Dallaryen

[Declined] Order of Categories and Sections on the main page [Forums]

11 posts in this topic

Title: Order of Categories and Sections on the main page

Type: Forums

Description: 

After working the forum for a month or more on a daily basis, and seeing that a few people can't find the guides and the tech support, I suggest reordering the sections on the main page by relevancy / trendiness, and to make technical guides more accessible. Your feedback / suggestions or further ideas are appreciated.

General Information
- Announcements
- Rules & Policies
- Events
- Information
- Recruitment


Support
- Forum's Archive
- Technical Support
- Report a Player
- Suggestions
- Ban Appeals


Community
- General Discussion
- Tutorials & Guides
- Class Forums
- Presentations
- Roleplay
- Resources
- Off Topic
- Localized Forums


Realms' Forum  (subsection order unchanged)

Development

Firestorm Staff

 

Major points are:

- moving down Development  --  it concerns only a few people who look that far
- moving up Support  --  most people visit the forum for this

   -- many Tech Support questions end up in General Discussion now, so I would test Support before Community for a week
   -- if too many Tech Support questions have to be moved to General Discussion in the next week, I would move Support below Community

- moving up Tutorials & Guides  --  we/me are writing more and more guides, and players should read these before asking questions: they find answer faster this way, and we have less copy-paste to do
- moving up Class Forums  --  this is the resource for people to learn about their class, and to improve their gameplay

 

Git gud.

 

Edited by Dallaryen
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+1

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+1

A lot of members post bugs and issues in the General Discussion section and the Tutorials and Guides section on a daily basis. It costs moderators time and reduces the members' chance of receiving proper help quickly. Move the Technical Support section up will increase the chance of a person will notice it.

Also, I suggest that a link to the Bugtracker is added to the Support section (e.g. Report a Bug). Currently, if you want to report a bug, you have to know that you shall press the "Tracker" option in the navigation bar in order to find the Bugtracker website (or "More" then Bugtracker, or Technical Support then Bugtracker), where the report can be filed. It's understandable if people mistakenly report bugs in the General Discussion, Class, or PvP section.

In my opinion, the Forum Archive section doesn't belong in the Support section. The support section could be made slimmer, and forum archive could be placed in its own section and moved more down to the bottom.

And while we are at. It would be nice if a "Submit a Question" button was added to the Technical Support page. Right now, you have to either follow a link on the main page, which is easy to overlook, or you have to click on the Support dropdown in the navigation bar and then select "Submit a Question". I have replied to several people who posted in the General Discussion section because they could not find the "Submit a Question" link.

Edited by Lagdyret
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Agree, people tent to post in the first area they see so general discussion posts get forgotten about most of the time when it's people who need actual support.

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About the Forum Archive:  I feel too it's out-of-place, but there is a reason to keep it there:

We want people to search the archive, and ask a question if it's not already answered.  The archived Tech Support topics are in that section + anything else archived, but that's not too much.

My only idea on this is:  Technical Support could be archived in it's own Archived Questions section, and everything else archived to the Forum Archive, that is moved to the end of Community.

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11 hours ago, Dallaryen said:

About the Forum Archive:  I feel too it's out-of-place, but there is a reason to keep it there:

We want people to search the archive, and ask a question if it's not already answered.  The archived Tech Support topics are in that section + anything else archived, but that's not too much.

My only idea on this is:  Technical Support could be archived in it's own Archived Questions section, and everything else archived to the Forum Archive, that is moved to the end of Community.

Yes, but I imagine people use the search tool when they want to find relevant content. The number of posts moved to the archive in the last couple of days is, on its own, enough to fill several pages. It would take ages to find a relevant post in the archive by navigating through the pages unless you're looking for something that has been discussed very recently. However, I think you're absolutely correct about having two archives, where one, which is a part of the Support section, contains topics with important, helpful or very informative posts. One of these archives should probably have a different name in order to avoid confusion (e.g. Archived Answers).

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The section would be named  Archived Questions / Archived Answers / Technical Support Archive  ?

About the search feature I'd like to share my findings: it happens that people post similar topics in a short timespan, so I tried the search feature, and found that searching for error 132, or error #132, or cas error will give only unrelevant results. This is because words below 4 letters, or so are ignored. Searching for "cas system" will not find the guide tagged with "cas system".

I also found that the order of results is very hectic, with posts from 2016 in the 2nd and 3rd spot sometimes.
Searching for blz51900003 will show the pinned and featured "Technical Error Guides" topic as the last, on the 2nd page.

To find relevant information, I use google site search now, but I doubt anybody else does that. It would be an option to integrate it.

 

Edited by Dallaryen

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@Dallaryen If you open the search tool, then you can select a time range. You can sort the results and choose search by tag. If you use quotation marks around your search term, then it will not ignore any of the words but will find all topics which contain the specific search phrase. I mostly found relevant topics and I also found your topic, which is tagged with "cas system", and it was, in fact, the very first result when I searched by tag. The search tool is by far from perfect and it seems like that even if you choose "Contain all of my search term words" then it will still just find topics, which contain any of the search terms. It would also be nice if it didn't "ignore" short words since people may very well search for 132, 134, CAS, MoP etc.

Anyway, a specific archive for helpful posts would be a nice addition. What I'm most interested in is that the section will be arranged in a more practical way. 

Edited by Lagdyret

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Yes, I will use the advanced search too, thank you for reminding me. I would mention that probably not many people use the advanced search, therefore I'm also interested in seeing the sections rearranged. Hopefully we can have Inveric's support, as it is up to him to make the new order.

 

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We won't be changing anything right now, and they're fine how they are right now.

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