New Board Layout - Organization Suggestion

Hi Robert,

Thanks for reorganizing the Boards so that there’s some hierarchy and organization to them. :smile: I like the general grouping to make things more understandable to newbies and regulars alike (Non-regional discussions vs. USA West, East, etc.).

Some suggestions for further board ordering to consider:

  1. Consider ordering the boards by current and potential future popularity: Many forums I visit place the most-visited / used boards at the top. In our case, it would be Regional Boards before Non-Regional, and then USA Boards before Outside the USA.

  2. Consider renaming “Outside the USA” to be “International”. Sounds friendlier. :wink: (Eventually proper named regions would work if we had enough demand (like “Europe” “Asia”).

  3. If you go with the “most popular” style of organization, then the Sub-Boards within each Regional Board should be organized that way (with the boards with most traction and visitors first). But if not, then Alphabetizing them might be more consistent. Right now, the Sub-Boards feel like they are randomly listed.

  4. If you click on any Major Heading (USA West, Non-Regional, etc.), consider taking the user to a page with a list of all of the sub-boards (showing “Los Angeles” “San Francisco” etc.).

Thanks!

1 Like

I find the new layout undesirable - too fragmented, IMO, and didn’t think there was anything wrong with the previous layout. With a home page, could look at what everyone was talking about. Was pleasing to the eye as well.

New board seems too USA-centric. It’s kind of like US citizens and news - if it’s not about USA, do they really want to hear about it? http://www.satirewire.com/news/0010/international.shtml. Ha.

“International” seems like American chauvinism to me.

I plan to put everything in alphabetical order. I’m waiting to hear from Discourse support if there’s a less labor-intensive way to do it than the one I know of.

I think (4) would be a Discourse feature request. I plan to put a note at the top of the page explaining that behavior.

Hi Robert,

Just a follow-up on this. I agree Alphabetical is probably the simplest method of organization; and that’s OK.

I would say, though, that the vast majority of the forums that I visit organize sub-boards by “focus” (i.e., on some tech sites, it’s by the actual main software product that the company is known for, followed by hardware discussions separately (after) the software focused board, etc.).

Most forums I go to have “Coffee Talk” (or similar friendly sounding names for off-topic discussions for the forum goers), as the LAST board displayed, even though alphabetically “Coffee Talk” would be way up on the list somewhere.

Same for “Hardware” discussions on some software sites I go to. “H” goes well above 2 - 3 other software packages being discussed, but it’s not the emphasis of that site.

Just a suggestion and to add to my original point (that IMHO, we have the most amount of discussion and users on certain boards, and if that’s our focus, why not highlight that?).

Re: International - It feels better than “Outside the USA” (which feels exclusionary), but maybe that’s just me. Of course ideally it’d be more targeted descriptors like “Europe” or “Asia”.

Thanks.