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.

I think I'd like the stats to be at the bottom arrow, but overall it's a nice redesign idea. What do you mean with calendar on the picture, though?

An idea that I have related to the changelog is to add an icon that shows the amount of comments that people have made to a particular commit, so people feel more inclined to click, although, to be honest, I think I am one of the few users who uses that function and I mainly comment for shitposting... And it's not like commenting on commits is a main function of the site lol

Also, now that we are discussing stuff other than the forum, I feel like the news section could be used for stuff like informing about these redesigns once they go live, or about particular development efforts like your exploits at the DNS mines (although both of those could also be on the forum as well to encourage discussion)

I think bottom makes the most sense as well yeah. The calendar feature would display planned events in the upcoming weeks as well as birthdays, whilst highlighting whats going on today, akin to how Thunderbird (and probably other e-mail/calendar apps) display it, though probably zoomed in on just the current week and one week in the future:



Showing reactions would be a fun thing maybe, I've had the idea of just making the changelog a direct feed to Patchii, providing comments for any commit by any repo by anyone on the forge, posting unsolicited comments on people's commits used to be one of my favourite activities on github.

I find it a little difficult to determine what count as a good thing to warrant a front page news post, and if it even makes sense to have as a system separated from the forum in the first place anymore. It's always difficult to judge where a topic is too technical or not, I even mulled on the Patchii post for a while wondering if it wasn't too alienating.

i like this idea a lot as i think it blends the forum into the average initial experience more, and would likely center the website around it much more than it does currently. perhaps consider making the front page be a sort of unique listing which lists the most recent threads posted across every board, in order of the date of last posting descending. this way the forums appear more lively to the passing visitor, and you get a sort of panoply presented immediately as a first-time user. having the front page reward the recency of posting in this way will also likely encourage further activity because it allows any user to be seen according to the frequency of their activity rather than relying on those checking any given forum category

perhaps you may also consider having two different listings, the most recent threads being on top and the most popular below, or maybe a section which considers the rate at which replies are posted in a given time as a sort of "popular threads" listing. either way, i recommend on this display having a way to show the contents of the most recent post in the thread rather than just a listing of the threads themselves

The idea of having the frontpage be a means to highlight activity like that also passed through my mind while browsing around last night considering how I would tackle it. I think I will take the fact that this was raised independently to mean that it is a good idea and will look into it B)