Some homepage changes

[roddy]

Would like to ask anyone who's interested to take a look at Chinese-forums.com/test where I've been working on a few changes to the home page.

 

The changes so far are in the central column (assuming you're looking at the original on desktop)

 

1) Rather than *every* new topic appearing on the home page, content now needs to be manually promoted. My hope is to have a bunch of people doing this, not just me. We can also now send topic replies, blog comments, etc, to the home page. It's always been a shame that someone could write a short and dull question and have it sit on the home page for days, while a long and interesting answer to a topic could easily go unnoticed. 

2) If the item being promoted to the home page has photos, we can choose one to brighten things up.

3) The 'Promoted by' item tells you who thought it worthy of featuring on the home page. As you see it's only me at the moment, but that will hopefully change.

 

So that's the change on desktop. On the mobile view the change is 

 

1) The mobile page isn't just the most recent blog entries and posts, it's a 'slider' of the featured content (see above) to scroll through, with the existing content below it.

 

Interested in thoughts on this. Still a work in progress, but starting to look something like I'm imagining. There are a couple of things need sorted - you might sometimes get both desktop and mobile versions on top of each other, and there's some unnecessary space at the bottom of the content slider on my phone at least. Sometimes.

 

I'm very sure there'll be problems across different devices, etc. Let me know if something seems wrong.

[Lu]

I like it, it looks good. Issues I see:

- When reading the promoted content, it's initially impossible to see whether you're reading the content itself or the promotional message. I noticed that you already noticed that, but I think this is a real problem.

- I have a slider-like thing with promoted posts below the promoted posts. I think this looks a bit bad. In Firefox on a laptop, see also screenshot.

- This has been mentioned before, but the contrast in the headings ('Site sponsors', 'Our picks' etc) is too low, in my opinion. This makes them a bit of a pain to read.

[roddy]

Yeah,  there's nothing I can do about the first of those at the moment. I suspect we'll just end up not having promotional messages and leave it as the original content. 

 

It's being a pain in the neck about when it does and doesn't show that slider, thought I'd got it fixed. Think I've got it now (although it's probably now not showing when it should for someone else). 

 

I'm unsure about the contrast thing - how often do you actually *read* those? Once or twice, and then you just know where things are. I suspect more contrast would be more distracting. That said, I realise I'm quite violently disagreed with by certain imrons. 

[Lu]

Slider's gone for me now. Although now I noticed a different issue: when I click 'View All' at the bottom of the page, it goes to a fancy-looking overview of posts, including one by abcdefg with pictures. However, the pictures are in a narrow band on top of the post and in the post itself (as seen here) are only blanks. Not sure if this is a problem, and if so, if it's fixable?

 

About the comments/posts: is it possible then to turn off the comment function, so that nobody accidentally confuses visitors? Or is that too complicated?

 

I have to say I completely agree with Imron on the contrast. Low contrast makes things hard to read; I can see there is something there to read so automatically I try to read it (because I always read everything in sight); and then I have to squint because it's hard to read. This makes it more effort to just glaze over it. The same happens with the 'X posted in a topic Y' lines.

[roddy]

Yeah, that 'view all' thing will probably go, for this reason among others. It's removing the images as the function which pushes the post to the home page is also used to promote to Facebook, Twitter, etc, where you can't just have images sitting around in text, so it strips them. Or something like that. 

 

It might be possible, but it's probably easier to ask everyone with access not to use it. I'm also hoping they make some kind of change to how that works.

 

Yeah, I'm looking at this and am feeling more confident now there are numbers and rules. I like numbers and rules. 

[roddy]

See attached. Internet approved. I didn't leave it like this as I didn't want to make a change to the homepage without giving it a bit more thought, but if you look at the section headers on the forums listings.

 

Trouble with this is I change one thing and it becomes unusable somewhere else. 

 

Edit: reverted some accidental changes to the current home page.

[abcdefg]

9 hours ago, roddy said:

Interested in thoughts on this. Still a work in progress, but starting to look something like I'm imagining.

 

Having one or two photos on the home page does brighten it up.

 

I'll submit a short illustrated travel piece later today and you can see how that works.

[lips]

To save moderator's workload and be more objective, can topics be automatically promoted based on the number of posts per period, number of likes per post, level of member participation, etc.?

[roddy]

That's a possibility, but I think I'd always want a human check. Sometimes a very short or very specific post can get (and deserve) lots of likes, but not necessarily be of very broad interest, for example. Similarly two members having an argument can result in lots of posts ina short time. 

 

What I was thinking of last night though was using reaction data to make sure posts get seen and considered for the home page. Say through the day we promote stuff we happen to come across, but once a day we look at the most liked posts in the last 24 hours and promote them if appropriate. 

 

What do you you make of the changes?

[somethingfunny]

The photos look great.  Although you might need to start paying abcdefg.

 

Would there be a way to switch back to see all new content rather than promoted content, if so desired?

[roddy]

Not unless there's some kind of massive demand for it. New topics still come up in the new posts feed on the right / bottom of the home page and would appear under 'all activity', etc. 

[roddy]

10 hours ago, abcdefg said:

I'll submit a short illustrated travel piece later today and you can see how that works.

Am using it to test scheduled posts - it should appear at or shortly after half past now.

[roddy]

On 01/11/2017 at 3:36 PM, roddy said:

there's some unnecessary space at the bottom of the content slider on my phone at least. Sometimes.

I think I've got this fixed, although in quite a dubious manner. 

 

Would appreciate any comments from folk on different devices - I can test on an iPhone 6 and a cheap Amazon tablet, but that's all. Current oddities are a) on desktop if you shrink the browser window, there's a stage in the middle where the central column is empty [edit:fixed], and b) the carousel doesn't always appear if, eg, you shift from landscape to portrait on a tablet, but turns up when you reload.

On 02/11/2017 at 11:18 AM, roddy said:

it should appear at or shortly after half past now.

It didn't, as I'd hit the wrong date.

 

 

[abcdefg]

39 minutes ago, roddy said:

It didn't, as I'd hit the wrong date.

 

I was wondering, but I didn't want be a nuisance by mentioning it.

[edelweis]

eeep what happened to the recent posts list on the homepage?

 

edit: never mind , it's back now...

[roddy]

That's nothing to do with the changes I'm making, but it does look like the server was overloaded which is why that block might not have loaded sometimes. Have rebooted now, will keep an eye on it.

[AaronUK]

I thought it looked good on my mobile phone

[roddy]

Thanks. The desktop view is a bit of a mess at the moment as I got halfway through something yesterday.

[roddy]

Ok, that's tidier. Posting a screenshot of the centre column as I may break it later while looking at the mobile view. Note:

I've given up on including the promoter's avatar and made that text much less prominent.

Addition of reaction data (and if logged in you can add some). Reaction data for topics isn't showing due to a bug currently being fixed.

 

Any comments? I did have reaction data to the right of the title, but it got messy with long titles and small screens. Still not sure about the white space you end up with around there though. 

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/test

[Lu]

6 hours ago, roddy said:

Still not sure about the white space you end up with around there though. 

I don't see any awkward white space. Looks good to me.