Organizing & Creating Content

I'm not understanding the "published on the site" thing. If it's a forum post, why repeat it on the main page? The content is all there, you added some pictures too, which OP can do as well. It seems there's duplication going on. There are two comment threads for each one as well, which is confusing.

Dunno, seems to me that reviews should stay in the forum under "Reviews" OR scrap the "Reviews" section of the forum and only post Reviews as published articles. I'm not sure why there's two versions of the same content on the site.

Ok so it's on the main page, but in a few days/weeks, it will be pushed down and gone? How would one find the article then?

BTW nice review, don't want to take away from that, just navigation questions.

Love,
rplass

The way I understand it, published reviews get added to the main site in a sort of database that you can go through by category and tags and whatnot. More organized than a forum or straight-up blog setup.

Yes, Like MIstressMerr said. It's there in a more public area, for the world to see. Not everyone who is into AF is part of the forum, or into the forum. It starts out on the main page, but when it slides off the front page, it's still part of the site proper in the reviews category. By writing it here, one of the admins has a button that says "Promote to Article" we then have an interface to turn it into an article, categorize it ect.

Maybe what we should do as admins is once a thread has been published is to lock it with a link to the actual article, thereby having all comments on the article proper. Thoughts?

Locking the forum thread to new comments would help but my point is that there's duplication. Just get rid of the Reviews forum. Members who wish to submit a review can just email them to Ben or another moderator for promotion. All other smaller comments about an issue can go under "Alpha News" like we've always done.

Also, once the article is promoted to the main page, how would a user find it? Say it's from 8 months ago and way off the main page. What series of clicks would a reasonable person have to click to get to the desired review, assuming he or she knew the review existed in the first place?

@MistressMerr, the part of the site that's suppose to organize the posts isn't working exactly right. The tags and categories which are supposed to organize the reviews aren't organizing them... yet!

Even when the categories and tags are working, it still doesn't make sense to have the content duplicated. I've never seen a website organized like this.

EDIT: maybe we should move this thread from post #3 on over to the "Forum/Website Discussion" section so it doesn't take away from KM's review.

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Originally Posted by rplass

Locking the forum thread to new comments would help but my point is that there's duplication. Just get rid of the Reviews forum. Members who wish to submit a review can just email them to Ben or another moderator for promotion. All other smaller comments about an issue can go under "Alpha News" like we've always done.

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Yes, but the idea is to make the site more of an interactive experience for all users. I'm trying to get away from people having to send stuff in like that. So I've given it some thought, and you bring up great points. I've changed things so that all users can now click on a "create new article" button on the home page. This will allow anyone who is a member of the site to create be it a review, a news item, article of interest, anything for the site proper. It will be queued until an admin publishes it. That is a little more direct eh?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rplass

Also, once the article is promoted to the main page, how would a user find it? Say it's from 8 months ago and way off the main page. What series of clicks would a reasonable person have to click to get to the desired review, assuming he or she knew the review existed in the first place?

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That's what the Section are for. Once an article is published, it gets placed in a section, or in the case of reviews in a sub-section. When you expand the reviews section, you will see Guest Appearances, that's where the new ones have gone. The front page just shows the most recently published items, but the actually live in the sections they've been placed in.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rplass

@MistressMerr, the part of the site that's suppose to organize the posts isn't working exactly right. The tags and categories which are supposed to organize the reviews aren't organizing them... yet!

Even when the categories and tags are working, it still doesn't make sense to have the content duplicated. I've never seen a website organized like this.

EDIT: maybe we should move this thread from post #3 on over to the "Forum/Website Discussion" section so it doesn't take away from KM's review.

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The Catagories need work for sure. The idea behind them is to have an alternative organization from the Sections. I've been pondering what to do about the Catagories, and may just do away with that.

Thread split as requested.