View Topic

Today I made some minor changes to the front page of the forums to try to reduce clutter and remove things that are not really used.

1) The top bar menu has been rearranged with three options: donate, Wintreath (links to Wintreath locations), and Your Menu (links to your profile areas). In the process the old guides and IRC links were removed...we have not used IRC in some time now, and the few guides that were ever written were extremely outdated and have since been replaced with newer guides.

2) The social media links and recruitment page link have been removed from the front page sidebar. A link to the Steam Group can be found in the Wintreath menu, and for now links to the recruiter page are in Civil Service forum.

3) Subforums of the archive forum will no longer show on the forum front page. These are subforums that are rarely needed but take up a lot of room on the page, especially on phones and tablets, and this will save that room. The subforums can still be accessed by going into the forum itself.

1. In general this seems to me a good change. Are the old guides other than the recruitment ones archived anywhere?

2. I'm not finding any link to the recruitment page anywhere. The only thing I see is an unlinked url on the new recruitment guide, which, when I type into the address bar, redirects me to the news feed. (I'm on mobile though, but I got the same result trying with a desktop user agent.)

I'm also kinda concerned that even though manual recruitment has historically never been very popular of an activity for citizens, that this would worsen the issue by not having recruitment status or even the fact that you can recruit for Wintreath be that visible.

3. I'd have to disagree that the archive subforums are rarely needed. I find myself having to go to them quite often, especially since recent Underhusen Speakers seem to prefer archiving threads far too early for people to see the final posts on them.

1. In general this seems to me a good change. Are the old guides other than the recruitment ones archived anywhere?

2. I'm not finding any link to the recruitment page anywhere. The only thing I see is an unlinked url on the new recruitment guide, which, when I type into the address bar, redirects me to the news feed. (I'm on mobile though, but I got the same result trying with a desktop user agent.)

I'm also kinda concerned that even though manual recruitment has historically never been very popular of an activity for citizens, that this would worsen the issue by not having recruitment status or even the fact that you can recruit for Wintreath be that visible.

3. I'd have to disagree that the archive subforums are rarely needed. I find myself having to go to them quite often, especially since recent Underhusen Speakers seem to prefer archiving threads far too early for people to see the final posts on them.

1) The government guide is a dispatch pinned to our region page on NS. The other two guides were on R/D and the World Assembly...both are outdated, we're no longer involved in R/D, and there's probably a better WA guide on NS.

2) I forgot to include the link in the guide...I've added it now. The link on the front page didn't really draw in more recruiters though...for the past few months I've been the only person to recruit. I'm hoping that having an updated guide will help, and in the future I'd like to create a page that has information and links to every way you can get involved in Wintreath, including becoming an ambassador, recruiting, writing Orendi articles, etc. I think that'll be more effective than just throwing the link out there, but I suspect we'll also have to bring it up from time to time and entice people to give recruiting a try too.

3) I'm not sure the solution is to make archive subforums visible on the front page for everyone...maybe the solution is to not archive Storting topics for a week. Maybe the solution is to not have an UH/OH archive...is the UH/OH so active that they need the active UH/OH forums to only contain active topics? In some cases I'm wondering whether archives are actually necessary.

Yeah, I think that all UH threads should stay there until the end of the term (at which point archiving makes sense IMO, to separate between current and past terms). But that's ultimately up to the Speaker and the rest of the Underhusen.

I personally use the archive subforums quite often to also see past elections, festivals, etc. so I find it convenient (and the subforums being there makes it easy to see whether the newly archived posts are worth taking a look at again) and I've never had an issue with having to scroll a bit more to see who's online, but I see that my situation is probably not representative of most Wintreans and can see this argument.

I personally have to partially agree with Taulover on Change 3. I reference the Archives rather often, and usually it is a specific archive (such as the Underhusen, Overhusen, or Elections Archive). This change increases the amount of time that I must spend to try and access the subforum, and tries to solve an issue that IMO no one really had an issue with in the past. As a mobile user I found the archive area as not that big of a deal or annoyance anyway, although perhaps the less used and active archives could be hidden (such as special event archives and the like)

Additionally I would like to state that the Underhusen does actually need an archive area, as it would otherwise be extremely cluttered in the actual UH topic. There are twenty-four pages in the UH archive of closed topics from past sessions. Each session is a bit different and if there were no archive it would be cluttered with the Speaker Topics, with each and every debate, discussion, and act proposed, and the like. The OH has less of this issue, so perhaps the OH could just deal with having its archive in the same area.

As to the matter of moving things too early or too late, when something is over and moved to the OH, I usually archive it because I don't see any point in keeping the clutter there, although this changes based upon the Speaker of the Underhusen.

Perhaps the houses could have their own archives within their respective sections?

I think dropping the general archive down a level makes sense.

Perhaps the houses could have their own archives within their respective sections?

I would see this as the logical solution if we got rid of archives entirely (though I don't see how that's feasible considering that most of the archives are archived subforums that don't belong anywhere else, and the only other option of deleting/privating them would be a bad idea). But otherwise I think it makes more sense for all the archives to be in one place.

I think dropping the general archive down a level makes sense.

Might be a nitpick but they are still on the same forum level as before, they just aren't visible on the front page anymore.

Yeah - visibility level.