At the end of last week and earlier this week I put up a post in regards to some fairly significant changes I wanted to make to the forum, that post has since been moved to the contributor’s section as I find it’s a bit of a loose post with a random thought of what to do included so reading through it consists of remembering what the goal was, why I made the change then why it was reverted and what the supposed benefit was.. all in all, it was not a good read and struggled to put forward what the ultimate goal was.
This post hopefully clears up what the goals are and what changes (I can remember) have been made, in no specific order.
Website topic
Every website has a topic and for a time I was unsure what I wanted to talk about on Joolo, I don’t have many interests: gaming, phones, tech in general, what’s going on with the web and general gossip in and around those areas but it was fairly clear based on the search results that while I did get more read time on my TV shows thoughts and insights into old phones .. gaming was of more interest to the readers and it is something I do nearly nightly so a topic was defined with everything else pushed into “other” as to not remove/alienate them
Categorised tags
When working with a tag-based forum you have a ton of freedom and movement that you can make use of however this also does lean into the world of over-usage, something I was and still am very much aware of.
A category-based forum is perfect for the goals I wanted to achieve however this comes at the cost of posts live where placed - I would physically need to post in more than one location for something that covered multiple topics and I was quite honestly happy with the current forum platform (flarum) so had no desire or want to switch to something else.
A clever developer on the core team of flarum by the name of Alexander Skvortsov had already had a similar thought and put together some code that allowed the best of both worlds - a category layout for a tag-based forum
Post Culling
Some posts, I suspect most of them were my own have been culled, I did try to find a place for them all but some were just nuked.
Tags Arrangement
A ton of tags have been shuffled around, initially, we used a platform -> console setup however this introduced a new problem, lots of topics were tagged as a platform which made little sense so the platforms themselves were elevated and now sit up high and proud
It’s still a bit of messing around and editing things as recently as today I found myself culling the Gaming/Games tag, and promoting the Trailers sub-tag to Gaming/Trailers…It’s not perfect but I’m more than open to feedback on this and how best to organise things let me know in the Support forum
Feedback & Support
A dedicated tag now exists for feedback and support, unlike virtually every tag on this site; anyone can post in this forum without approval. This forum is for support documents, feedback on the site and in general help with the site - platform/game-specific issues should be posted in the platforms of choices tag.
Homepage view
The homepage view had defaulted to the category view and for those that prefer the discussions view or tag view those still exist
Rules Updates
The dread rules have been updated to introduce an option for those with media to be able to share them without fear of being flagged as spammer but also to remind you not to spam.
The rules have been written in such a crap way that I would love someone with a better brain than my own to rewrite them in a more logical and readable way.
That’s all for now
I have been making an effort to every morning get in and post the gaming deals and trailers and as I encounter issues to address them then whisk myself away to the world of work but I do hope to continue to try to keep up with things.
I know deals and trailers are hardly hardcore ground-breaking topics but time is limited when I can I’ll do my best to post some actual content!
Oh and we got a bookmarklet!
Bug Bugs Bugz
So I just did some final checks before posting this article and what would you know, found a bug seems upper tags overwrite lower tags permissions which means all the permissions for everything under Meta were borked so for now those are top level tags as I value the permissions more than a little scrolling.
