New site sucks

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Re: New site sucks

Post by 91 »

the alternative is closing it down, because it does cost money ... :)

Everyone is also welcome (encouraged) to help. This is not a professional website that anybody pays to get done and therefore it will never be a professionally and perfectly balanced team with just the right amount of every role (@dolan). People of the different roles also don't do full time work either. Some will travel for a few months, some will work hours everyday for a few weeks then go afk for a few months. That's life for a community built website.

As I was part of the team I was at one point worried that the whole project would go into the grave when we had too few people, and we had big obstacles in the way, but thanks to more people showing up and incredible effort from a lot of people (no names, nobody forgotten) the site is still up and running, and also improving. I'm grateful :)

of course specific feedback is good, it benefits everyone, but please remember the dev team often put a lot of time into things they might not even know how it works - so they also have to study to reach the goal. There's a lot of time put into it, and it is stressful. It also doesn't help when feedback has a very bad attitude (companies can deal with negative-attitude-feedback, but private persons voluntarily doing work might have a harder time dealing with it) - you might risk losing some developers that way instead, and we don't want that right? :)
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Re: New site sucks

Post by Kaiserklein »

Dolan wrote:
imperial wrote:this design sucks

Yeah, I agree, this forum has nothing special. It's a standard installation of a phpBB3 forum, with a couple of CSS adjustments here and there to make it look somewhat similar to the old styling of the forum.
They probably also modified some of the PHP templates to accommodate some of the features people asked for (active posts, tourney registration, the chat dropdown, etc).

Other than that, the forum lacks a cohesive concept of what it's supposed to achieve in terms of user experience and interface. Like the top navbar is just floated on the left and the user functions are floated on the right, which makes you travel with the mouse left-right-left to get something done.

I can understand why it looks this way. Probably everyone is busy enough with their own real-life stuff to have time to do more. Then if you look at the number of admins, things are a little crazy: 8 full site admins (!), 3 mods, 2 devs (what do you need 8 site admins for if you have a dev team..), plus the media team. Imagine this team trying to make a decision on changing something on the site. It has to be something like the UN Security Council, where what the US wants to get adopted is opposed by Russia and viceversa.

You know how professional websites are made? Client comes with a concept, the concept is discussed, a structure of the site is agreed on. They send this draft to a designer, the designer makes a quick mockup of how the site should look like (basic wireframing). Client checks the mockup and adds his feedback, so the concept may be modified again or just slightly adjusted. A new draft is agreed on. The designer further develops the mockup into a more full-fledged site design (one or several PSD files with lots of layers to indicate how the site behaves dynamically). Client comes for a follow-up check, the finishing touches are agreed on, the designer incorporates the changes and the client signs for the final concept. Then the PSD files are sent to the dev team as a project, which is usually split between coders/programmers and content/data entry monkeys. The coders slice up the PSD templates into a site structure and send it to the data entry monkeys to fill it in. Then they finish up the dynamic side of the site: forms, transitions, ajax calls, etc. They may also have to integrate with the backend, unless it's pre-made. Then it goes through cross-browser testing, etc.
At no point do they all sit around a table and throw their 2 cents on how the site should look like. It's just not everyone's job, because there already is a guy who is good at that.

Obviously nobody has time for that and nobody gets paid to take this too seriously, so the end-product is what you see.


Do you really need a NASA-ish website to talk about aoe 3 ? We're not trying to send cows on the moon bro (except aiz probably)
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Re: New site sucks

Post by yurashic »

The site is great. Complaints are unreasonable.
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Re: New site sucks

Post by 91 »

evilcheadar wrote:Yea it's not as good, still the elo thing doesn't work.

Which browser are you using? works for me. If you mean the search box in the left sidebar
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Re: New site sucks

Post by Hazza54321 »

the site is good, stop your whining
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Re: New site sucks

Post by momuuu »

Dolan wrote:
imperial wrote:this design sucks

Yeah, I agree, this forum has nothing special. It's a standard installation of a phpBB3 forum, with a couple of CSS adjustments here and there to make it look somewhat similar to the old styling of the forum.
They probably also modified some of the PHP templates to accommodate some of the features people asked for (active posts, tourney registration, the chat dropdown, etc).

Other than that, the forum lacks a cohesive concept of what it's supposed to achieve in terms of user experience and interface. Like the top navbar is just floated on the left and the user functions are floated on the right, which makes you travel with the mouse left-right-left to get something done.

I can understand why it looks this way. Probably everyone is busy enough with their own real-life stuff to have time to do more. Then if you look at the number of admins, things are a little crazy: 8 full site admins (!), 3 mods, 2 devs (what do you need 8 site admins for if you have a dev team..), plus the media team. Imagine this team trying to make a decision on changing something on the site. It has to be something like the UN Security Council, where what the US wants to get adopted is opposed by Russia and viceversa.

You know how professional websites are made? Client comes with a concept, the concept is discussed, a structure of the site is agreed on. They send this draft to a designer, the designer makes a quick mockup of how the site should look like (basic wireframing). Client checks the mockup and adds his feedback, so the concept may be modified again or just slightly adjusted. A new draft is agreed on. The designer further develops the mockup into a more full-fledged site design (one or several PSD files with lots of layers to indicate how the site behaves dynamically). Client comes for a follow-up check, the finishing touches are agreed on, the designer incorporates the changes and the client signs for the final concept. Then the PSD files are sent to the dev team as a project, which is usually split between coders/programmers and content/data entry monkeys. The coders slice up the PSD templates into a site structure and send it to the data entry monkeys to fill it in. Then they finish up the dynamic side of the site: forms, transitions, ajax calls, etc. They may also have to integrate with the backend, unless it's pre-made. Then it goes through cross-browser testing, etc.
At no point do they all sit around a table and throw their 2 cents on how the site should look like. It's just not everyone's job, because there already is a guy who is good at that.

Obviously nobody has time for that and nobody gets paid to take this too seriously, so the end-product is what you see.

The teams do more than managing a site though. The media team for example has a set of tasks that do not have to do much with the forums, except that the news posts appear on the forums. But hey, if you know someone good with design or something then why don't you tell that to the people that are working on the site? You've had a lot of criticism in the past, but have never offered to help out. This is a group project, and anyone willing to do something is welcome to do so. Would be more useful than complaining all the time you know.

lesllamas wrote:I think the site works alright for what it's supposed to be. There's no point in comparing it to the old site--this is what we have now and we should work with it. But just because the site is functional and has a couple nice features, doesn't mean it can't be improved! I, for one, think that the news posts take up a lot of room on the site's home page and often sit there for weeks without accomplishing a whole lot. The forums might be more active if perhaps, the news posts were condensed into a side column, and the sub-forums were front and center--with each displaying the most recent topic within that forum. The bar on the right is decent, but some of the threads are locked to all but admins, there aren't any timestamps or post counters to tell you how recent or active a thread is, etc.

But there's no rush to fix anything on this site. Any improvements ought to be treated as side projects by the people who actually have to put in the work to implement them, and should be left to their discretion as well.

The home page is the biggest thing that could use some help. The forums itself are good I think, and the navigation options are quite powerful actually compared to the average forum (its super easy to keep track of all the topics, just the active ones, just the ones you posted in or whatever you want). Only thing to consider in that regard is to change unrated posts to active topics imo. About the same functionality I guess. But the homepage and the UI need to add some spark to it. It needs to direct people to community content, the EP should be more visible than a small missable subsection that says ESOC Patch. There should be more than a little line saying Donate! Maybe the chat functionality needs to be merged into the UI. There's lots of room for improvement there I think.
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Re: New site sucks

Post by evilcheadar »

91 wrote:
evilcheadar wrote:Yea it's not as good, still the elo thing doesn't work.

Which browser are you using? works for me. If you mean the search box in the left sidebar

I use safari on ipad, chrome, and sometimes internet explorer
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Re: New site sucks

Post by imperial »

Dolan wrote:
imperial wrote:this design sucks

Yeah, I agree, this forum has nothing special. It's a standard installation of a phpBB3 forum, with a couple of CSS adjustments here and there to make it look somewhat similar to the old styling of the forum.
They probably also modified some of the PHP templates to accommodate some of the features people asked for (active posts, tourney registration, the chat dropdown, etc).

Other than that, the forum lacks a cohesive concept of what it's supposed to achieve in terms of user experience and interface. Like the top navbar is just floated on the left and the user functions are floated on the right, which makes you travel with the mouse left-right-left to get something done.

I can understand why it looks this way. Probably everyone is busy enough with their own real-life stuff to have time to do more. Then if you look at the number of admins, things are a little crazy: 8 full site admins (!), 3 mods, 2 devs (what do you need 8 site admins for if you have a dev team..), plus the media team. Imagine this team trying to make a decision on changing something on the site. It has to be something like the UN Security Council, where what the US wants to get adopted is opposed by Russia and viceversa.

You know how professional websites are made? Client comes with a concept, the concept is discussed, a structure of the site is agreed on. They send this draft to a designer, the designer makes a quick mockup of how the site should look like (basic wireframing). Client checks the mockup and adds his feedback, so the concept may be modified again or just slightly adjusted. A new draft is agreed on. The designer further develops the mockup into a more full-fledged site design (one or several PSD files with lots of layers to indicate how the site behaves dynamically). Client comes for a follow-up check, the finishing touches are agreed on, the designer incorporates the changes and the client signs for the final concept. Then the PSD files are sent to the dev team as a project, which is usually split between coders/programmers and content/data entry monkeys. The coders slice up the PSD templates into a site structure and send it to the data entry monkeys to fill it in. Then they finish up the dynamic side of the site: forms, transitions, ajax calls, etc. They may also have to integrate with the backend, unless it's pre-made. Then it goes through cross-browser testing, etc.
At no point do they all sit around a table and throw their 2 cents on how the site should look like. It's just not everyone's job, because there already is a guy who is good at that.

Obviously nobody has time for that and nobody gets paid to take this too seriously, so the end-product is what you see.


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Re: New site sucks

Post by Dolan »

iNcog wrote:let's calm down here for a second bro

Who wasn't calm?

the only client here is the age of empires 3 community. we just need a site to host tournaments, aoe3 discussion and community stuff. everything done here isn't with a professional or business plan behind it. it's a community site which is built from scratch by community members. this site does its intended role perfectly.
we're done with going for big concepts and all the like. We're just here to host aoe3's community. we also have a lot of admins because this is a community run site... no big head honcho which owns or dictates things.

Yeah, but it could be better and from some points of view it was better. At least in terms of UI functionality the old site was indeed better. That's why Proboards actually has a market, as deceptive as they may be, they built that forum software from scratch and they actually developed a few nifty features, such as instant search in a thread, user tagging, a simple CSS editor for when you don't really need to get down to server metal level to make a few adjustments, support for embedding video files for a very wide choice of formats, a nice window for your participated threads which can be popped so you don't have to navigate to another page to see your active threads, and so on. They also had lots of badly implemented features too and, of course, you were locked to their backend. But that doesn't mean you have to deny the good features they had.

Yeah, from my point of view, I'm fine with whatever you guys are fine with. I still think the number of staff/admins is way too big for such a small site, I think one or two would do the same job.

Oh, don't have any illusions about having any real rights here. As long as there's one single person who pays for the site and whose name is on the AWS bill, that person can do anything they want, change admins, close the forum, change permissions. You're basically hanging on their personal whim or future plans. So enjoy the ride while it lasts.
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Re: New site sucks

Post by 91 »

Dolan wrote:
Yeah, from my point of view, I'm fine with whatever you guys are fine with. I still think the number of staff/admins is way too big for such a small site, I think one or two would do the same job.

Oh, don't have any illusions about having any real rights here. As long as there's one single person who pays for the site and whose name is on the AWS bill, that person can do anything they want, change admins, close the forum, change permissions. You're basically hanging on their personal whim or future plans. So enjoy the ride while it lasts.


It's easy to judge number of staff members when not being a part of it. Due to peaks of inactivity one person can end up having to do hours of work everyday for some time. Better a higher number and getting things done, than to low number making staff too stressed and tired, quitting the whole thing
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Re: New site sucks

Post by Kaiserklein »

Lol do we care really ? The site is fine, they're spending their free time in it, and you come to complain ? But is there at least any real problem with the site lol ?
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Re: New site sucks

Post by evilcheadar »

Kaiserklein wrote:Lol do we care really ? The site is fine, they're spending their free time in it, and you come to complain ? But is there at least any real problem with the site lol ?

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Re: New site sucks

Post by musketeer925 »

evilcheadar wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Lol do we care really ? The site is fine, they're spending their free time in it, and you come to complain ? But is there at least any real problem with the site lol ?

Notification problems

This is on mobile only, correct?
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Re: New site sucks

Post by evilcheadar »

musketeer925 wrote:
evilcheadar wrote:
Kaiserklein wrote:Lol do we care really ? The site is fine, they're spending their free time in it, and you come to complain ? But is there at least any real problem with the site lol ?

Notification problems

This is on mobile only, correct?

Yes
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Re: New site sucks

Post by Kaiserklein »

evilcheadar wrote:
musketeer925 wrote:
Show hidden quotes

This is on mobile only, correct?

Yes

Then have a life and stop checking esoc from your mobile geez
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Re: New site sucks

Post by momuuu »

Dolan wrote:Yeah, from my point of view, I'm fine with whatever you guys are fine with. I still think the number of staff/admins is way too big for such a small site, I think one or two would do the same job.

Oh, don't have any illusions about having any real rights here. As long as there's one single person who pays for the site and whose name is on the AWS bill, that person can do anything they want, change admins, close the forum, change permissions. You're basically hanging on their personal whim or future plans. So enjoy the ride while it lasts.

You know, I dont think anyone working for the forums has the time to be doing that full time. Thats why theres a lot of staff, because you can't really expect people to spend 20 hours or more per week on it.

I mean, what the media team is doing for example, can be done in 3 work days. However, all three of us go to school/university and have to study sometimes, so it's nice that you can split it up in like 5-8 hours per week per person, so that there's some time left for other things.
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Re: New site sucks

Post by musketeer925 »

Some of the staff disappear for months at a time and then come back and work for hours a day for a while. And that's totally reasonable -- we all have lives. Having what seems like a very large staff is necessary to ensure there's enough to run everything at a time.

Also I think you underestimate the amount of work that goes into running tournaments, improving and developing both the site and the patch, organizing streams and casters, keeping the spam down on the forum, providing patch tech support, etc, etc. No one or two people could begin to do all that even working full time, even if they had the wide range of skills required to do it all. There have been a lot of weeks where I put in probably 25+ hours on development and planning in addition to my university workload and job, and I doubt I'm alone in that.
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Re: New site sucks

Post by fightinfrenchman »

musketeer925 wrote:Some of the staff disappear for months at a time and then come back and work for hours a day for a while. And that's totally reasonable -- we all have lives. Having what seems like a very large staff is necessary to ensure there's enough to run everything at a time.

Also I think you underestimate the amount of work that goes into running tournaments, improving and developing both the site and the patch, organizing streams and casters, keeping the spam down on the forum, providing patch tech support, etc, etc. No one or two people could begin to do all that even working full time, even if they had the wide range of skills required to do it all. There have been a lot of weeks where I put in probably 25+ hours on development and planning in addition to my university workload and job, and I doubt I'm alone in that.


Well I would be willing to devote huge amounts of time to moderating. I would never disappear for so long.
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