Poll: Homepage Design?

So this forum can do polls, which is nice. To show one by example, one initial question is what people think the landing page for this forum should be? By default the software uses this:

http://forums.mudspike.com/latest

…as it shows a quick overview of everything. We panicked and changed it to this though:

http://forums.mudspike.com/categories

…as it looks more like a ‘normal’ forum.

So, who likes what?

  • Use Latest, it’s funky!
  • Use Categories, it’s fine as is.
  • Your poll options are bad.

0 voters

Meta note: the above text looks like this in the editor:

[poll]
- Use Latest, it's funky!
- Use Categories, it's fine as is.
- Your poll options are bad.
[/poll]

…and I added that by adding four-spaces in front of the text to make that grey ‘code’ block.

I like the catagories view but that may be because I am equating them to forum space heirarchy. I am going to vote for #1 because it is different. It’s possible to switch, no?

Yep, it’s a very easy change. We are inviting in the existing Mudspike members in today (the people that had previously registered at the main site) so it will be interesting to see what people prefer. As we have a couple of more posts, I am certainly gravitating to the ‘New’ or Latest pages more for sure…

One suggestion/voting point for the ‘Latest’ option is that it helps keep people open to other discussions happening in the forums. Often, with other forum software, I tend to gravitate to only the games I am directly interested in (DCS, Arma3, etc) and I tend to miss thing in other areas that would draw me in (Rise of Flight, etc). The ‘Latest’ option keeps it all more open to more conversations.

And that is both it’s strength and it’s weakness. Maybe I do not want to see so much traffic in things I am not as interested in. That being said, I still vote for the ‘Latest’ :smile:

I went with the Categories option since it’s more familiar. The Latest option has its good points too. Whichever one ends up being chosen will work for me. :slight_smile:

Wheels

@wheelsup_cavu - Nice to see you here. Yep…I went with Categories, but now find myself flipping to the Latest format since it is easier to see what is trending. If it gets too busy I could see a situation where Latest might look a bit too daunting…but for the small scale it works pretty well. So I still haven’t decided which I like better…

BeachAV8R

A perfect split vote so far!

:smiling_imp:

Why not both? I find i’m using the “latest” option and the categories will make it nice and neat.

Same here. I like the categories, but I’m finding I’m using the “latest” option the most at the moment. If we ever get to the point where we are getting hundreds of replies and topics a day though - that would perhaps make that “latest” listing a bit too daunting. So yeah…I like both for now…

BeachAV8R

Well, ‘Latest’ is in the clear lead now. I pretty much navigate to it direct. Tempted to flip the default lol :smile:

I went with option 3…lol

Honestly whatever you guys go with will be perfect. I like categories when I’m looking for something specific but I normally go to latest upon first visit.