Doesn’t separating reviews out like this miss out that you can’t browse reviews in the same way you can browse games, polls, and so on? That, and didn’t the united feed display more than 50 reviews?
That page is still available:
Whoops. I somehow managed to miss that.
I started trying to add a ‘reviews’ search page similar to the tags and polls search pages a while back. It seemed like a tedious process, so I stopped, but it doesn’t look like it would be impossible; you just have to find all the places that, for instance, tag searches come up and copy it and change it to review searches.
I think this project would take too much of Dan’s time for the effect it would have, but if anyone wants to mess around with it on their own and submit a pull request, that would be cool!
I admit this is the only change I was personally stimulated about in all this (having split the game and review feeds out, now I could page through all new reviews in reverse chrono order) and unfortunately it’s the only one that hasn’t come about.
I understand @mathbrush 's comment along the lines of ‘Dan’s done a lot, it looks a bit tedious, and someone would have to do it’, but I’m not one with the ability.
-Wade
Two additional comments after using the new site today:
- I liked opening the home page and immediately seeing if there were new game listings or new reviews. Could the items in the “New on IFDB” section be shortened so that it doesn’t take up the whole screen when you open the page? Removing the list and competition descriptions would help condense it.
2. Could this column be widened to take up the whole width of the page?
It did come about!
You can still go to https://ifdb.org/allnew (the “All Updates” link on the home page), but furthermore, there’s a “See the full list…” link at the bottom of the “Reviews” section, linking to https://ifdb.org/allnew?reviews which shows only reviews.
(What didn’t come about is a search engine for reviews. Maybe some day, but I wasn’t let that get in the way of redesigning the home page.)
As for other feedback, I’m working on stuff.
- Streamline "New on IFDB" by dfabulich · Pull Request #977 · iftechfoundation/ifdb · GitHub
- Streamline welcome message by dfabulich · Pull Request #979 · iftechfoundation/ifdb · GitHub
- Home: Make scroll links stick to the top of the page by dfabulich · Pull Request #982 · iftechfoundation/ifdb · GitHub
I’m also trying to turn feedback into filed bugs:
Nobody creates competition news. To create competition news, you have to navigate to a competition, scroll to the bottom, and click “Add a News Item.” Then, you can post news with a headline and a body.
But what I just told you is known to very, very few people. No one has posted competition news all year.
IFDB doesn’t even know in any structured way when judging starts or ends, so we have no way to highlight ongoing competitions on the home page.
The whole point of these sections is that they do both things, and that’s what’s so great about them.
The only other way is to have the sections be “here’s the latest listings of this thing” and then have a separate place for “here’s how to view this thing generally.” That is what the sidebar was doing, but that sidebar sucked.
Those links are my favorite part of the “Games” section; I think that putting them at the bottom of the section will make them harder to find/notice/use.
(Imagine if Reddit put the “New” “Hot” “Top” links at the bottom of the page…?)
The “New” and “Top” links are both browse links.
Generally speaking, “Browse” pages are search pages with an empty search and a default sort order. But games are so important, I think we want to make it super clear how to browse both by date and by highest rated.
I could have spelled it out “Browse Games (sort by new)” “Browse Games (sort by highest rated)” but that would use a lot of space; I don’t think those all those words are helpful.
I’d accept a PR to normalize this, but I don’t think I’m going to work on it, partly because site news is pretty rare, and partly because the whole point of the section is to juxtapose different kinds of things, and making everything “match up” requires matching up the look of all of the things that could possibly appear on https://ifdb.org/allnew.
It’s non-trivial to get all of these to “match up.”
- Games (with and without cover art)
- Game news (“Add a news item” on a game listing)
- Competitions (which never have cover art)
- Competition news
- Site news (which never has cover art)
- Lists (showing the user’s profile pic, but some people don’t have one)
- Polls (showing the user’s profile pic, but some people don’t have one)
- Reviews
So, uh, I’m probably not gonna!
Sorry, I don’t follow – or perhaps the differences are that
- you are thinking of ‘all new reviews’ as that page of 50 with no option to see more. And
- that what you’re describing as ‘a search page for reviews’ is a more advanced version of what I already hoped to see – a page of reviews in reverse chrono order that would keep going if I clicked more or something, instead of stopping at 50.
If I click All Updates (which took me a while to spot) I get the old style list of all new things, with all content types mixed.
If I click Reviews, the page scrolls down to the reviews mini-section. If I then click ‘see the full list’ there, I get a list of 50 without a way to see back further.
-Wade
The missing “Next” button on https://ifdb.org/allnew?reviews was a bug; it’s fixed now.
Wonderful! Good work and thanks.
-Wade