The site needs better front page organization

Originally Posted by Pladio
It reminds me of xenophobic comments you hear the far-right shout all the time to foreigners or to lefttists. "If you don't like it here then go away".

Exactly what I was feeling about it ! Reminds me about what was said here in France by some Extreme Right persons (many of the Right wing too, shamefully) I despise deeply (shall I be awarded a Goodwin point for such a remark ? ).

Drithius and crpgnut have a very blunt way of communicating. That simply doesn't go down well with everyone. The important part of communication is about how the other person perceives your message not how you intended it.

@ Lemonhead: We have categories for news and categories for games. What you propose is not going to work in our system as it requires to enter games categories in news and that would make a mess of things. For news I would only like to add categories that are related to the type of news. Still it would be possible to offer to filter on both news categories and game categories, so in the end you could still achieve what you want.

In general you should be aware that filtering means 'not showing'. So if you uncheck 'Reviews' this means you see zero news posts of reviews of all games.

The news page for me is pretty pointless but not because of filters.

I simply do not care about the hype machine building up a game before it is released.

I pretty much only care about reviews when the game is actually released, preferably after a patch or two.

I would prefer a RPGWatch review be sticked for a few days so I can easily find it to follow the discussion. The news forum flows so fast that even hot threads can be quickly put on page two or three.

Toff, all RPGWatch articles are stuck on the right-hand side of the newspage.
These include interviews as well as reviews though, but that should be a better starting point for you…

Originally Posted by Toff
I would prefer a RPGWatch review be sticked for a few days so I can easily find it to follow the discussion. The news forum flows so fast that even hot threads can be quickly put on page two or three.

The recent RPGWatch articles are on the right side of the news page.

Apparently Couch has stickied them now in the news forum

That is a nice improvement. My main gripe was/is, I can't tell if a game is a crpg. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that there are so many games released nowadays. Everything is a hybrid and I like the pure games.

I'm coming in via the forums and that's workable. I do a scan of posts for folks who have similar interests. I skim all game posts by Hidden, I read that as we have similar tastes. Hidden plays on the higher difficulties though. I'm a wimp

Originally Posted by Pladio
Toff, all RPGWatch articles are stuck on the right-hand side of the newspage.
These include interviews as well as reviews though, but that should be a better starting point for you…

Well, thats my fault for never going to the home page. I have always gone straight to the forums.

Originally Posted by Toff
Well, thats my fault for never going to the home page. I have always gone straight to the forums.

No it was a good idea as I know more readers don't visit the front page. This way the articles will get more exposure for members, and anonymous readers.

Originally Posted by Myrthos
This site is run by volunteers, who's only payment is whatever satisfaction they get from what they do. It is a hobby we do in our spare time and as such there is little need to be told that we do it in the wrong way. Especially as for some it is a big time sink.

We aren't a company and you aren't customers. We don't need to reach a customer satisfaction level and improve ourselves based on the feedback we get. Our visitors are people that can benefit from what we do. Or they simply don't

That's the best reply I have read on this site, and in this thread this week Myrthos. New and old members need to understand this about our site.

Just a reminder I tend to listen to opinions when I'm not targeted with disrespect.

Originally Posted by Myrthos
@ Lemonhead: We have categories for news and categories for games. What you propose is not going to work in our system as it requires to enter games categories in news and that would make a mess of things. For news I would only like to add categories that are related to the type of news. Still it would be possible to offer to filter on both news categories and game categories, so in the end you could still achieve what you want.

In general you should be aware that filtering means 'not showing'. So if you uncheck 'Reviews' this means you see zero news posts of reviews of all games.

I'm aware of how filters work, I just didn't explain my post very well I guess. I think that it'd be nice if all newsposts had tags associated with them so that you could filter for example: reviews of post-apocalyptic games. And then get a list of of fitting articles all the way back to 2006.

As to sorting it'd also be nice if the news feed was an endless feed / scroll. And you sort by most recently posted (default), trending and most recently commented on. I also think you should keep the sticky news item at the top for breaking news or RPGWatch reviews.

We now have a basic news filter.

You can filter by news type and games via the Menu (three lines) next to "All News" on the front page . For now it only works if you are logged in. Your settings will be saved in the database.

News type:
This is a white list filter. You select news types you want shown on the front page. If nothing is selected, no filter is applied, which means: show all news types.

Games / Developers / Publishers:
This is a blacklist filter. On the right hand side in the actual news bits, in the little info box, there's a link called "Hide". You can use it to stop showing news for that particular game. You can later remove blacklist entries via the filter menu.

If you filter too many games out, the menu will get very big. I haven't thought of anything to address that, so don't filter too much if you want to stay sane.

The two new categories "crowdfunding" and "sales" have been in use for a week or so. I re-categorized all previous newsbits with "*fund*, *kickstart*, *indiegogo* or *sale*" in their titles.

Originally Posted by Lemonhead
I think that it'd be nice if all newsposts had tags associated with them so that you could filter for example: reviews of post-apocalyptic games. And then get a list of of fitting articles all the way back to 2006.

I have game-tags planned for a future update. Filtering by tag may come afterwards.

As to sorting it'd also be nice if the news feed was an endless feed / scroll. And you sort by most recently posted (default), trending and most recently commented on.

Endless feed or something along those lines is something for later. Sort filter sounds nice, too.

Thanks, this looks great! The bit I'm most interested in is filtering by game.

Nice, well done, Arhu. Played with it a bit and found it very convenient to quickly scan for reviews and such.

Yep, this is pretty good. Still have to get used to it, but it does the job.

Thanks, Arhu; very much appreciated. Very simple frontend and you didn't change the front page's layout at all, genius

The blacklist feature is brilliant. Thanks a lot, Arhu!

Any chance for a genre blacklist? Or would the multitude of combinations make it hard?

Originally Posted by Kostas
Any chance for a genre blacklist? Or would the multitude of combinations make it hard?

We'll have to have a tag system in place first, which will make filtering easier and make more sense. Right now our genres are a bit too restricted.

Nicely elegant Arhu! Excellent work!