AOU New Site Discussions

[Khuri]

Hmm, i tried to convert all the guide images from their old folders to their new locations, but some guides obviously stored their images somewhere else but in their actual guide-id image folder, making them miss the transaction.
I'll look in the backup if i can find them. As for the static-server, it just replicates the folders from this server, so if they get uploaded here correctly, they'll end up on static later.

For information on the static:
it replicates the upload-folders every 15min, and the guides switch their image-links from internal to static 30min after their last update (=someone edited/saved them).

[Windguaerd]

As a side note, now I get e-mails with notifications about posts in threads I posted. So whatever did not work before, it does now.

[Demoder]

Khuri: You might want to check this: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/12011 ... c3eb9e041/

It has some info about performance bottlenecks when loading the front page.

[Silvana]

Okay, so based on some of the suggestions going on, a few things to propose.

• Make "booster packs" their own sections. I had planned to get this done anyway, but people are pointing out the inconsistency and break in fluidity of it now, and that's not good.
  
  An option to list all guides in an expansion/booster. Some people are stuck on the way it used to be, and it wouldn't be a hard option to add.
  
  The guides/articles discussion part of the forums should be hidden. If there's a way to stop them from showing up for regular users on the unread list, that would be good too. I don't mind us seeing them, but with how many blanks are showing up and will be for a while, the public has no use seeing those if we can help it.

[Silvana]

1 and 3 are done. 2 would require a bit more twiddling than I can do.

[Windguaerd]

Articles have no date format, therefore it is not possible for anyone checking that section as to when each article was published.

Maybe extend the "Author" column by adding a date, like "By Name, on 12/08/2010.

I would think all articles would be in date order, with the newer on top and the oldest at the bottom. Right now we have an article from 2+ years at the top, and the newer articles.

Another issue that I may see, is date of publication and "Last Updated on xx.xx.20xx by NAME" is not always the same date.

For example lets say an article is published today, January 18th, 2012. Then in 2 days a typo is found, and it's edited. The article then appears to have been published the 20th. Not a big deal, unless something is edited 3 months later.

We're accurate on guides, that should also apply to articles and they way they are published as best we can.

I know it's not really a priority compared to the knowledge section, but I just want to post this so if there is a chance to improve the articles section, it would be nice to see.

Thanks for reading.

[Windguaerd]

Quick question, is it normal that I have to log in every day even when I set it to remember me? I just want to know if the issue is from my side.

[Silvana]

It's doing that for everyone, Khuri put it on the back burner to get our guide/article permissions working right, but he's back on it now

[Snakebite]

I've only had to log in twice so far...

[Khuri]

I'll be off tomorrow and saturday, family business. Don't break anything, i might come take a peek if i got time between

[Silvana]

So yeah, not sure if it will help you or not, but Llie figured out something where if you go to the main page, and not to the forum first, you stay logged in. You only get logged out trying to go directly to the forum.

[Demoder]

If I search for "Anarchy Online Universe" on google, AO-U pops up as hit #4 - with an invalid (old site style URI) article.
If I search for some AOU guide on google, AOU doesn't show up anywhere near the top.

I suspect this is because we don't use search-engine-friendly URLs. If changing the URLs are too much hassle (it probably is), Khuri might want to look into using the google web tools (and similar tools for other search engines) to instruct the engines which parameters are important; Such as saying that the parameters "id", "mid", and "pid" should be used to identify a page.




Furthermore, I notice the titles are "AO-Universe - <useful title here>". I think it would be more useful if it was "<useful title here> - AO-Universe".


PS: URIs are quite horribly long too... They're currently:

Code: Select all

http://www.ao-universe.com/index.php?id=14&mid=26&site=AO-Universe%2FKnowledge%2FShadowlands%2FGameplay+Guides%2F&pid=524

; It would be a lot more copypaste-friendly (and less scary for the user) if we dropped the &site= parameter (it doesn't affect which page you end up at anyway; and it's not readable either due to URI encoding), and drop the specific reference to index.php, so the URI is something like this instead:

Code: Select all

http://www.ao-universe.com/?id=14&mid=26&pid=524

And yes. Someone really do need to go through all guides. I pick a guide at random to test something, and it's broken 90% of the time The one above should probably use the item icon bbtags instead of hardcoded links to some arbitary uploaded icon.

PPS: If you for some reason still want the &site= parameter, place it at the end; and convert spaces to dashes (-), at least it'd be readable then. Might want to do the same for other special characters. I also notice you're uri-encoding forward slashes (/); why?

Edit: vvvvvv Got me!

[Snakebite]

On a topic that I didn't understand at all, I'm gonna chip in with the only bit I did catch...

PPS: If you for some reason still want the &site= parameter, place it at the end; and convert spaces to dashes (-), at least it'd be readable then. Might want to do the same for other special characters. I also notice you're uri-encoding backslashes (/); why?

That's not a backslash, that's a forwardslash!

R I coder yet???

[Demoder]

Also, a confusing thing:
When I browse guides, the most available search box is the top right corner one. It says "MY AO-UNIVERSE.COM" and "Search...". If I enter text here, it searches the forums only.

The more anonymous search box which is a tiny bit further down looks like it'll do some fancy search in the current guide; although it does search the whole guide database.

Might want to expose the guides search more, forums search less?

[Silvana]

Weird, if you're not on a forum page, it shows "Search Forum..." in that box, which makes it a little more obvious what it is for, but any forum pages, it just says "Search..." If it could be changed to show the forum part always, that would go a long way.

Putting the guide search above the calendar would help too, or even better, above everything else in the navigation panel since it's the main focus of the site, and once you're off the front page having to click around to get to the search again is odd.. Maybe making its box a color that stands out more against the rest too.