Thread: Site changes in the near future

Originally Posted by AlanII

How do you start a blog?

For now it's only limited to vendors, mentors and staff.

I'll explain some more. For now we are keeping it restricted to a manageable group of people. Blogs are new on SRP, and they come with some things that need a bit of structure. We have to come up with some sort of guide on what is and is not suitable for publication, even though a blog is to be your own personal space. Things like the infamous short lived 'honemeister comparison blog' really have no place here. And while politics and religion are allowed in the conversation forum, those topics have no place in SRP blogs.

Additionally, we are looking into using categories (or tags for example) in a useful way. In the main forum, tags have all but outright failed their purpose. There's a zillion tags, and they are not in any way actually useful for people trying to find information. One of the big reasons that failed was that we just opened the tag system and said 'here you can use tags, have at it'.

So to prevent sheer volume from making it hard or impossible for us to implement a useful structure, we keep it limited to those groups, which are a total of about 100 people, so that the traffic is still manageable and we have the opportunity to fine tune things.

And finally, while we will make blog available to senior people later on (probably based on post count and time in), they will not be available to anyone from day one. The biggest reason is that the blogs also have to be in some way useful to the community, and have some certainty that the owners know what they are doing, shavingwise. Beginners outnumber senior people significantly. That's only normal. Without some restriction, there would be 10 or more 'I just discovered straights and they're the best thing evar' blog posts for every 'things to keep in mind when using natural hones' type posts. And that way the blog system would drown in posts that are ultimately only interesting to the writers.

All very reasonable, thanks for the explanation.

I do not find the sig line distracting in any way but rather very informative of the poster. If there is also a link to a website I have found that useful and convenient. Distracting it is not. I do remember a time in the past when there was a complete lack of information available and us new guys had to grope about blindly for information and supplies etc.
Removal of the sig line is a step backwards.

Originally Posted by randydance062449

I do not find the sig line distracting in any way but rather very informative of the poster. If there is also a link to a website I have found that useful and convenient. Distracting it is not. I do remember a time in the past when there was a complete lack of information available and us new guys had to grope about blindly for information and supplies etc.
Removal of the sig line is a step backwards.

True, but there were only a handful of people who used their siglines for something informative.
And in the past, there was no main page and there was no wiki.

With the new front page, we will have everything a beginner needs available in a website format that contains everything they need to know to get started.
This is very different from when I joined. Given that you were already here, it is very much different from when you started out. We no longer have to 'hunt' down information like even just 5 years ago. While there were sig lines that were useful, the void they filled does not exist anymore.

SRP has evolved to more than just a web forum.

Trying to be of help in this post..........

If your going to rely upon the main page as a portal then the top of this page needs to have a link called "Home". It should be located to the left of the current "Forums" .

Originally Posted by randydance062449

Trying to be of help in this post..........

If your going to rely upon the main page as a portal then the top of this page needs to have a link called "Home". It should be located to the left of the current "Forums" .

Good point actually.
I didn't notice it because I always just click the SRP logo right above the navbar.
I'll ask Gugi to add it.

I actually removed that button on purpose when we switched to the new software back in March. The reason is that having too many links is even more useless than having too few. There are already two links to the SRP main page - the logo and the 'home' icon on the breadcrumb navigation:



Both of these have very high profile positions on the screen real estate already. It's not a problem to add 'Home' to the navigation bar, but there are already 7 other buttons right there. Sometime ago we had a request for 'What's new' among them as well, since it's the major forum navigation way for most people.
I don't mind having 'Home', or any other button there, but I think these should go only as needed. As the site changes the navigation should be changing as well, but above all it's purpose is functionality so it needs to stay as focused as possible.
You've probably noticed that there used to be other items there (Games/Casino/Paypal/Community/Logout/QuickLinks) that I removed, and others (Reviews/Blogs) appear only as we add the functionality. The point is that SRP has changed a lot since its start as a yahoo group and continues to change, and the software ought to reflect these changes.

Of course, it's possible to do everything we do now in the format of a yahoo group, but it's just going to be one huge exercise in frustration since we have to constantly fight with the limitations of that format. It's much easier to use a discussion board for discussions, classifieds software for sales, wiki for synthesizing the community knowledge, blogs for self expression, etc.



From what I've heard most beginners' problem on SRP is not lack of information but the opposite - too much information and difficulty to distinguish the good from the not so good, the essential and important from the optional and personal choice. There are just a lot of extremely enthusiastic beginners who are convinced their latest breakthrough is the one singular problem everybody else faces, and their personal choice is the best one for everybody else. The mentor badges are one of the better ways to point out people who are knowledgeable and experienced and whose posts should be given higher weight. And then there are also the democratic 'likes' and 'thanks' systems...

But back to what should be linked and what not, it's very easy to put stuff on, the hard part is figuring out what is not that essential and adds mostly clutter obscuring the important things. The vbulletin 4 software was a big step in reducing clutter by having the second level navigation that is contextual, but the software doesn't cover all of the things that we need at srp, so 4 out of the 7 items on the navigation don't have that contextual subnavigation.

But any ideas in how to prioritize and improve the site navigation are very welcome and highly appreciated.

I will miss some of the silliness in sig lines (mine was utterly useless) but I think overall these changes are a huge step forward. I'm really excited to see how the blogs turn out, should be great. Thanks SRP staff etc!

Originally Posted by gugi

[Stuff about the home button]

Maybe we can just add the word "home" next to the little house graphic on the forums page, like it is on the main page