Sidebar ponderance

[Trivaldi]

Hi Folks,

Bit of an informal one for you.

If you arrived here via the main forum homepage you may have noticed a new addition.

For those that didn't and came straight to Community Talk via bookmark, go check out the forum index (http://forum.neocron-game.com/forum.php). Also, what are you doing?! There's loads of forums to get stuck in to! ;)

I'm toying around with leaving the sidebar active as a way to give the Neocronicle more visibility, since it's often quite buried by the way we use vB as a platform. As the list widget was handy I've also thrown the @OfficialNeocron twitter feed in there too.

Thoughts? Opinions? Stuff you'd rather see? Stuff you'd rather not see? Any other information we can wedge in there? I appreciate the forum is the main point of reference for a lot of the active community. Trying to get all of that info in there can be problematic though. Especially as we need to get the balance right for those who stumble across Neocron via the website, twitter, facebook and the rest of the web.

I may still turn it off yet, just exploring options for getting more information in the right place.

Cheers,

[Jodo]

Snazzy, I like it. Keep it there, I certainly noticed it when I logged on.

[aKe`cj]

neat – looks like the perfect spot for a thn server stat widget and a donation button ;)
that said ... those blue icons/buttons still need some radioactive paint!

[Drachenpaladin]

I'd welcome it if the sidebar was outside of that frame and I could see it without squeezing the main forum overview.

[OFT]

Love the Neocronicle. The more visibility the better.

[Divide]

I dig the sidebar cause it reminds me of that Xzibit yo dawg facebook meme.
12485

[Trivaldi]

I dig the sidebar cause it reminds me of that Xzibit yo dawg facebook meme.
12485
I really should have just opened with that :D

[Riddle]

"Too jazzy" says Triv??



https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EIUie8whO7g

Looks good to me ;p

[gstyle40]

i like it

[William Antrim]

Can you put a server population button on there? It would be nice to see how active it is.

[Xenios]

Noted :) Pretty good idea actually (y)

[aKe`cj]

I noticed the top bar menu is being reworked, placing major links on the 2nd level.
I don't think it is a bad idea to do this, but please have someone fix the menu styles, so the 2nd menu links look a) less broken and b) have better contrast so they catch the attention they now deserve and c) make visible if a menu item has children / can be expanded. I first thought the IRC chat was simply removed.

edit:
looking at it once more ... it is kinda insane to have a full page reload to switch the active submenu, but have no change of content at all. this is madness - there ought to be a way to implement this more cleanly.

[Trivaldi]

I noticed the top bar menu is being reworked, placing major links on the 2nd level.
I don't think it is a bad idea to do this, but please have someone fix the menu styles, so the 2nd menu links look a) less broken and b) have better contrast so they catch the attention they now deserve and c) make visible if a menu item has children / can be expanded. I first thought the IRC chat was simply removed.
The forum theme needs updating to reflect the website anyway, so things like this will be addressed when we have the opportunity to make those wider changes. As for second level links, for the most part there is not a lot lost from the first level with the change made. The idea here is to just float some more website content to the attention of the community until a better solution is put in place.



edit:
looking at it once more ... it is kinda insane to have a full page reload to switch the active submenu, but have no change of content at all. this is madness - there ought to be a way to implement this more cleanly.
We're doing the most with what we have. This is a stop gap to put links in the faces of users. We've seen a few recent occurrences where out of date answers are sought from threads and forum posts, rather than from the up to date (granted, not always) website. We could use drop-down menus but the forum theme produces interesting results at the moment. For now this is the best solution available.

[Trivaldi]

A small entirely sanctioned bump ;)

The Twitter element of the side bar now feeds from the same Neocron Support Team list (https://twitter.com/OfficialNeocron/lists/neocron-support-team) as the website (http://neocron-game.com/about-us), so you will see more activity there. Especially from Zoltan who uses his Twitter account to quickly post little snippets of progress he's making in the code.