Form and Functionality - Our Forum Update

[James32 823]

The Forum Update

As promised by Red today we're bringing you news of our newest updates to the forums to bring our website a modern appearance and format. These changes will be going live on the evening of 29/07/18

We can split the changes into a few main sections that I'll briefly talk about below,

• Forum Restructure
  • We're adjusting the structure of the forums so that it will be easier to navigate for everyone and more logically laid out, making it easier to find exactly the thing you're looking for.

 

• The Altis Life Hub page
  • We have custom made a page to showcase all AL related content on our forums in one place, It will be accessible at https://strayagaming.com.au/altislife , once all of these changes are live later tonight.
  • Below is a screenshot of the page
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  • The page shows summaries of AL section posts, important updates, our AL events calendar and a summary of core AL stats including a live player count. The big green join altislife button even opens your game and connects to the server directly all automatically!

 

• The most significant change for most users will be the implementation of our new theme that I've been working on for the past few weeks. This theme will help modernize our website's appearance. If you notice any bugs or graphical issues please let me know So i can correct them!
  • The new theme will become the default, but fear not if you prefer the current theme it will be left enabled as an optional theme that you can select from the theme drop-down seen below (For a few weeks maybe):
    •  
  • Here is some previews of the new theme:
  • Profiles:
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  • Writing a post:
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  • Forum Frontpage
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  • Comments:
    • 

                                     

• Tag Colours/Post Highlights
  • To make everything more consistent we will be making all donator tags a consistent colour
  • In addition to this we are going to be adding emphasis to posts by lead staff, management and forum staff to indicate people who are posting with authority on the forums.

 

[James32 823]

The New theme is live (feel free to offer any feedback here) and the altis life page is up at  https://strayagaming.com.au/altislife I hope it helps present AL content in a useful and pleasing way!

The restructure of the forums themself is currently ongoing so you may see large amounts of shiftuing/have links not load or error over the next hour or so while i restructure everything.

[ZrMz_x 8]

@James32 - Report a bug on the Altis life Page does not redirect you to the Bug Tracker page, instead takes you to 'Join Altis Life'.

 

Edited July 29, 2018 by ZrMz_x

[Red 1068]

1 hour ago, ZrMz_x said:

@James32 - Report a bug on the Altis life Page does not redirect you to the Bug Tracker page, instead takes you to 'Join Altis Life'.

 

Thanks, i've fixed that up now.

[Connor Manson 19]

Personally, I think the new Altis life part of the forums is a bit hard to navigate. When you go into a forum post or another page on that part of the forum, there is no way to go back to the Altis life hub (Unless you use the back button on your browser). Every button redirects you back to the normal forum instead of the Altis life hub.

In my opinion, this forum as a whole is hard to navigate in general, especially for a new user. The nav bar needs to be used more to make it more user-friendly. On my first time using this forum, it took me a bit to find where the support tickets were located only to find out it was hidden in the footer. Things like this are important for users to find and shouldn't really be put in a footer. A lot of things such as the Altis life stats and the new Altis life hub are also tucked away in sub-forums. Basically, it takes a bit of exploring to find non-forum pages. I think these pages should be added to the nav bar or even separated from the forum boards themselves by something like the quick links you did with the Altis life hub. The support navigation in the footer needs to be moved to the nav bar under the support drop down. I understand this is a forum but not every user creates an account to make a post, but they need an account to make comp request or view community updates, and a forum like this can be overwhelming and cluttered for a new user.

 

Also in the community drop down it says "menu item 133" and it launches teamspeak.

Edited July 30, 2018 by Connor Manson

[Connor. 1352]

20 minutes ago, Connor Manson said:

The support navigation in the footer needs to be moved to the nav bar under the support drop down.

It's actually there if you click support, but I have to admit thats easy to miss. Rest of your post is valid points

[Connor Manson 19]

2 minutes ago, Connor. said:

It's actually there if you click support, but I have to admit thats easy to miss. Rest of your post is valid points

Lol make sense not sure why Ive never click it before