Subforum Description Blurbs

[Lithiel Morn]

Hello! I was thinking about how immediately clear it may or may not be to our members - both new and old - that there are optional subforums. This is something that has been discussed before, but I still see a couple of potential issues cropping up. On the one hand, each membership group's admin is in charge of making it obvious to those in their group that there are hidden/optional subforums and how to join them. On the other hand, I have talked to a considerable amount of people so far who still haven't been aware, or found out "accidentally" through Discord messages or something similar.

I've got a few points I wanted to bring up, and they mostly stem from my own personal experience, so this may not necessarily apply to everyone. Each subsegment of the forums has a little blurb description, like the Introductions has "Are you new to TarValon.Net? Come in and introduce yourself! Be sure to read the stickies at the top for super duper top secret forum info. This forum is visible to visitors." Fair enough - but I've always accidentally glossed over these descriptions because the font is small and it's not immediately obvious.

Regarding the Discussion Halls, it gets a little bit trickier because of how it's set up. As a random example, the Sports & Entertainment says "A forum for entertainment of all kinds, from sports to stage shows to TV to movies to radio and beyond! This forum is open to all members with a forum account." Also fair.
However, the Discussion Halls' blurb, "Here you'll find areas dedicated to all areas of conversation. Jump on in and get to know what our Community is interested in talking about! There are three opt-in only forums called News & Politics and Spirituality & Religion, and Gender Discussion." is only there if you click on the Discussion Halls button first, instead of just automatically defaulting to a specific subsegment you want to go to, like Sports or Education. I personally never click on the Discussion Halls first before deciding where else I want to go, so even I have missed this for ages. Second of all, it doesn't even say how you opt into these forums anymore, and we did actually use to have it before Xenforo 2. It said: "Here you'll find areas dedicated to all areas of conversation. Jump on in and get to know what our Community is interested in talking about! There are two opt-in only forums called News & Politics and Spirituality & Religion. Please click here to opt-in or opt-out via our form."

So I guess my questions are: what can we do to improve this, and how difficult would it be from a technical point of view to make potential changes?
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. ​

 

[Qamra Daielin]

This SHOULD be fixed now for PC users. I was always on my ipad where it showed, I knew the forums on the PC looked different but I could NOT put my finger on why. So thank you!

It still will not show on mobile unless it's clicked on, but it IS mentioned in the FAQ (https://www.tarvalon.net/index.php?threads/all-the-information-faq.49967/) .. so hopefully that will bring a little more visibility to it for mobile users.

 

[Lithiel Morn]

Holy crap, this is absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much, Qamra (and others who may or may not have worked on this)!

 

[Stasia t'Andrei]

I knew the forums on the PC looked different but I could NOT put my finger on why.

Same here.


I noticed the descriptions say who can see the forums (which is an awesome touch, for the record... don't know how long that's been there). A couple of the descriptions aren't consistent in their wording, though. That got me looking at all of them... here were the ones that didn't match in some way for the forums I can see:

• Site Announcements- "This forum is open" instead of "This forum is visible"
• Servant of All- "This forum is visible to all members with a forum account." but I could see it when logged out. So should it say "This forum is visible to visitors."?
• Head Librarian's Desk- "This forum is open" instead of "This forum is visible"
• Spring Fling (NA)- Doesn't have a description at all.
• The Crossroads- Doesn't have an age note.

 

[Lithiel Morn]

On that note, for the Servant of All:

Spoiler

"This forum to share your experiences in being a true Aes Sedai" feels incomplete/wrong.

 

[Erin al'Denael]

Thank you guys for sharing inconsistencies! I'll try and get to fixing them later this week.

 

[Stasia t'Andrei]

Thanks Erin!

 

[Erin al'Denael]

I think I got all suggested changes re: forum descriptions; if I missed anything, let me know.