Suggestion of change to front page

Cianos

I really think there could be a lot more activity in a lot of the lesser used forums. Presumably part of the problem is the fact that people rarely are reminded of the choice available.

The front page shows 50 of the latest posts across the site, which gives a chance for some of the less frequented forums to gain exposure. But the problem with this is that when these forums are quiet to begin with, there's no activity to gain that exposure on the front page, so less people are reminded of the forum, so nobody posts, so less people are reminded, so nobody posts and so on.

It could ignite a lot more wide spread participation across the site if the front page was restructured. My suggestion would be to rather than show the last 50 posts from across the site, break this in to categories and show the last X amount of posts from each of those categories.

Maybe the most straightforward way to do this would be to separate the page in to sections, or panels according to the top of the hierarchy tree, ie Arts/Biz/Edu/Games/Hosted/Music etc. The panels could be spread 3x4 across and down the page, or 4x3 or whatever works best.

Each of these could show maybe the last 5 posts from each category, and showing what sub forum the post appeared in. So under the Music panel you could have;
"Jazz & Blues - blah blah blah"
"Punk - blah blah blah".
etc

Then beside it you have the Rec panel showing;
"After Hours - blah blah blah"
"Fitness - blah blah blah"
etc

The result would hopefully be that each time people hit the front page, they get a good glimpse of what is going on across the whole site, rather than the 50 last posts list always being dominated by the forums that are the most popular anyway.

Hope I explained this well enough, cheers!

problem is i know i'd only look at whichever panels had after hours and motors forums.. not a bad idea tho.

DeVore

we're currently trying to get our heads around a front page design with the idea of making it cleaner and more concise and a better tool for finding threads of interest.

When we have mock ups done we'll throw them up for comment.

DeV.