internal anchor. The "post reply" button doesn't "post" anything, it's a shortcut to something further down the page, might want to rename that to reflect what it does. Including a little down arrow to let the user know that it links to something down below might also help.
The UBB code (why is it still called UBB code?) buttons look exactly like all the text input fields, which probably isn't a good idea, they also look like forum buttons but don't act like them. The ?Insert Slimies? and ?Insert UBB Code? box display actuator links have >> arrows after them but their function is more up & down in nature. I realise this might reflect where the content is placed, but this is a link to expand and contract, the link itself does nothing to the right which make those arrows confusing. The "Your Text" haeding, the "insert" word and them being on the same "row" as the input textbox sould be enough for people to see this relationship anyhow.
What's with the arrow pointing back towards the thread title? Why is it there? I'm also confused about the "IP" image to the right of each reply, what's it doing there? If it's meant to tell the user their IP has been logged, make it say so. If you create ambiguous elements you're sure to be plagued with questions about them by the new members that come along.
That?s about all I?ve noticed so far. Again I?m just nit picking on a lot of different things but IMO worth saying none the less.
with the search function, perhaps it would be better to have the search as a text box with two radio buttons as such:
Search: [-------------] * only this form (selected by default) * whole site [Advanced search link]
Simple, neat, and all in the one place.
Actually, I'll propose what I think would be the best menu structure for this site, feel free to ignore or take any ideas you like.
Top Left menu (under the asylum logo) possibly in this order: Forum Index (Formerly just 'forums', which I realise makes sence in the forums/faq divide but the forum is the heart of this site, the faq is a supliment, this help establish this pecking order) FAQ (no change) Archives (no change) Join/Sign Up/Create Account / New User (Formerly register: which is perhaps a little too ambiguous when it's not used in any sort of context)
Top Right Menu (where the This page's ID: XXXX): Member List My User Profile / My Cell (perhaps only displayed if the user has the "remember me on this computer" cookie set, if this is at all possible) Quick? Changes (The use of "quick" seems odd here, as it refers to a short period of "time", not "speed" as the word quick suggests. Perhaps this could be called "recent" like the last asylum and we could find a more suatible name for the other, perhaps "Extended Change Log") -- Line Break -- Search box (See above).
Note : Shift "This page's ID" into the "Topic:" header like so: Linkwords ? (Page 1 of 1) | ID: 21346
Topic Header
[Title and Backlink] [Links to thread Pages if they exist and not in full thread mode] [Page ID & Link] (Left Aligned, possibly shouldn't state page 1 of 1 if there is only opne page, but I suppose it doesn't hurt, it just uncessary)
[Display Full Thread -- only shown if there are multiple pages] [Create New Thread] [Reply To This Thread] (RightAligned)
It would also be nice to have some kind of individual user options that could set things like the "always display full thread" or how many entries to display per page etc. Perhaps as an option in each users "cell" ???
The bottom menu's are difficult because they prvide such varied information that's hard to group. The "changes" section is simple enough and repeating the search ber down here might not hurt anyone. I think at the moment the whole footer is a little to compact to be as usefull/usable as it perhaps should be. There's quite a lot of well structured information you could put down here and I see no reason to keep it all squashed up. A full search bar, longer and better descriptive text on the links, menu category headings (changes, adminstration etc...) and re-introducing the drop down lists to jump to other fourms would be nice, as would the previous and next thread buttons, which should also be included as relative <link> attributes for those with browsers that display link data.
On the topic of relative link data, it would also be nice to set the "help" link to the FAQ index (maybe, maybe not), and including non-standard (ie, non-common) links would also be a good idea, one that links/points to the archives would be nice.
And that's about it, for now. Like I said before, take or ignore whatever strikes your fancy.
Getting rid of all the black headers really helped a lot there!
I have also removed the top navigation's bottom border, but while it's good to have a horizontal line less I feel there's something missing now... especially if we rearrange the links and go with your idea of having a search field on every page the navigation could do with a bit of new styling to seperate the links etc...
The UBB buttons (don't ask me why we're still calling them UBB codes - would 'Insert Code Tags' sound better?) have a lighter border and background than the text input fields now, to be seen here: http://grail.coonabibba.de/create/4?&parent=5449
I think it's clear enough that they're clickable now, isn't it?
Those arrows that were pointing to the right are gone now, as well.
As for the "Post Reply" button - maybe we could replace it with a "go to latest post" kind of button/link which would also get you to the reply box (at least if the last post isn't too long)?
You're also right that the "IP" icon has no apparent function yet, but it was planned to have it link to a page where Mad Scis could check the poster's IP, we just didn't get around to implement that yet. Would you change the text to "IP logged" anyway?
The menu structure you proposed definitely seems like an improvement to me, but I'll see what TP thinks about it first before shuffling around too much there. More later =)
Tyberius Prime
Paranoid (IV) Mad Scientist with Finglongers
From: Germany Insane since: Sep 2001
posted 04-18-2004 12:16
just a quick note on the bottom menu:
the left hand side displays links specific to this page - 'special' options at the upper end, the options that every page has below the <hr>.
The right hand side displays site links that are used less often/are less important than the ones at the top, but still should be available from everywhere. (though the quickchanges will be replaced by 'your profile') soon.
Quick changes are called quick changes because that's the way the original Wiki does it ( c2->RecentChanges and c2->QuickChanges ). The old asylum called it's similar thing something like 'show me what happend since midnight'
the <link> next and prev are already being set by pagewise threads.
register is what the old asylum always called it. search is the most important thing in the top menu - and I don't really like search boxes on every page, though I could envision one next to the breadcrumb tree.
anyhow, gotta go now. sorry that I can only reply in this short fashion.
Tyberius Prime
Paranoid (IV) Mad Scientist with Finglongers
From: Germany Insane since: Sep 2001
posted 04-28-2004 14:27
just to note: google has started to pick up the new grail urls, without altering our page rank
Example - we're still in place one. (and on place 4 for 'php session tutorial') - both with the new url (meaning the 'moved permamently' header probably is working ;-))
posted 04-14-2004 22:07
