Forum:Controversial proposal

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I look at the current front page, and yeah, it's got all its fancy features and that nonsense. But it still does not give writers value for their money, and places too much emphasis on the less significant stuff. Now, I'm all for half-arsedness, just not on the front page. I was skimming through some articles, as I tend to do, and came across Logicopedia, which reminded me of how much I used to actually like the old front page. Sure, it had its failings, but, from a design/aesthetic point of view, well, it's a lot less vulgar than the one we have now.

Yep, the current front page has its good points, and it may be good to, in time, incorporate some elements of it into a mega front page. But I do feel very strongly about this, which is why I say bring back the old front page. It has much more of an emphasis on featured content, which encourages more people to actually write good stuff, and just generally looks prettier.

Fancy features does not necessarily = better. -- Hindleyak  Converse • ?blog • Click here! 10:43, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Uhhh Testostereich • (ballsack) 11:15, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Seconded I totally agree. I think the front-page change was a kind of hasty decision. Our old front page actually somewhat resembled the wikipedia and uncyclopedia front pages, which I always really liked. Sure the new front page looks nice, but it spotlights the puzzling inside jokes of the news and the Did-You-Knows instead of the n00b friendly and more consistently awesome featured page. I would completely support a conversion back to the old front page which had more features I liked (such as newestarticles and similar stuff). The old front page I think was a much better reflection of our community, and was in general more awesome. So yeah. Strong For. --THE 13:45, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm tinkering towards the Old page. Sure, this new one is fancy, and I know Silent Penguin worked on it a damn ton, but the Old Main Page Is starting to look like the better one, mainly because of how the featured article, image, and user appears. Sorry Sepp, but I have to say for. —rms talk 14:15, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Ok, so, seeing as people are moaning, i guess i need to explain why i designed it the way i did:

• the features half all been moved into the top to make it more compact. how its been done is by no means fancy (but new visitors like fancy). I and many other people are sick of the gold star brigade (naming no names) of voters who just edit to get their articles on the front page, they turn ?pedia into a competition. By making them slightly less profound I removed direct focus.
• The community based boxes like the news box / DYK / vandlepedia are much more interesting to look at than the features, they give a more diverse cross section as to what ?pedia is about. Any crap articles whored in those things will hopefully make for something interesting.
• Although the featured article has lost relevance, the featured image and writer pages have been significantly moved up the page's code. Google doesn't care about things being out of view, it cares about orders on pages, the sooner important things (to search engines are) like features, the more important it deems them.
• ?pedia ISNT wikipedia, sure the featured area often represents our best articles, sometimes it doesnt. With a lack of things to great things to feature regularly, i moved the feature area into its current location to hide any inactivity caused by stagnation in the site.

The front page is by no means fancy, its just fancy with regards to wiki coding, i never said the main page was a final design, it may not be perfect, but it is impossible to please everyone :P

possible changes:

• Use Jquery javascript meaning a top area is created which always shows the featured image, clicking on the links causes the area to appear.
• Use CSS to enable a similar ability but without any fancy animation javascript would introduce.

In closing: you tits :P ?pedia is small time. --Silent PenguinLeave Me Alone 14:23, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

From a bullcrappy professional viewpoint

Look, Sepp, I know you worked bloody hard on this new page design, and it's all hi-tech and web 2.0 and that. I can understand why you're quite protective, even proud of it. However I'm of the old school anti-Flash, pro-information brigade, and I just believe it isn't working.

The point about the front page wh0rers, the 'Gold Star Brigade' as you call them (which, by the way, I love) lies with the users and is more of a VFF problem. That should not be to the detriment of the actual good writers who write good articles: it's not their fault a certain section of the Illogic userbase are attention wh0res, so why sould they suffer? Maybe we should readdress the VFF situation to stop Eurovision style block voting or maybe draft in some new users and place loads of emphasis on the featured articles, because I really miss them. And it really does feel like they aren't there anymore. I would be wholly behind a campaign to reinvigorate the featured article project.

I understand your design considerations, and I see how it could have worked, but after this lengthy trial period, I think it just isn't working. Nobody is denying you've done a lot of work on the front page, it's just, well, IMHO not very well suited to a content based wiki.

Your points are all valid and very good. We aren't Wikipedia, but you know what? Wikipedia have had their front page design for yonks, and even when someone proposed to change it they voted not to because they could not improve on it. I'm all for differentiating ourselves from Wikipedia, but not when it's to the detriment of access to information.

I didn't want to resort to this, because it sounds bloody pretentious, but I have a degree in this sort of thing and had these points hammered into my head for three years. That's part of why it irks me so much.

I guess what I'm saying is that a text-heavy front page is more suited to an information-heavy site such as Illogicopedia. And by the way, I'm not moaning, I'm offering constructive criticism. ;) -- Hindleyak  Converse • ?blog • Click here! 14:50, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Illogicopedia is by no means an information heavy website, it contains nothing at all of any redeemable value to any scholars, except maybe social studies. ?pedia is a community not a resource, we are here because we like to add to it, because something needs to be said, not because sometime someone will put it in their term paper and call it research. And you maybe have had these things hammered into you, and i agree that flash is no way to present a website, but this front page is by no means a flash website, everything is still there, i unlike you, did graphic design, so a slightly shiny "finished" look was always hammered home to me. I was bloody anal in making sure it fitted the needs of ?pedia, i asked people what they thought, and at the moment the only real complaint anyone brings is that they cant see the feature without hovering over the text first, which can be rectified. we need our own image, personally i would have graphicly gone further but i knew you wouldnt like that, so i tried to retain as much of the flavour of the original as possible while still giving ?pedia its OWN image, a page nicked directly from wikipedia in my opinion isn't very respectable as a designer. --Silent PenguinLeave Me Alone 15:07, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

My hand is on Seppys lap. *Gets Turned On*--Ben ^Blade 15:22, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

As Hindley said, the "gold star brigade" is a barely noticeable thing unless you spend all your time on VFH. All of our writers write loads and loads of stuff. I wouldn't say there are any writers who write for the sole purpose of getting their stuff featured. Even if there were, it would be no reason to hide the feature in the top corner. The fact is that the featured article is almost always a high-quality article as opposed to something added to DYK or the news at random. I'd be willing to compromise if you made it so the DYK and Vandalpedia were the ones that only appeared when you hovered over them. Then you could push the news over to the right side of the page and put the featured box on the left side. As I recall, the entire community except you, seppy, has spoken out against hiding the featured article in the top right corner. I personally think the DYK and Vandalpedia are entertainingly nonsensical, but not something we should be displaying instead of the featured article. This is because the DYK and Vandalpedia are hardly cross-sections of illogicopedia's best content as the featured articles usually are. And when Hindley talked about "access to information" I'm sure he didn't mean it in the literal sense. I'm sure he meant access to what our site has to offer. The old home page simply had a lot more in it. This one might look better, but the old one was better suited to the site, and if I had posted in the forum in which your front page design was originally discussed, I would have said the same thing. The old front page wasn't broken, so there was no need to fix it, especially when the entire community dislikes one of the changes. --THE 15:31, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Bear in mind I wrote this next bit before I saw THE's comments above, so apologies if it seems I'm not acknowledging you...

Sepp: at no point would I say Illogicopedia is of any value to scholars, that's pretty obvious, and you're right that we aren't Wikipedia at all. When I say 'information' I use it as a catch-all term for the content - as in the humour writing. I take your point about Illogic being more of a community in our eyes, but it's still a creative writing based wiki at its very heart, and it would be foolish to ignore that.

Cool, you did a graphic design degree? I thought it was a more engineering based course you were on. And yep, you were right in thinking I would not like a more graphics-y front page. Guess it's the old info-design debate rearing its ugly head again :). At the risk of becoming too defensive, I did a Multimedia Arts course which was pretty much 66% 'hardcore' graphic design and the rest implementing it via computers and that, so we're pretty much splitting hairs there. I know naff all about complicated coding though.

As for your final point, the old front page is not 'nicked' from Wikipedia as such. It takes its good points and builds on them, develops them for our own needs, which is essentially the core of good design, graphic or otherwise. Building from scratch with no influence or allusion to successful design would be foolish, so what better front page design to take influence from than the world's most popular wiki?

Anyway, as I said, I wholly understand your reasons for implementing everything, it's just my considered opinion that, after seeing it in action, there would be more practical methods of displaying this info. And by that, I'm specifically referring to the rollovers tucked away in the top right hand corner. I mean, to see the content, you have to, like, move your mouse and everything :P -- Hindleyak  Converse • ?blog • Click here! 15:47, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

The old page was always broken. and at the time I tried to find criticism and met nothing but "yeah its good". nobody told me how to improve apon what we had, I was working in the dark, even after i had finished everyone was a blank canvas about it, so I stuck it in to try and get some response, most people liked it apart from you (THE), and nerd42, yak made some vague comments about not caring, and that was it, now people are complaining, so saying that everyone has spoken against it is a vast generalisation of the situation I was in designing and placing that page. I've linked it to people outside the wiki to get a general idea and they seemed to like it too, it precented a nice warm page rather than the uninviting, and generally ghastly green and purple of the wikipedia theft. The wikipedia page is a dire rip-off and it shows, it was never perminant to start with, just until we could make something more presentable. I have also regularly said im willing to improve it on this page, and other, but I don't think that placing the community based content in where the features are is the answer, as I said, its about how the featured content has been presented, yet again, people ignore any suggestions of improvement and just say no it's broken. Sure THE said that we should swap round the news and feature stuff, but iv addressed that. Any disagreement is due to a failure of communication with the community which i attempted to facilitate in numourous ways, the fact of the matter was nobody gave a shit to voice their opinion. and just because its on the main page now doesnt mean a design is ever finished, there is always ways to improve apon it, however most people just say i like it, or i dont, and then everyone else just jumps on the band wagon.--Silent PenguinLeave Me Alone 15:56, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

Jeez if youre so bothered about your old main page set this as your bookmark. Im with seppy on this one.--Ben ^Blade 16:01, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

It wasn't just me and Nerd, testes also said he wanted the feature box back and Hindley twice mentioned disliking the new front page. My primary concern is the feature box. I still don't really understand why you can't swap the feature with the DYK and Vandalpedia. The feature is a high-quality article that the community has voted to FEATURE. The DYK and Vandalpedia are funny but completely random and inside-joke based collections of nonsense. Surely the feature should take priority? That is really the only problem I have with this new front page...the fact that the feature isn't featured anymore, instead attention is focused on the News, DYK and Vandalpedia. As long as you bring back the feature box so it appears always as opposed to only when you hover the mouse over it, I'll be happy. I completely fail to understand why it's okay to hide the feature in the top corner but it's not okay to hide the dyk and vandalpedia. But if you want to do it some other way that's fine, just bring back the feature box please and I'll stop whining. And for a dire rip-off, the wikipedia front page sure lasted a long time without much complaint. It presented a familiar home page to anyone with experience in either wikipedia or more importantly uncyclopedia, which is where pretty much all of our writers come from. When I first looked at the redesign of the front page my initial reaction was "Where the hell's the feature?" I still stand by that. Take the feature out of the top corner and your front page design will have my support. Sorry for rambling. --THE 16:46, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

If I'm entirely honest, Seppy, I don't think I ever really liked the rollover thing for the features. I did think I liked it for a short time, but it became apparent that it was just because of the novelty. Now, I'm all for innovation - what you've got there is undoubtedly classy and I would not be against using it for less important content like 'category of the week' or maybe featured user. To be completely honest, I was a bit afraid of telling you what I though of it outright sooner rather than later because I didn't want it to seem as if I was belittling your efforts. Plus it would seem a tad hypocritical from someone who was contributing so little to the new front page design at that point. It's only in the last week I've plucked up the courage to properly speak out about it.

The reason I bring this up is because I really don't have the motivation to visit Illogic as much because I see the front page as a little bit of a mess, a beta test shoved into everyone's face. Stupid, I know, but I see the front page and, well, don't feel the urge to contribute to it, which is a shame, as we need as many people as possible providing their input.

I disagree that the old page is completely ghastly, though the colours do suck. The reason why I never mentioned your suggestion of improvement -- ie. adding more technical stuff to the current front page -- is just adding more sugar to the shit sandwich, so to speak. We gots to simplify to, er, successify.

Anyhow, now you know of my misgivings, I guess we can start to work towards a compromise. My suggestion is thus - by no means a be all and end all, just my opinion. Make a list of all the stuff that needs to be on the front page: ie., features and site news. Then, make a list of the secondary stuff that ought to be there in some way, shape or form: vandalpedia, Illogic in other languages, DYK. Next, we draw up an "ultimate dream front page" that everyone is happy with. A foolproof plan, hehe :)

@Ben: I believe this is simply more than just a personal thing. New users are gonna be confused when they see a so called wiki with little indication of quality content. I think Seppy is underestimating the importance of the articles on this site. -- Hindleyak  Converse • ?blog • Click here! 17:14, 31 Jumbly 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to take credit for solving this dispute with my own personal reskin. No need to thank me!

But if you don't I'll kill you. Testostereich • (ballsack) 20:43, 1 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

A better proposal

I am a mole. That is all. MyMetalFencepost—talk 04:26, 8 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

Seconded. --T3 04:55, 8 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

A Really better proposal

Personally I like the frontpage as is, but seeing as half the community seems not to, I suggest everyone who cares submits a sketch of their idea for a frontpage, and we utilise the old chestnut of democracy with...A MASSIVE VOTE!!! Oh wow, that guy HelloolleH is freakin' clever.--JonTehSexyMofo 19:46, 19 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

who's Helloleheo —rms talk 00:05, 20 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

User:HelloolleH --Nerd42 14:14, 22 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

well ... the old front page wasn't broken in my opinion ... but there is some coolness to the newer look, except that it puts the content in an undesirable order. It's also stupid that people have to hover to see the (apparently not) "featured article". --Nerd42 04:08, 22 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

Which reminds me, change it Nerd! It's been the same for almost two weeks! —rms talk 04:12, 22 Ergust 2009 (UTC)

Um ... We're sorry, but all of our operators are currently assisting other customers. Please stay on hold for the rest of your life until we get back to you in some future incarnation. Thank you for calling Hell Customer Support. --Nerd42 14:14, 22 Ergust 2009 (UTC)