At last night’s HH, I suggested to Maoman that we re-organize the forums on the front of Forumosa. With the retirement of the old classified forums to pave the way for the Forumosafieds, we were looking to rename the Classified Forums section anyway.
Please give us your thoughts about how we might rename and re-arrange sections. We are not going to affect the forums themselves (we aren’t merging, removing or creating new forums with this exercise). Instead, I’m hoping to see ideas about how to organize what you see now
Presently, there are 4 “Categories” - Classified Forums, Discussion Forums, Legal Forums and About Forumosa…
… and there are 33 public forums. We are definately going to rename the “Classified Forums”.
Also, should we re-order the forums within these sections? In the past, we would put the busiest forums towards the bottom and the newer forums towards the top. If a Category has many forums, the ones in the middle can be a little more difficult to find than the ones at the beginning/end of a category.
Nothing big, I find this too close together,[quote]SEARCH RULES Q&A WIKI FLICKR
NO NEW PMs OWN POSTS NEW PAST 24
Logout [ bobepine ] [/quote] maybe it could be spreaded appart a bit more. I liked it better when the profile link was up in that corner as well but I guess it’s just because that’s what I was used to. I’ll post again if I think of something else.
Alphabetical wasn’t as meaningful as arranging it to influence some traffic flow. We usually had the Open Forum at the bottom because people would naturally go there anyway (number of views tell us they are most looked at threads). So whenever we introduced new or less popular discussion forums (ESPANOL en Taiwan) we positioned this higher so that they are seen or are “Above the fold”
By the same thinking, Housing Forum was at the bottom of the classified forums
This search does look good. I’ll look into moving it to the top and adding a loud color
How does this re-arrangement strike you?
And this will help when you try to focus your searches by category
FORUMOSAN INTERESTS
Women
Travel
Business & Money
Sports, Fun & Games
Arts & Entertainment
Pets & Other Animals
International Politics
Dating & Relationships
Open Forum
TAIWAN-INCLINED DISCUSSIONS
Parenting
Human Rights
Taiwan Politics
Learning Chinese
Culture & History
Miscellaneous
IN TAIWAN
Events
Vroom, Vroom
Health in Taiwan
Volunteer in Taiwan
Technology in Taiwan
Restaurants, Bars & Clubs
Teaching English in Taiwan
Living in Taiwan
Where Can I Find…?
LEGAL FORUMS
Work
Taxes
Dual Nationality
Marriage & Divorce
Real Estate & Housing
Visa and Residency Issues
General Legal Matters
Missing: Forumosans For Hire - we’ll aim to re-design the Forumosan Profiles and Forumosans.com to replace this forum
Also: In this proposal, I’ve split up WCIF from Misc. WCIF being short threads and Misc being long ones as Brian noted
If we go with his suggestion, then we keep WCIF as a discussion forum and remove Misc altogether, and look to create a catch-all Forumosafied section of some kind
Women
Travel
Business & Money
Sports, Fun & Games
Arts & Entertainment
Pets & Other Animals
International Politics
Dating & Relationships
Open Forum
TAIWAN-INCLINED DISCUSSIONS
Parenting
Human Rights
Taiwan Politics
Learning Chinese
Culture & History
Miscellaneous
IN TAIWAN
Events
Vroom, Vroom
Health in Taiwan
Volunteer in Taiwan
Technology in Taiwan
Restaurants, Bars & Clubs
Teaching English in Taiwan
Living in Taiwan
Where Can I find…? [/quote]
I find the division into these three categories, and their titles a little strange. I think it more likely to confuse than to add clarity.
For example, ‘Pets’, ‘Parenting’ and ‘Vroom Vroom’ are all things that are international, but have specific concerns in Taiwan, yet they’re in three different categories. I’d think they should be in the same grouping.
I don’t mean to be too critical, but I think we could improve on this grouping, unfortunatley I don’t have a better sugegstion right now. Give me a day or so and I’ll try and come up with one.
It’s kind of difficult categorising the forums. I’m inclined to think that it might be best just to have them in two groups - discussion and legal.
But if they must be grouped, here’s what I came up with (might need snappier names though, and not put into any particular order).
Life
Pets
Parenting
Vroom Vroom
Teaching
Living
Events
Dating and Relationships (although, could go in either of the others)
Health
WCIF
Volunteer (although I’m not sure we need this forum - could be better elsewhere)
Leisure
Travel
Sports Fun and Games
Arts and Entertainment
Learning Chinese
Technology
Restaurants
Food and Cooking (yes, I think we should start it)
Discussion
Women’s
Business
IP
Open
Human Rights
TP
Culture and History
But then, that would flow against another usability issue you are complaining about (search)
Seriously, though, thank you proposing this. I’ll go over them with Maoman later today when we meet.
Folks, as ever, we are open to suggestions for how to improve Forumosa. Drop us a line here in this thread, PM Maoman or me, or send e-mail to adminYOURPANTS@forumosa.com (and don’t forget to remove YOURPANTS first - I love writing this
(thanks Loretta!)
)
Here’s a suggestion. In the left hand bottom corner you have “New topic” and “reply topic.”
Perhaps you can move them around, as every time I want to reply I naturally hit “new topic,” as it is first on the left. It just seems logical to swap the two buttons as when reading posts, “reply topic” is more likely to be used than “new post.”
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I think it does look better this way.