I'd like to make three suggestions about the newsbox.
1) The newsbox is supposed to contain important regional news. Sometimes it's regularly updated, other times it's not updated for months. Some of us check it, others completely ignore it. In 3 out of 4 of these combinations, it's taking up too much vertical space for no good reason.
I would suggest having instead an additional link "news" next to where "search", "members", and so on are. Once you hover over the "news" link, a drop-down menu will appear, showing the news that would normally in the newsbox. That way, those of us who check the newsbox can quickly look at it there, and the rest can easily ignore it.
For an example, you can look at the header of Europeia's forum, where I recently implemented something similar. Hover your mouse over the "news" link for a couple of seconds, to see how the drop-down menu works.
2) The newsbox also contains the "ways to get involved" links. I consider these very important, and in various surveys conducted by the MoHA many members responded that they found the links very helpful when they first joined the forum. However, for everyone who has been a member for more than a few days, the links are useless and take up a lot of space.
I would suggest moving the links to a second link row, right below the one we have for "search", "members", and so on. There is already a lot of wasted space there, due to the irregular shape of the forum banner. That space is ideal for containing the "ways to get involved" links.
3) This suggestion is more technical. Currently, the newsbox works by directly loading the contents of a certain forum post. As a result, many forum tracking scripts do not operate correctly - for instance, in the Users Online page, you cannot tell what people are looking at.
I would suggest that we change the implementation so that it works in two parts. First, a script running from an offsite server polls the newsbox forum post every, say, 5 minutes and stores its contents in some file on the server. And second, the forum loads this file from the server, instead of directly loading the newsbox post.
Ideally the server would be Elu's server, which the forum is already loading a lot of stuff from. Given that Elu is currently away, I could temporarily have this stored on the server we use for the mass-TG and dispatch pages.
I'd like to hear what others think about these suggestions. I'd also like to hear what others think about the newsbox in general. Once the discussion has reached some conclusion, I'll implement the changes for which there seems to be consensus support (if any).
1) The newsbox is supposed to contain important regional news. Sometimes it's regularly updated, other times it's not updated for months. Some of us check it, others completely ignore it. In 3 out of 4 of these combinations, it's taking up too much vertical space for no good reason.
I would suggest having instead an additional link "news" next to where "search", "members", and so on are. Once you hover over the "news" link, a drop-down menu will appear, showing the news that would normally in the newsbox. That way, those of us who check the newsbox can quickly look at it there, and the rest can easily ignore it.
For an example, you can look at the header of Europeia's forum, where I recently implemented something similar. Hover your mouse over the "news" link for a couple of seconds, to see how the drop-down menu works.
2) The newsbox also contains the "ways to get involved" links. I consider these very important, and in various surveys conducted by the MoHA many members responded that they found the links very helpful when they first joined the forum. However, for everyone who has been a member for more than a few days, the links are useless and take up a lot of space.
I would suggest moving the links to a second link row, right below the one we have for "search", "members", and so on. There is already a lot of wasted space there, due to the irregular shape of the forum banner. That space is ideal for containing the "ways to get involved" links.
3) This suggestion is more technical. Currently, the newsbox works by directly loading the contents of a certain forum post. As a result, many forum tracking scripts do not operate correctly - for instance, in the Users Online page, you cannot tell what people are looking at.
I would suggest that we change the implementation so that it works in two parts. First, a script running from an offsite server polls the newsbox forum post every, say, 5 minutes and stores its contents in some file on the server. And second, the forum loads this file from the server, instead of directly loading the newsbox post.
Ideally the server would be Elu's server, which the forum is already loading a lot of stuff from. Given that Elu is currently away, I could temporarily have this stored on the server we use for the mass-TG and dispatch pages.
I'd like to hear what others think about these suggestions. I'd also like to hear what others think about the newsbox in general. Once the discussion has reached some conclusion, I'll implement the changes for which there seems to be consensus support (if any).
