People have occasionally suggested giving ifarchive.org a friendlier new-user experience.
Now, the Archive is no longer a primary arrival point for IF newbies. People are much more likely to land at IFDB, IFWiki, or the forum, all of which have excellent “try this first” resources on the front page. However, there’s no reason for the Archive to be bad at this.
We recently added a prominent search bar to the ifarchive.org front page. That’s good for people who arrive with an idea of what they’re looking for. For everybody else, it would be nice to have a small list of “check this out” links.
Suggestions? What files or directories on the Archive are unexpectedly fun to browse?
Ideally, these would be slightly obscure treasures – items that are not prominently featured on other IF sites. We don’t need to point people at the collections of IFComp games, for example.
Glancing at the current IF Archive games directory, it looks like the main categories on that page are organized by playability on different system types (e.g., “Games playable on a BeOS computer”).
As someone not familiar with most of the systems listed, maybe an approachable widget would do something like randomize (or cycle per-day through) a spotlight on each of these systems, with a few sentences to a paragraph explaining what each system is for context. Otherwise, as an oblivious newcomer, I don’t have any intrinsic reason to understand/care about the significance of a “BeOS computer” and the relevance/importance of archiving works related to that. (Not trying to pick on whatever this computer is, that was just an example.)
If you want the IF Archive to serve more of a purpose as a general IF recommendation type website, for me personally I would be more interested in curated collections/lists of archived games/materials based on things like genre, subject matter, theme, setting, or game mechanics. (But IFDB kind of already does this with things like the recommendation lists/polls/tags.)
Yeah either a classic game, or a directory of them (“Did you know we have old Amiga games?”), or a magazine, or any of the little treasures in the Archive.
I’ll happily test if someone wants to provide sandwiches of the day.
agree on keeping the “IF flavor”, as Fos noted, and giving more visibility to oldies, as per Mathbrush, is an excellent idea.
on a “suggestion of day/week”, as suggested by DemonApologist, is obvious that is complementary to Mathbrush’s idea, the curating code can be written for choosing between more or less broad categories (incl. oldies) then choosing the showcased IF/Language/document inside the selected broad category.
I’d definitely like the page to stay relatively simple in content. To be honest IFDB’s front page is rather too cluttered for my tastes. There’s a tendency in newer websites to cram in lots of information. When that can make the pages overwhelming for at least some visitors, new ones especially.
I very much approve of the traditional parser IF themed content at the forefront for now. Though that’s nodding to one form of IF, when we now have different ones too …
The search section text refers to IFDB but doesn’t say what that is. And it’s not referred to as “IFDB” over on the right …
Having submit files above the “what the archive is for” description is rather unintuitive.
Also the reader really shouldn’t have to get to the bottom section to learn what the archive is and what it does.
Basically I suppose for me the page structure should boil down to: what do people new to the IF Archive need to know about it up front, how can they search/use it effectively, what are some of the highlights of the archive (maybe a rolling/changing section), how can people submit their own content to the archive, where can they learn more about IF etc., and who maintains the archive. And keep the user interface as clean as possible, including mobile friendly.
Some sections lurking in there that I particularly like include
/articles/ - lots of old IF gaming history
/infocom/ - ditto for Infocom specifically
/magazines/ - especially SPAG (agree with Mathbrush) and XYZZYnews collections
What I figure is: if you’re looking to upload a file, you don’t need to read the “about” section, because you already know. If you want to read the “about” text, you’re not uploading a file. Those are two nonoverlapping sets of people.
But you are only in the second set once, whereas you might come back to upload files on multiple occasions. :) So the submission link should be first.
Thanks for the suggestions. (Still interested in more if you have 'em!)
The idea of a rotating list would require a bit of implementation work. The front page is currently entirely static, and there’s no facility that updates Archive pages on a regular (running unattended) basis. I could come up with something though.