Website Suggestions

[John Adams]

Community Members,

I am looking for suggestions on how to make our website easier to navigate and find things. I've heard from a few people that the forums/sub-forums can get confusing, but it seems a logical way to organize our topics. I would definitely consider alternative suggestions though, if it means you can find what you're looking for easier.

Some ideas:

• Doing away with the Tutorials forum, and replacing it with a WIKI link to our Wiki page. Might drive more business to our Wiki!
  
  Consolidating the Support forums (General, Windows, Linux, Tools). Really, who needs that much Support?
  
  Ditching the non-essential Development forums (Code Submissions, Requests, Archives)
  
  Re-ordering some forums with important ones up top (need suggestions)
  
  Some websites suggest allowing Anonymous posting, but I fear the Bots... but what do you think? More activity if folks didn't HAVE to create an account?

I have also reconfigured some of our Team forum groups, as you will notice by the color changes so if I inadvertently dropped your access to a forum, send me a PM and I will address you directly. There may have been another reason for it

Thanks

[TILT]

Some ideas:

Doing away with the Tutorials forum, and replacing it with a WIKI link to our Wiki page. Might drive more business to our Wiki!

I like this idea, not to mention it helps since all information would be in one central place and maintaining it doesn't require updating both.

Consolidating the Support forums (General, Windows, Linux, Tools). Really, who needs that much Support?

In my honest opinion, I think it's a good idea to have these separate so users aren't searching through unrelated topics that do not pertain to their issues.

Ditching the non-essential Development forums (Code Submissions, Requests, Archives)

Agree! Besides code submissions may get lost here anyway. If someone has changes to submit they should request to become part of the team and commit code via the SVN. Perhaps cleaning up all the forums from posts that are older than a specified date of your choosing is in order; moving the important stuff to the Wiki. This may require a lot of work but cleaning up the forums from really old threads may make things easier to sort through.

Re-ordering some forums with important ones up top (need suggestions)

Seems to be this way already with sticky posts. If I think of anything else I'll reply later.

Some websites suggest allowing Anonymous posting, but I fear the Bots... but what do you think? More activity if folks didn't HAVE to create an account?

Again, in my opinion if the user doesn't have enough interest to create an account why should they be able to post? Another suggestion might be having a forum with the ability to post anonymously as a registered user... then again for what reason?

Another Suggestion

Revamp the way bugs are submitted and/or reported. This may be controversial but bug reporting seems to be all over the place. Either submit in-game, or submit to the forums. Right now bugs are being reported in both which can become really confusing at times and hard to keep track of. I think the biggest issue in regard to bug reporting is that there is really no easy way (currently) to tell when a bug has already been reported. Bug reports are necessary; however, I think the current system could be tweaked to be more efficient.

[John Adams]

Great feedback, TILT. Finally, someone who likes to post informative messages as much as me

If someone has changes to submit they should request to become part of the team and commit code via the SVN.

The reason for the Code Submissions forum is that some people may not want the obligation of becoming a full-fledged Team member (I run a tight ship, filled with expectations, after all ) so this forum was for people to submit code modifications for 3 reasons:

• Evaluate potential new Dev Team members by seeing their code submissions first (the original intent)
  They fixed something once, but don't want to be a developer
  A dev tweaks EQ2Emu in a way that is NOT Project-related (custom code) and wants to share

Same goes for Content and DB submissions. Just some things to consider before we consolidate those forums.

Another Suggestion

Revamp the way bugs are submitted and/or reported. This may be controversial but bug reporting seems to be all over the place. Either submit in-game, or submit to the forums. Right now bugs are being reported in both which can become really confusing at times and hard to keep track of. I think the biggest issue in regard to bug reporting is that there is really no easy way (currently) to tell when a bug has already been reported. Bug reports are necessary; however, I think the current system could be tweaked to be more efficient.

Because our game offers the /bug command (and that is not going to change), we needed a way for Bugs to become visible, and this is why I wrote our Bug Tracker script to post assigned bugs to the forum as a new message.

Secondly, we allow Forum Posted bugs, because sometimes you cannot get into the world to submit a bug report at all. World crashing, here's the stack, etc. We need to offer people ways to let us know something is wrong.

Lastly, the Bug Tracker script is my own creation. If there is something more I should add, definitely let me know. Right now, it's search-ability is pretty robust, and I recently added the ability for Devs to input bugs directly to the Tracker (not sure if anyone noticed that). If it works for us, I could open that for users, and close New Post ability in our Bugs forums.

Does that make sense?

[TILT]

The reason for the Code Submissions forum is that some people may not want the obligation of becoming a full-fledged Team member (I run a tight ship, filled with expectations, after all ) so this forum was for people to submit code modifications for 3 reasons:

Evaluate potential new Dev Team members by seeing their code submissions first (the original intent)
They fixed something once, but don't want to be a developer
A dev tweaks EQ2Emu in a way that is NOT Project-related (custom code) and wants to share

Same goes for Content and DB submissions. Just some things to consider before we consolidate those forums.

Fair enough, what about posting a sticky in the appropriate forums with a template for "Rules for Code Submissions" stating all necessary requirements for submitting code, such as must post as a .patch or .diff file when submitting C++ code. Also, maybe include client and data versions so we know how old the patch is and what will be affected. This would help developers/users to test code easier than having to manually input changes into existing code. Hopefully submissions done in this fashion will also help in the process of getting the code committed to the SVN a little quicker.

LUA scripts would still be posted in the appropriate forum using "

Code: Select all

" blocks.

This of course is only an idea and isn't necessary. I think if users outside the development team could download these patches, re-compile and run them on their own servers, then they could provide feedback on the patches as to whether or not they are working thus alleviating some of the testing burden on the development team.

I'd be willing to do a write up for the Wiki in regard to creating .patch/.diff files using TortoiseSVN.

Because our game offers the /bug command (and that is not going to change), we needed a way for Bugs to become visible, and this is why I wrote our Bug Tracker script to post assigned bugs to the forum as a new message.

Secondly, we allow Forum Posted bugs, because sometimes you cannot get into the world to submit a bug report at all. World crashing, here's the stack, etc. We need to offer people ways to let us know something is wrong.

Lastly, the Bug Tracker script is my own creation. If there is something more I should add, definitely let me know. Right now, it's search-ability is pretty robust, and I recently added the ability for Devs to input bugs directly to the Tracker (not sure if anyone noticed that). If it works for us, I could open that for users, and close New Post ability in our Bugs forums.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely! I completely disregarded the fact that users may not even be able to log in to report the bug. This in itself is reason enough to keep the current setup. Don't get me wrong the current system used is very robust and better than any I've used elsewhere. The ability to report while in-game is more than what I'd ever have expected.

I tend to do things very systematically as I'm sure others do too, so the likelihood of a bug report being duplicated is almost guaranteed. The only concern I have as far as bug reporting goes is the ability to identify and remove duplicate bug reports. So long as we can do this I agree the current system works well. Then again, I suppose any bug reporting software still requires some level of manual intervention.

[John Adams]

I tend to do things very systematically as I'm sure others do too, so the likelihood of a bug being duplicated is almost guaranteed.

One option I had not yet considered was the ability to search (easily) if the bug a player just encountered was already in-game. That would of course be a totally custom /slash command (/bugsearch {text}) but I think we could do it. All servers maintain a local "bugs" table, so it should be pretty simple.

Add that to the TODOs

[John Adams]

Just a heads up, I'm going to start sliding some forums around over the next few days. If you feel something got lost, you can always come to this thread and ask "Hey, where did ____ go?" - I certainly should have the answer.

Also, for those unaware... the link to the top-right "View active topics" is a quick way to see any topic on the entire forum that has had a new post in the last "x" days, defaulting to 7. You can change the date range considerably, too. I use it a lot to find things I thought I lost