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

[Melooon]

Moved the links to a nicer spot, added a sort of notch to the header bar for the compass. It's looking real stylish now 

The compass overlap looks sooo cool! You had a complex background hiding system, and I swapped it out for just injecting padding into the sub-page itself. Im not sure if it will cause issues for pages, but I've not found any that it breaks yet; I left your code commented just in case.


ALERT
If there are no major comments or issues by anyone here, I vote that we swap the index over to rols homemockup later today? The current index has already been backed up to https://everyone.melonland.net/legacy-homepage

[ribose]

I vote that we swap the index over to rols homemockup

i'm in favor! i much prefer the new mockup to the legacy homepage. all healthy pages get a chance at being highlighted, so it gets around the problem of a bunch of links competing for limited space. and the compass nav addresses the wobbly ball issue that melon brought up a few days ago. overall i think it's very solid.

i still feel like there's something missing (but it's minor enough that i wouldn't want it to get in the way of an index swap!) i'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who's never seen the everyone site before... would understand what it is, and what i could do there? OH  as i was typing this, "About Everyone's Site" was linked the wiki page, which has been expanded recently! i think that covers everything in a technical sense.

so i think the only thing from this discussion that feels unresolved to me is this:

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.

is there anything that can (or should) be done on the homepage (or the town/forest/desert hub pages) to help everyone figure out where they should put their links?

though maybe i'm overthinking this and we should just wait and see

[Rubbereon]

I just checked the everyone site under the explore button and noticed that Melooon went with my idea and added a navigation bar that links to random pages. I don't know when that got added because I only noticed it today.

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...

Sorry Ribose.

One thing I'll say is that it's done fairly poorly because instead of being like the sidebar and show up everywhere, it's instead a single page with an embedded iframe meaning that it's very easy for it to go away accidentally. Again I only noticed it today because it doesn't show up if I go on recent and click on a page. I also don't understand why there's still the random button on the sidebar because now the everyone index shows a random page too, so it's redundant.

I think the old index should be reintegrated and the navigator footer (or header in that case) should be global to be really effective in my opinion. @Melooon

[Melooon]

One thing I'll say is that it's done fairly poorly

No one is going to want to work with you if you just put people down as an opening line to your suggestions. 

As it stands, I think the system we came up with is fantastic, ribo did a great job building out the other linked utility pages., I'm hugely grateful to Rol for getting the ball rolling and adding so many cool features, and I think its far better than anything I could have done on my own   (it was also really fun to do)

I also don't understand why there's still the random button on the sidebar because now the everyone index shows a random page too, so it's redundant.

This was discussed in chat too (though that ones fair to have missed), its currently there as a place holder until a better option is found. Im thinking something MainStreet related possibly?

You do raise two valid points (although they are drenched in ear wax):

One: what should the general linking policy be for everyone pages, should they be direct links, or index links like: https://everyone.melonland.net/?z=/red I think my suggestion would be to have a script on the recent page that converts them to index links if the person has javascript, so non script visits still work normally. (see next suggestion)

Two: Should the new explore header be integrated in the everyone's render engine, rather than via an iframe page? Putting it in the render engine (we could still keep live edits)  and would mean it would be on every page by default; but that also means you lose the option to have non header pages.

Rols hack of the edit buttons on the index page might actually be the best soloution. My proposal would be to add a "pop into everyone explore mode" button that appears in the vertical button list by default, but gets hidden by rols fancy buttons on the explore view.

[Rubbereon]

No one is going to want to work with you if you just put people down as an opening line to your suggestions. 

As it stands, I think the system we came up with is fantastic, ribo did a great job building out the other linked utility pages., I'm hugely grateful to Rol for getting the ball rolling and adding so many cool features, and I think its far better than anything I could have done on my own   (it was also really fun to do)

I didn't criticize the system, I criticized its implementation, I mean the fact I missed out on it for at least a week says something, but it's good it's being discussed.

Would an explicit "opt-out" somewhere solve this dilemna? "but that also means you lose the option to have non header pages."
It could be done via metatags or with a comment e.g. <!--# exclude navigation --> alternatively since the page uses url parameters https://everyone.melonland.net/?z=/arcade <- the ?z= in particular, that too could be used to hide the navigation, "the Current stop:" would bring the user to https://everyone.melonland.net/arcade?nonav=yes

Currently as it stands people may miss out on the feature completely if they don't specifically click the "Explore" button, like if they type the url for the fun of it (like let's say they try everyone.melonland.net/mario), use the search or click on a link posted to the forum for example they're gonna miss it. This is why I called it a "fairly poor" implementation. i wanna help if I can, but I don't know if this is something only you and rol can change, I am not completely familiar with all the inner workings of the site and usually when it comes to design that affect most of a site (and I do imagine implementing this sitewide counts), it's typically restricted to developers only.