Open Riven202 opened 3 months ago
Glad you're liking it overall, and this is great feedback. Going to make a checklist for myself to work on over the week. Also a few responses to questions/etc:
*bold*
and /italics/
without typing [b]bold[/b]
and so on, so hopefully it does the trick.Progress in checklist above. Notes:
Hey Dan,
Thanks for continuing to stay on top of this and keeping things moving! I noticed some of the updates, and I think its coming along nicely! I've added my responses below your comments and numbered them for ongoing reference.
1. SVG Graphics / Updated Logo:
SVG (or even PNG) logo would be much appreciated, perhaps in various different layouts (e.g. logo only, logo + text, etc). I couldn't find the original art for the snark so I ended up clipping it out from the original site's graphics.
2. Responsive Ordering:
For changing the order on the mobile layout, I was able to get most of the changes you wanted except for "Recent Updates" which I couldn't put after "Recent Maps" - I can only change the order of things within the same column, but I can't put stuff from the left column underneath stuff from the right column. I put it below "Spotlight" instead, hopefully that's enough. If you really want it that order it's possible, but I would need to duplicate that section into both columns and toggle which one is visible based on the window size - not ideal, but doable.
- Since Journals were always an underutilized tool, I'd like to avoid giving them a spot at the very top of the home page. Can recent journals section go beneath recent maps section on the medium and large screen breakpoints otherwise? I like where it appears beneath the recent maps on the small screen breakpoint now. Does that still keep it in the same column?
3. Star Maps:
I think I might have not implemented the "star maps" feature, should I add it in?
- Yes please. That's essentially our recommended maps tag. These are maps that are definitely worth a user's time.
4. Online Users:
I can add the 'other users online' section back in, maybe it can just show logged in users based on their last activity? If they visited any page on the site in the last 10 mins maybe? Tracking the anonymous logins is a lot harder, and I'd like to avoid that if possible. Same for the link to the dedicated page of online users - it seems somewhat overkill. Maybe the whole thing could be replaced with an "active users" section on the home page, like TWHL has?
- If you're referring to the awesome active user list on TWHL like below, then yes! I think that would be an awesome addition and provide some much-needed encouragement for users ghosting.
- Can we add that beneath the Recent Forum Posts section on the home page?
- I'm completely fine with eliminating the dedicated user's list page otherwise.
- Additionally, can we add a new line to the common footer on each page?:
- Into something that reads like:
- © Snarkpit.net 2001 - 2024 • about us • contact 184 users online • 13 members browsing forums Snarkpit v7.0 created this page in 1.0037 seconds.
5. Forum Icons:
The forum thread icons just represent if there's new posts that were posted after your last login. I can add a tooltip to them.
- I think that's completely fine and does the trick!
6. News Items:
I made some changes to the mobile home page - only the first news post is shown, and the first 3 spotlight items. Let me know if this is no good, I can change it back. I ended up changing TWHL to just one new post on the front page since we post news so rarely, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to make everyone scroll past multiple old news post to see the forum updates. Spotlight is 3 because 3 icons fits nicely into 1 row (4 seems a bit small, and 5 is way too small).
- I think that's a good idea, especially for mobile. I know the "Community News" header at the top is a link to more news, but should there be a new button added beneath that post in the mobile version to "See more" ? But maybe that's not necessary. What are your thoughts?
7. BB Code:
BBCode - the old site had some weirdness going on with bbcode, especially in articles - some of it was pre-parsed and the html saved to the database, and some of it was parsed and converted into html when the page is loaded. It's more consistent now, the bbcode is saved to the database and also converted to html and that's saved into a second database field. It's a little bit more efficient than having to parse the bbcode for every post every time a page is loaded. The BBCode is actually using the same parser that I made for TWHL, which I call WikiCode. I removed most of the TWHL-specific features and added the missing SnarkPit features so it's pretty much compatible with how SnarkPit did it before. Markdown is probably not a good idea since there's a lot of history in the threads that use BBCode stuff that markdown doesn't support too well. My WikiCode variant is sort of a mashup of BBCode and Markdown which allows stuff like bold and /italics/ without typing [b]bold[/b] and so on, so hopefully it does the trick.
- I think the new system works great, and don't have any other objections to what you pointed out. I think the new system makes a lot more sense for what we need.
Will follow-up with more comments.
Hope all is well, Dan! I've got another round of comments queued up, but I think this will cover the last of the design changes, and the rest should just be bug squashing. There was a bit of time between me initially testing the site to write these down, and me posting them here, so I noticed some were no longer issues, and appreciate you continuing to work on the site! I'm feeling really good about how both the mobile and desktop versions of the site are coming along. And it's performing beautifully for me! It's so wonderful to see the Pit get the kind of love needed to keep the content around. I really appreciate your time on all this.
Here's a design thoughts I had as I made efforts to check out both the mobile and desktop versions of the site:
I will continue to review more of the site testing each of its features and will follow-up here. I'll start to limit my comments to bugs and no longer anticipate asking for any new feature requests like what was listed above, so we can start to wrap-up what we have.
Looking forward to hearing back!
Thanks for the detailed feedback, those are all achievable - I'll probably work on them this upcoming weekend.
Ok, I've worked through most of the most recent feedback - I'm aware I've still got some more things to do from the initial post.
Design requests:
Bugs:
General Comments:
Font Size:
Mobile Sliding Sheet Menu:
Home Page:
Maps Landing Page:
Map Detail Page:
Articles / Downloads Landing Page:
User Detail Page:
Forums
Group Landing Page:
Forums Thread Landing Page:
Forum Thread Page:
More comments to come!