iftechfoundation / ifdb

The software behind the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)
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ifdb manual #725

Open qdacsvx opened 3 years ago

qdacsvx commented 3 years ago

Dan Fabuilch and I have been scratching our heads "How could somebody discover the feature that you can change the skin of ifdb?"

There is a simple solution. ifdb should have a comprehensive online manual which documents all of ifdb's features.

There would be one article for each page of ifdb. With one section on each task/feature. Sections should be fairly short. There would be a link "help" or "docs" to view the manual in the top bar.

On a wide screen there could be a left sidebar with a random manual section for that page displayed on it. There could be links to navigate to the next/prev section or to open the manual contents page (i.e. as a page not in the sidebar). This left sidebar would be non-scrolling.

The help text will be static and will not scroll off the screen no matter where you scroll. This means you can always get help no matter where the page is scrolled.

There could be a control to show/hide the left sidebar.

dfabulich commented 3 years ago

I'm not sure this would actually solve the stated problem! There's already a sidebar link to "Pick a custom display style," and people aren't discovering it. We could add a new sidebar link to the "User manual," but I bet users wouldn't discover that, either!

qdacsvx commented 3 years ago

The random help section displayed in the sidebar could be the one on "Pick a custom display style," Eventually that one would show up for anyone who visited the home page (or user settings) often enough.