This is a spur of the moment idea I had last night while cleaning up my browser bookmarks. I've always found it difficult to come up with the content of the landing/home page of the website, whether that be the shitty logged out view (accessible while logged in here) or the (essentially) classic homepage you see while logged in. This is merely An Idea still and I haven't really fully worked out how I'm going to do it yet but I do think it would kind of "fix" the focus of the website, I'd say the primary feature of the main site is the forum, yet its tucked away in a subdirectory.
Initially my idea for the homepage was to turn it into a feed type thing, I guess it would've shown all activity including comments, forum posts and changelog entries in a linear timeline-like fashion and I still don't think that's a terrible idea but it also seems like it'd be a pain in the ass to maintain and there's already enough websites that are structured like that.
I think I'd just want to merge a bunch of the elements that are currently on the logged in homepage into the forum index page. I would probably expand the max width of the page so a thin column can fit on either side of the page. I think an activity feed could still work as a sidebar item regardless, though that one might still take a while to actually exist.
obligatory crusty paint diagram
I think this emphasises the important content much better regardless of how it ends up turning out, the landing page does have more representation of the forum that just the opaque counters and I'd also want to give the Popular and Active topics things a place on this redesign forum/site index and in effect gaining more feature parity with phpBB from literal 20 years ago but before any of that takes place I'd like to gauge what You, The Viewer thinks about any of this.
Initially my idea for the homepage was to turn it into a feed type thing, I guess it would've shown all activity including comments, forum posts and changelog entries in a linear timeline-like fashion and I still don't think that's a terrible idea but it also seems like it'd be a pain in the ass to maintain and there's already enough websites that are structured like that.
I think I'd just want to merge a bunch of the elements that are currently on the logged in homepage into the forum index page. I would probably expand the max width of the page so a thin column can fit on either side of the page. I think an activity feed could still work as a sidebar item regardless, though that one might still take a while to actually exist.
obligatory crusty paint diagram
I think this emphasises the important content much better regardless of how it ends up turning out, the landing page does have more representation of the forum that just the opaque counters and I'd also want to give the Popular and Active topics things a place on this redesign forum/site index and in effect gaining more feature parity with phpBB from literal 20 years ago but before any of that takes place I'd like to gauge what You, The Viewer thinks about any of this.
