How can we make the flow better on the everyone site?

[Melooon]

I've been thinking about how we could improve the flow on the everyone site today 

Currently I think the site has a few faults:

• The index has way too many links and way too much pressure
• Its really easy to end up in a dead-end with no clear way out
• Its difficult to find the more developed pages among the short junky pages

Those things are really holding the site back and making it a less fun space to explore since you keep having to backtrack and you never feel a sense of completion at knowing you've explored an area fully.

One thing I did notice was that when the everywhere-links were added there was a big boost in site use because suddenly having all these extra links added much more flow to the site, but I still end up in a lot of dead ends 

So I'm looking for things we could do to improve this! There are already some good additions such as the town and the desert that are actually great ways to break up the link load from the index and make things explorable.

I wonder if we could subdivide the site into districts, following the same regions as guilds use, and then have the server put a little icon on each page so that you always have a way back to the district you are currently in 

[larvapuppy]

When you mentioned districts, the first idea that jumped into my head was a big map with all the areas greyed out, that would fill in with colour more and more as you explore. But it might be difficult to generate and maintain a map to represent every page, especially as new pages are added and old ones are deleted.

Another idea is a small progress bar that sits as an overlay at the bottom of the screen and shows you how much of the current district you've explored. It could also function like a webring with arrows to bring you to yet-unopened pages.

My final idea is more cultural; we somehow encourage everyone to maintain a links list at the bottom of each page so that no page is a dead end. It could be made into a community project where people volunteer to search out pages without links and add links to related / neighbouring pages. If we can't make this happen intrinsically, maybe some small reward like a swap credit could be awarded each time someone adds a link to another everyone site page?

[MediocreMetastasis]

When you mentioned districts, the first idea that jumped into my head was a big map with all the areas greyed out, that would fill in with colour more and more as you explore. But it might be difficult to generate and maintain a map to represent every page, especially as new pages are added and old ones are deleted.

Reminds me of the LSD Dream emulator map. Each new area is fill out on your map. Even when traversing a new location was seemingly random it added a bit of fun and curiosity.

Developing on the idea you could have a mode where, like dream emulator, the user can only spend at most 10-30 seconds on a page before they're either kicked out to another random page or they click on a link to another page. Turns the whole ordeal into a game and if they like the page they found they can save the link.

As for districts. It seems neat but I feel like people would forget about them immediately and just set their page to the default one.

Maybe you could have a "most viewed page of the month" so that people have direct access to the "best" and most active pages.

[IndigoGolem]

My first thought was to try to map the esite to a space,... i had a way of explaining this in mind and i lost it when i started typing.

Sort of like the village or Pixlarea, when you create a page you have to give it an address and also a place on a map, relative to links to other pages. Tho i'm not sure how best to do that on a technical level, since <map>s don't scale, one of my workarounds requires rectangle hotspots (no circles or ngons), and the other requires SVG so it has browser compatibility issues.

The village and desert could be areas within this map, and there could be other subareas (or disticts like Melon suggested) too. I'm imagining something like a map of the world of a MUD. There are rooms for wilderness areas, and then on the wilderness map there's one big block representing a city because it uses a different scale. In the city map there are blocks for buildings because many of them are also on a different scale.

This would be a geography for the Melon Land, and now i wonder two things:

One, what would Melonland look like from a distance, as seen from a place like John's Castle? (No pressure, John)

Two, what biomes are there? The easy, obvious answer is it looks like a geography book. Mountains, forests, plains, desert, etc. But i think there must be some other answer that's more in the spirit of Melonland. Maybe there are 32x gif foothills leading up to the digital art mountains. Maybe a lagoon of Geocities imitation pages. Maybe we don't map it to real world geographical features at all, and then the fun part is figuring out how to visually represent this stuff.

One other idea i have is to make the index (or just the esite button in the navbar) point to a random esite page, so you never know what you're gonna get.

Another idea is a small progress bar that sits as an overlay at the bottom of the screen and shows you how much of the current district you've explored. It could also function like a webring with arrows to bring you to yet-unopened pages.

I worry that the progress bar might make it feel like there's a checklist of pages you have to visit or you're missing stuff or doing an incomplete "job" of surfing the web. But i do like the unopened page button.

Its really easy to end up in a dead-end with no clear way out

This is true. Ruling that a page must link to another page might help, but i think it would mostly cause loops. Paying people in swap credits to link to more pages is an uncomfortable incentive structure. That's less of an issue here than on a more open forum, i think, but i still could see pages being flooded with links just for this. I don't know a structural solution.

Wait, maybe. I have a dumb idea. A certain percentage of the HTML elements you add to a page must be <a>. You have a limited number of less/greater than signs, and that stock is replenished either when you add an anchor to a page or when someone clicks a link you added. Maybe not that last part, i don't know if it's possible to tell who added what parts of a page (maybe a custom attribute like <a href="/whatever.html" author="[account id number]">), or if that would encourage clickbait.


One other idea, while i'm here and talking about the Everyone Site. I think artifacts should be able to appear sometimes at a random spot on a page (tho ideally not blocking interactive elements like links and buttons), so you can find ones that aren't on the popular list. Hey, why not make it possible to put artifacts in pages intentionally so people who find them (and are signed in) can adopt them from there? Now i'm imagining shop pages, maybe something like a pet store.

[ribose]

ooouh i have thoughts!   they are all over the place and were written out of order...

RE: the index page

The index has way too many links and way too much pressure

this reminds me of a forum topic from 2 years ago that said the same thing. for context i looked up what the index looked like around the time of that discussion... the big list had 27 links in early october and 32 links in late november. today, the big list has 77+ links! in the older topic, no consensus was reached about what to do with the index page (but there was a proposal describing a train-like navigation system!), though i wonder if those who preferred the flat directory structure back then would feel the same now that the site is so large. i personally agree that the index page has too many links.

some of my recent edits to the index page have been adding little flexboxes to break up the sameness of that big list. i wanted to add a few more, but i've been struggling to find related pages to group together. i think this is an issue that reinforces itself: because there's so little structure, people rarely make pages that build off existing ones, and because so few pages relate to each other, it's hard to give the site more structure. i think most links get added to the index page because it isn't clear where else they could go.


RE: districts

subdivide the site into districts, following the same regions as guilds use, and then have the server put a little icon on each page so that you always have a way back to the district you are currently in

i think dividing the site into districts could free up the index page to be more welcoming and fun, but i don't think adding a district icon to every page would improve the flow through the site. it would recreate the same backtracking navigation pattern we have now: visit hub (index or district page), click a link, it's a dead end, go back (browser back button or district icon), click the next link in the list. it's the same thing but with four hubs instead of one.

As for districts. It seems neat but I feel like people would forget about them immediately and just set their page to the default one.

this lines up with what i noticed when reorganizing the guilds page yesterday. there are 58 guilds and 60% of them are in Melon Town. (though maybe everyone just wants to be close to main plaza )


RE: dead ends and interlinking

My final idea is more cultural; we somehow encourage everyone to maintain a links list at the bottom of each page so that no page is a dead end. It could be made into a community project where people volunteer to search out pages without links and add links to related / neighbouring pages.

i'm optimistic that we can do this! i think the issues with the everyone site are more about community norms than the technology powering the site, so the most appropriate solutions are cultural instead of technical. a few volunteers would make a huge difference! if every page someone encounters on the eSite links to other eSite pages, that will shape their expectations of what an eSite page should be like, and they'll be more likely to add links to the pages they make. i believe that the more the site feels like one big interconnected world we've made together, the more people will treat it that way.

two resources that would be really helpful to me as a link-building volunteer:

• a list of pages with no links to other pages
• a list of pages with no pages linking to them (like wikipedia's orphaned articles category)

(not sure if room pages should be filtered out or put in a separate list? a lot of these are pretty bare but i don't wanna barge into anyone's room to add links... i know i said auto-linking a district page wouldn't solve the flow problems, but maybe all room pages could link to the tenement by default?)

also the forum has an etiquette guide; maybe the eSite would benefit from having one too? or maybe the blank pad placeholder text could be updated to encourage linking to other pages?

Ruling that a page must link to another page might help, but i think it would mostly cause loops.

this feels like a fair rule to me! what good is hypertext without any hyperlinks? i'm not sure how easy it would be to enforce though. like what happens when a page has no links? does it get deleted? hidden from search and recent? or it could be something like a monthly sweep to remove any links to dead end pages from the main eSite pages (index, village, desert)?

also i don't think loops would be a bad thing, as long as they're a comfortable size! getting stuck in a loop of two pages that only link to each other is basically a dead end (like me and you), but i think loops like the corridor ring are great. i added a ring to the named color pages and i'm actively looking for more groups of pages to link up like that. completing a loop gives me the feeling of having fully explored it. i think it would be less satisfying if the loops were too big to complete in a short sitting, so i don't like the idea of the server automatically putting all the room pages in a ring, or all pages from a district in a ring. more small rings!


RE: empty pages

Its difficult to find the more developed pages among the short junky pages

i relate to your statement, but... there are probably a few pages i think are junk that you love, and pages you love that i think are junk! junky is subjective!

in the post where you introduce the everyone site, you say that it's an experiment for people to "mess around" and "get their toes wet" and i think for the most part that's what people have been doing! there's a lot of short gag pages, and not a lot of big projects. to make it easier to find those bigger pages, the links to them will have to be made more prominent and/or more numerous than the links to junky pages. right now, the site rules emphasize being respectful of others work, which i don't think is a bad thing, but i think it can make people feel nervous about making changes to collaborative pages. is it rude to move a junky link off the index? was it rude to add the junky link in the first place? who gets the final say about what is or isn't junky?

a small progress bar that sits as an overlay at the bottom of the screen and shows you how much of the current district you've explored.

I worry that the progress bar might make it feel like there's a checklist of pages you have to visit or you're missing stuff

i agree with IndigoGolem here; i think a progress bar would make exploring the site feel like a chore. i have the bad habit of playing videogames past the point i stopped having fun to try to get all the achievements, and i worry that any kind of completion system would make my relationship with the eSite less enjoyable. but beyond my own hangups, i don't think this would be much fun for anyone else either, because so many of the pages have so little to see on them. if there was a progress bar, should only certain pages count towards exploring a district?

One other idea i have is to make the index (or just the esite button in the navbar) point to a random esite page, so you never know what you're gonna get.

there was a button in the navbar to go to a random eSite page, briefly! it was added earlier this month and was removed after a week or two. you can still visit the link directly: https://everyone.melonland.net/@/random (it's also linked from this random link page i started). if you click it a bunch of times you'll find that a lot of the eSite is empty dead ends, which i suspect may have at least partially inspired this topic!

as new pages are added and old ones are deleted.

are old pages ever deleted? i'm not saying that they should or shouldn't be, but i wonder! i haven't seen a delete button as a regular user, but do Melon or other mods have page deletion privileges?


RE: artifacts

Hey, why not make it possible to put artifacts in pages intentionally so people who find them (and are signed in) can adopt them from there? Now i'm imagining shop pages, maybe something like a pet store.

this already exists! if you scroll to the end of the page for any artifact you own, there are HTML and BBcode embed codes for that artifact. for example, here's one of mine:

these embed codes are being used to set up shops on the eSite at the artifact mall! your pet store idea would fit right in as a section of that page, or as a new page linked from there! there's also the iframe embeds that show your whole collection, if you prefer! i put one with all my adoptable artifacts on my room page.

[Melooon]

this reminds me of a forum topic from 2 years ago that said the same thing. though i wonder if those who preferred the flat directory structure back then would feel the same now that the site is so large. i personally agree that the index page has too many links.

i think the issues with the everyone site are more about community norms than the technology powering the site

From what I recall Rol's plan actually did happen, the bulletin board was added, rooms were split out to the tenement and the town maps were added. However the link list was never cleared away and the new stuff ended up working beside it rather than replacing it. There's always a center of gravity issue and its really hard to move the center of gravity once its set in. 

The easy option is to make it a random page like IndigoGolem says, but way too many pages are empty so most of the time you'd end up on a very blank page. 

@ribose I had a plan for the random link, as a sticky next to the edit button, but now I feel like we need to figure all this out first! We could actually move the edit button into a custom section in the nav (same way the forum theme picker has a custom section), but Im worried that might be less clear and would reduce edits.

s for districts. It seems neat but I feel like people would forget about them immediately and just set their page to the default one.

This is what I call a wobbly ball issue, you drop people onto a wobbly ball (a page with no clear direction), and you need them to fall off the ball in a different direction each time, but you still need them to feel like they are in control of where they fall.

As a study: This is a map of disneyland that shows its layouts and routs. There is a main spine that people arrive through and it acts as an introduction, and then there is the central wobbly ball area that breaks out into districts. The districts reach out like arms, but they also interlink with each other, so you can walk out through one district, reach the end, then loop back through another and arrive back at the wobbly ball. You don't feel like you've missed anything because you always end up getting oriented back at the same point, but you also feel like you can escape and move away from it.


I think almost any solution we come up with is basically turning the everyone site from one huge wobbly ball (the index page as it is now), into a smaller wobbly ball with arms of linked pages that reach out more like that map. This means we need a simple convention people can follow to know where their page should be linked on that arm. The arms are natural districts, but they are not enforced or defined in any way outside of community work, like the colour street.

Im going on a wild 3am tangent here, but it seems like the issue is a fractal problem. WHAT if the site worked like a semi-Conway's game of life If a page has no links its dead, if it has a few links its alive, and if it has too many links its dead. Only pages that are alive receive everywhere links (not counted as life links). This means that pages with a healthy number of links get naturally promoted. We can also limit random links to only go to healthy pages. 

As for the issue of how to build arms... on a wiki, you create dead links that are marked as unfinished and that acts as a hint for someone to create that page, and when they do the link starts working. We could steal that idea and encourage creating outbound unfinished links that then naturally grow into arms.

I'm in favor of community solutions rather than technical ones (though my head is very much stuck in the technical side of this). but maybe one soft aid for the wiki-like-link idea, would be to have a page that lists all dead links on the site (an inverse index, where the links disappear when the page is made), so people can be like "Oh the fish page is not made yet, i'll make a fish page". 

who gets the final say about what is or isn't junky?

I didn't mean to say junky pages are bad, but more that developed pages are not getting promoted well. Its less about putting down quick pages, and much more about how do we highlight pages that people have put a bunch of work into. Though I think the answer is just to have an section on the index.

but do Melon or other mods have page deletion privileges?

I can delete pages, but its very rare, usually only a serious ban or a data removal request. Pages that get opened in the editor but never edited get automatically deleted after a while too.

[Rubbereon]

Currently I think the site has a few faults:

    The index has way too many links and way too much pressure
    Its really easy to end up in a dead-end with no clear way out
    Its difficult to find the more developed pages among the short junky pages

Isn't that the whole point of the index? Because it's been like that since I joined and noticed it.

• A mess of links and images
• Some of which lead outside melonland

To people it felt more like a huge elaborate shitpost, something like this than something serious. Yeah sure there are a few serious projects on it like everyone's Myst, but in general I thought it was purely for fun. I even did the Wikipedia thing of having an empty page just called "nothing" and added it to the list.

For a non-me example is the evilforum it serves absolutely no purpose and if the text wasn't automatically given anchor tags <a> it would be a dead end that links back to the main forum and a bunch of external sites. Another would be the pronouns page which I would feel bad to remove. Yet another would ironically be everyone's Myst, it goes nowhere either.

I dunno, I absolutely get your frustration, but I think it's simultaneously a lost cause at this point and barking at the wrong tree, maybe there needs to be a sidebar for the everyone's website that helps exploration?

[Rubbereon]

Methinks another way to improve it would be to add meta tags to pages like everyone's myst could get "game" and non-serious pages could go for "funny" and "shitpost" and pages that are so barebones they would have no tags would get none, and then from there they could populate an automatic list just like this: https://everyone.melonland.net/@/recent

That's my idea anyway, there's no telling how effective that would be.

I like the idea of putting a footer that links to other sites, but I think it'd need to be automatic and randomized otherwise you'll have possibly hundreds of pages to edit, no idea how much people are willing to do that because admittedly it's a bit of a time-waster 

[ribose]

I didn't mean to say junky pages are bad, but more that developed pages are not getting promoted well. Its less about putting down quick pages, and much more about how do we highlight pages that people have put a bunch of work into. Though I think the answer is just to have an section on the index.

sorry, i didn't mean to imply you were putting down short pages! i focused too much on the word junky, and got a little carried away with my hypothetical questions. the point i was trying to make there was more about like.... hmmm.... let's say someone moves the most developed pages to a special section that gets more emphasis at the top of the index page. multiple links can't occupy the same space, so the pages that aren't chosen for that section will have to get pushed down the page. this de-emphasizes them! the promotion and demotion are two sides of the same coin; i'm not sure you can have one without the other. which goes back to the question of how to decide what gets chosen for promotion, especially when everyone brings their own unique values and priorities to the site? i guess i'm bringing this up because i'm trying to minimize the risk of someone feeling rejected or confused if a page they worked on isn't chosen for promotion. that's why i was thinking about etiquette guides... something to get everyone on the same page about values and goals. but i like your healthy page idea a lot better!

WHAT if the site worked like a semi-Conway's game of life If a page has no links its dead, if it has a few links its alive, and if it has too many links its dead. Only pages that are alive receive everywhere links (not counted as life links). This means that pages with a healthy number of links get naturally promoted. We can also limit random links to only go to healthy pages. 

this is so cooool! i'm imagining a little "page health" indicator somewhere in the editor, and when you click on it, it tells you why the page is considered alive or dead. too few links? add more! too many links? consider dividing the page into two you can surf between. idk if this would make it tooooo complicated, but there could be measures of a healthy page besides the number of links. like how the forum encourages writing more if a post is too short, maybe pages should be a certain length to be considered healthy? and maybe a page having a higher number of editors could contribute to a page's health, to encourage more collaboration!

one soft aid for the wiki-like-link idea, would be to have a page that lists all dead links on the site (an inverse index, where the links disappear when the page is made), so people can be like "Oh the fish page is not made yet, i'll make a fish page". 

i like this too! i would like to do more on the everyone site, but most of the time i'm not sure where to start... knowing that someone wants something specific to exist is a huge motivator for me, and i have to imagine that i'm not the only one like this. i would love a "volunteer center" type page has a list of dead links, a list of pages that need links added to/from them, and maybe even a special section where you (Melooon) can request help from us for various things around the site.

I like the idea of putting a footer that links to other sites, but I think it'd need to be automatic and randomized otherwise you'll have possibly hundreds of pages to edit, no idea how much people are willing to do that because admittedly it's a bit of a time-waster 

i am willing! since this topic was posted i've already added links to about a dozen pages that didn't have them yet. if only a few people joined me, we could easily have links on every page in a month or two. i don't think they should be randomized...

the evilforum [...] pronouns page [...] everyone's Myst

i just added links to all three of these pages! it took me a lot longer to write this post than it did to add a few links 

[Melooon]

i'm imagining a little "page health" indicator somewhere in the editor

This is all doable!

We could give each page an info/stats break out page (like /home?info), that gives you stats such as link count, image count etc. Plus a health score. For the sake of simplicity id prob just link to a wiki page saying how you can improve a health score rather than doing bespoke "do this" messages.

We could also add a health snippet embed, so you can have the score appear on the live page.

Editor count - I added a test on the index page (Made By footer), and yes we can get a complete editor history for pages even when they have been overwritten

So we would need a health algorithm: such as:

Code

health = 0; // more health is more better

if links > 2 & < 6, health += 20; // ideal
else if links < 2, health += 1; // too few
else if links > 6 & < 12, health +=10; // a bit too many
else if links > 12, health += 2; // way too many

// editor count
health += editorCount;

// active pages get a boost
if last page edit < 3 months ago, health += 10;

// text length
health += (textLength / 100) max of 10; // 1 point for every 100 chars, maxed at 10

// image count
health += (image count / 2) max of 10; // every image counts for 0.5 points, maxed at 10.

i would love a "volunteer center" type page has a list of dead links, a list of pages that need links added to/from them

We could have a /@/todo list that basically works like recent edits, but for broken links. However we could also output that list as a snippet, so people can build a kind of workshop page around the list?

(Aside I think the snippet system is really powerful and something we should do more with)

to improve it would be to add meta tags to pages like everyone's myst could get "game

Having some bespoke meta tags on the everyone site is a good idea, and it could be an easy way to work around the districts idea too. Since people could set a district for the page <meta property="district" content="melon-town" />. Then at some point we could have a map of districts that's generated based on what districts exist on the site.

Two, what biomes are there? The easy, obvious answer is it looks like a geography book. Mountains, forests, plains, desert, etc

Those are all good questions that I would like people making the site to create answers too, I dont think they should be imposed on the site by the code!

[ribose]

This is all doable!

hooray!!

the system you've described sounds really fun and interesting to me. it makes me excited to edit the everyone site!

we could also output that list [of broken links] as a snippet, so people can build a kind of workshop page around the list?

oooooo yes please! i think this would be ideal!

(Aside I think the snippet system is really powerful and something we should do more with)

i've started putting some snippets on other pages, but i only know they exist bc i was snooping while you were working on the new home page! i don't think they've been announced or documented anywhere yet?

[Melooon]

Ok getting back to this discussion! Most of the server side stuff is done now! ooph that was a lot I also added more info to the wiki and establish some basic etiquette guidelines such as not being afraid to edit other peoples pages, and including links!

Next I think its time to redo the index page, my suggestions:

• We move the big link list to a separate page such as "pages"
• We pick a few hub locations to include on the index, maybe 5 at most, and make them as big clear links.
• We also embed community feeds like the everyone RSS feed into the index
• We also also make @ribose idea of a workshop page on the index, using snippets to list the todo and needs work pages.

That changes the index from a big flat list into being more like a working space with places to go if you are just exploring and things to do if you are editing 

[Rol]

I hope this isn't a bit too late into this thread! But I had some ideas upon reading this. There's a lot to read, so it took me a bit of time to make sure what I had in mind hadn't already been said.

So here goes,

I really like IndigoGolem's idea of the index of the Everyone site bringing you somewhere random. Reminds me of old online games I'd play where every time you joined you'd get plopped down somewhere random on the massive map.

And I think Melon's concern about potentially landing on empty pages more often than not could be easily addressed using ideas we've already mentioned here. The list of the pages that your destination gets randomly chosen from could be filtered to be only the healthiest pages, or with the most links.

Also, while pondering the random page idea, I made a mockup of a fun way a homepage utilizing this idea could work. It's more function over form right now, but I hope you see my vision! ^^" https://everyone.melonland.net/homemockup

Update: I made it fancy~