litphoria

That page should show the site has distinct signs of life, and where it is to be found.

The site's largely absent of timestamps and signs of activity. Lots of people might overlook chat rooms. Our public roleplays might be one of the first places they look and it's not a good representation of our site's life since so many roleplays are private.

It should emphasize recently active chat rooms as well as the recently active roleplays, and other things that are positive indicators of how the site's being used recently.

I have to agree with Satsuki, I definitely feel the main page needs to be more lively, perhaps a display of (various number) Online, as well as friends online, active chatrooms.

Perhaps the addition of "Recent Ads" may also increase population and overall growth in activity.

I'd love to see something like "X users online on X characters." and "Recent Ads"

Listing who is online isn't needed, but simply having a number is encouraging. It's one of the things I look at when I first join a site, and even if the number's small, I'm more willing to reach out if there is a number.

Also, like Mika said, recent ads would promote people coming to check out more of the ads.

I definitely support adding categories or sections like “Recent Profiles / Characters”, “Recent Roleplays / Stories”, “New Ideas”, “Popular Roleplays” (popular in terms if views). However, I do not support the removal of “Recent interests” and “Recent traits” as, personally, I have an interest in such things, because they can provide me with ideas on enriching my existing characters, and creating new characters altogether.

That's vote.

Ah Imara, my intent was not that they be removed. Only that they be condensed under a single heading. They would all still be easily available, it just might take an added click to see each section individually.

For clarification, of course I'm aware that the removal would only be from the main page, and that's also what I mean; I was voting for keeping those 2 elements for an easy, regular, quick glance.

Yeah, I guess that would be alright; a bit of reorganization wouldn't hurt.

The problem is that the main page is already really long and somewhat cluttered looking. Wrecked has already stated that adding more to the front page (such as recent role plays, etc) would be hard to pull off without cleaning up some of the other clutter first. we do not want a front page that has so much info that it is hard to take everything in. The balance between important information and a daunting page is a hard one to keep.

Yes, true, there is usually a fine line of moderation or a sweet spot. But there's also a “comfort zone” of what we all got used to, and if we don't get ourselves out of it, at least temporarily, sit back, watch reaction after a week or so, see how things feel, we may never realize what good solutions we were missing. Ultimately, rather than going by the subjective judgement of any one decision maker, a few things are better off being the subjective “vote” of the majority. So ideally, the majority of the community votes on what stays and what goes, regardless to quantity. Then it is up to the designers to come up with an organized layout for what the community voted for to stay.

This site works well on the voting system. Even if things get passed through, there is always the option to submit a new feedback with a dissenting view, where users can make their opinions heard and vote with the power of their limited points.

Perhaps based on the feedback you receive on this thread here, you can open a new thread with specific recommendations collected from the responders. Or you can edit this same thread, I’m guessing, with very specific recommendations about what most people seem to want.

I will be doing various iterations of this on the testing server. First, WIP, iteration is on the testing server as we speak. (testing.litphoria.com)

Thank you, Wrecked. This will help a lot in actually visualizing whatever is suggested and seems to be supported.

Comments after having taken a look:
At first glance, it is much cleaner!
That is not precisely what I meant by collapsing the profile options, but it works well.
What defines recently active in each of those sections?

I would personally put the recent feedback in a more prominent spot, simply because part of my ritual for this site is checking up on recent feedback every time I come here. That said, I could see it causing layout issues.
What I might suggest you do, if others could accept this, is combine all of the Rp activity so that the bar across the top would look much more like recently added profile options with ads, roleplays, and chats falling into sections across that bar. Then recent news and recent feedback would remain separate and sandwiched between the two cross bars.

If any suggestion seems promising to you, Wrecked, and it is not too time consuming to visually represent it, perhaps there can be a temporary testing page or two, like testing.litphoria.com/1 and testing.litphoria.com/2

This way people who work visually or find it difficult to imagine descriptions of layout can look at something and readily give feedback.

One suggestion that comes to mind now, by way of visuals, I think that adding a section towards the top of the page, which shows the avatars of some of the recent users or the popular public Roleplays, would create more immediate interest in the minds of lots of new visitors. I know that you may want to keep it simple, clean, and minimalist or slick, and that's good; but hopefully what you want more is for the site to get more popular and attention, and as potentially superficial as it sounds, pretty pictures or images have a huge “attracting” factor. Some may think that that would attract non-quality people and you want quality people, but that's like saying that people who learn visually or via mind-maps, for example, are inferior and non-quality. In conclusion, consider utilizing any images already on the site and showing a few fresh ones on the main page every day; it will boost how attractive the site is.

Per the recent comments in chat there seems to already be an intent to move to the use of avatars, and more accurate time stamps as well.

I agree with Imara; pretty pictures are pretty and might contribute to the front page being prettier for it. There is a bit of a spectacle factor to it but a good one.

The testing front page will show adult rooms and chats even if I haven't passed the age wall — I deleted my agewall cookie to check that. It shouldn't display those.

It also displays sexual profile options even if I haven't passed the age wall, but that's already an existing issue for the home page and for the feedback system, since profile options and feedback don't carry a sexual flag like chats and roleplays do.

• I have plans to add avatars and some more rich display for all of the roleplay displays. I am still debating just how I want this done, given the space constraints. However, it would almost certainly not work well if I split them into 1/3rd or such columns like I did for profile options, since there would not be enough space for pretty pictures.

• I go back and forth on where I want news and feedback. While I want them high up, the site is after all for roleplaying.

• Recently active is just the items with the most recent activity. This means post time for chats and public rps, and it means the online time of the owner for ideas.

Ah I could see the issue of icons in the more horizontal layout, I still feel like having the feedback in a prominent place is somewhat important. I may need to see the visual of the icons before I am able to imagine a fitting layout.

Perhaps a layout of
recent news recent feedback
_________active ads _________
active roleplays active chats
recently added profile options

Iteration two is live on testing server

I like that look a lot! It becomes much longer with the icons, but it looks clean still. The only thing I might suggest. On the ads section maybe use smaller icons, then list up to ten ads instead of five? The large icons just least a lot of empty space where more potential content could be included, in my opinion.

Also, how about adding all or some of the “pretty pictures”, at least the ones that would entice new non-logged-in visitors, to actually sign up, to the very first page before anyone logs in or signs up?

The non-signed-in landing pages just needs another overhaul like this one. I need to have more on it that better represents what you can do on the site, probalby with pictures.

I'm thinking, the benefits on that first page definitely encourage some people to sign up, but (“look at all these people!”) meeting new people would have an even stronger motivational factor for some of the visitors.

With roleplays and ads being put front and center it would be worth thinking about a mechanism to hide some that someone might find distasteful, whether that means not showing roleplays that hit my No interests, or manually being able to hide certain ones. Or something separate from both, like a "don't ever show me roleplays involving this" flag I can place on the interest.