Hi! Do we have a sense of how the front page will be organized? Seems that the threads generated automatically by BB posts should be at the top? And then what? subjects?
The basic front page shows the most recently commented-threads (standard forum behavior)
Maybe we can have the default be http://bbs.boingboing.net/categories instead?
Its technically possible, but I would strongly recommend running with the system for a couple of weeks before making such drastic changes.
We may want to look at “category matching” in the Boing Boing posts published in WordPress. For example “technology” posts could map to a “technology” category here. A bit early to look at it though, lets see how we go first.
Also, seems that once you’re in a thread, it would be easier if the nav that appears on other pages (Latest, New, Unread, etc.) should stay at the top so that you don’t have click back and back to be able to jump around?
Until the forum gets quite large, the easiest implemention is the one that works the best: a simple, flat list of topics in the order they were last updated.
We have flirted with more sophisticated choices in a “hot” tab (still underway, though low intensity), and certainly /categories can be made default.
KISS seems to work best in my experience, and should always be tried first… until proven guilty.
Well, we are adding specific New and Unread counts to the bottom where it says “want to read more?” soon. So you get some idea how many licks it will take to get to the center of that particular Tootsie Pop.
I would like to keep things simple, too, and am with ya on the flat front door staying as it is–a natural aggregation of the most popular stuff, serving participants, rather than an at-a-glance taxonomic look at BBS as a whole, which serves editors and admins.
But I do think Pesco might be right that the navigation is hard to get to, perhaps because of how we’ve customized Discourse to resemble BB.
So perhaps not now, but once we’re rolling, a “phase 2” idea would be to move the front door nav into the black bar (which doesn’t have to stay fixed) and getting rid of the double-stacked bars.
Something like this…
OK so the red part links to boing boing proper and the green part links to the BBS? That might be tricksy for people expecting the typical “I click the thing on the top left and I go home” behavior.
The main reason for the stacked “disappears when you scroll” nav is:
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Allow people to get back to BB proper
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Branding
Aaaaaannd pretty much that’s it. If you are OK with people being “stuck” in BBS once they get there – and feel the branding is sufficient to denote BB, we don’t require the link back to BB.
There are two “homes” now though, BB home and BBS home. So stacked scrolls-down nav is one of the better choices IMO.
You know, I might as well leap to the logical conclusion: to make a single bar that works site-wide, on both BB and BBS
(We’ve been planning to lose the ‘category verticals’ for a while, as they generate no traffic at all to those ‘sections’)
EDIT: obviously a “site wide” bar would still have some differences – e.g. on BB it would have the usual search box, whereas on BBS it has the Discourse login/tools/search boxes
it will also be great for BBS, I imagine, if we put links to http://bbs.boingboing.net/new and /categories and so on site-wide at BB. The hard part is cuing readers to know that it’s “new in the forums” rather than “new at the blog”, etc.
It’s also a good idea to see what topics people actually post on before assuming what categories you will need. For example, Technology may be such a hot topic that you might find it makes more sense to have “Robots”, “Apple”, and “Retro Tech” as separate top level categories.
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