Optional Realities: The Shameless Plugging Update Thread

If enough people are reading your forums on their phones for that to be the deciding factor, fine, but I don't have one and I can only judge how it feels to navigate it on my computer. I strongly dislike it.

It's hard for me to put the clunkiness into words, but I'll try.

1. When I go to the main page of your forum, what I see is an array of big mobile-app type icons that display the names of the subforums. Many of these subforums have rather abstract names, like "The Artists' Easel" and "The Gamers' Table," so I'm not really sure where to go for what I'm looking for. There's no description of what each subforum is, forcing me to browse through them. I know that might sound like a minor gripe, but for casual browsers of your page like me, it's a real turn-off that makes me say "meh, I'll just look at something else."

2. Yes, the fact that you do not display the most recent topic in each subforum is a big deal. I have to choose between looking at the subforums and scrolling through a big disorganized list of recent posts. On the old forum, when there was a new post in the "other games" subforum, in a thread about CamelotRPI, I could tell immediately and go, "Hey, look, some chatter about CamelotRPI. That suits my interests." I wouldn't necessarily have to click through subforum trees or scroll through a list of all recent posts in all forums to see if anything tickled my fancy.

3. The site is now aesthetically offputting for those reading in web browsers, with the big ugly text and so on. Don't most web designers these days create two versions of their websites, one for PC and one for mobile? If it is a big deal to you to make your site mobile-friendly, then maybe you should look into that, because I don't see why making your site mobile-friendly should mean alienating people who are not navigating on their mobile devices.

I also feel like I have to navigate through way too much to actually get to the meat of the site, which is the forum, namely the posts themselves. That and the fact that I cannot view the subforums and their most recent posts all at once makes the forum seem disjointed, like it's really just a bunch of forums that happen to be hosted on the same server. It's kind of an intangible thing, but it doesn't feel right.

Hey,

I also made "unread posts" open to guests. This is a much more efficient means of checking for new content without being disjointed like recent. Let me know if it improves your experience.

I also dislike your site, but I'll explain what's wrong in a low-profanity attempt at constructive criticism.

It's an issue of user experience. Specifically: what you've done to your site runs contrary to its purpose and how it attracts hits in the first place.

Your site is informational, yet I have to navigate through 2 - 4 pages just to get title links that might have the information I am looking for. That's upwards of five clicks to read one thing. Absurd, sir. If I pop over to OR's main page from a link to the site index, instead of newest/hottest content I see a giant logo. If I scroll down further I see game design tools. Why? Fucking why? I still don't know why I'm here. Did I come to this site for a dev kit, because so far the site hasn't told me what it is or provided me with materials I could deduce its purpose on my own. Halfway down the main page I finally get to information that should have gone on an About Us page before graphic artists got tired of functional design and created this semi-animated template that is everywhere now.

This leads into the second issue. The template you've used is one that is more appropriate to a non-interactive, "we're just throwing some shit on the internet for a web presence" website for a company that doesn't actually do business online. I am willing to bet that absolutely no one is going to just stumble onto your website and stay because it looks pretty. Pretty much everyone coming in to your site will either have wound up there from a search turning up one of your articles or will be a direct referral. They've already found you, and not your main page. If they like what they see, they're probably going to jump to the main page to see what's hot off the presses, only to be horribly confused by the lack of content. They won't see the main page until after they've already seen stuff buried 2 - 5 links under it, so it's actually going to drive off more people than it will retain.

Are the subforums for the discussion of individual games gone now? I only see official announcement threads, which I'm not particularly interested in.