Issues I have with the current front page

[quote=Meiyjhe]Greetings ladies and gentlemen, Normally I like that websites change up a bit, but this time I am not as enthousiastic. There are a lot of issues I have with the current front page and here I will discuss what these issues are and why I think this should change. Before I start I want to say that I do not know if the admins are already trying to improve one of the issues that I mention in this post. So here we go. [b]"Only comments"[/b] The new activity feed is black or white. What it shows right now is everything by default, new guides (ALL new guides), videos, new threads, anything at all except blogs (Ill discuss blogs later). For someone like me that isn't interested in seeing Tommy's new guide on sooper op bronze tactics, it is really helpful that there is a button that will remove all those silly guides. However, if you remove those guides out of the activity feed, you remove all the new thread posts, videos and potential good guides as well. Why isn't it possible for me to choose for not seeing Tommy's dumb guides and still see new threads and new actual good guides? In the old activity feed, new threads counted as comments, new guides only came on the front page if having X amount of words and now suddenly it is either show all crap and with a little amount of good stuff or show nothing? Can't I just choose to not see textless guides? [b]Blogs[/b] Blogs are an absolute joke now. They have no visibility whatsoever. They aren't on the front page, not in the activity feed (unlike other crap), not on the front page of your profile page (unless you recode it every time you post a blog), nowhere but under the community tab and then blogs. Guess how many people will take the effort to go those miles? I wouldn't. If someone needed help, if someone has something cool to share, if there is anything at all and they would put it in a blog post, the chances are that no one is going to see it. Blogs already had little attention and now it is like they would be adding just as much to the site as if they would be non-existent. The front page changed about the same time as the news post of [url=http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/forum/news/mobafire-weekly-report-31440]Psiguard's weekly report[/url], right? Look at the difference in views on the [url=http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/blog?feature_level=all]blog page[/url] between before 10 september and after september. Some people I have never heard of before got ~100 views before 10 september on their blogs and after 10 september those same people have like ~20 views. Now you could make the argument that, because these blogs are newer, it is more logical to have less views. Let's look at an example of [url=http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/blog/skilletrock/coolest-emoticons-ever]"Cool emoticons"[/url] by SKILLETROCK released on 28th of August. Right now it has 179 views whereas on [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140831211609/http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/blog]31 August it already had 113 views[/url]. Within 3 days this person got 113 views on his blog, that means that over the last 14 days he got 66. If that blog example isn't enough, go look at other examples, there are plenty of them! The views on the blog when it was new was enormous, whereas after 2 weeks it hasn't even doubled. The viewer increase rate becomes lower by each day. There are some really interesting blogs if you look at the current page that came after 10 september, yet no views at all. [b]Guide publicity[/b] We just talked about the influence of the front page and how it affects publicity of blogs, but it isn't just for blogs, it is also for guides. The guides right now can only be seen in the activity feed (which can be put off by the way) and "popular champion guides". Thats enough right? No. Look at the current popular champion guides. Dear mobafire, I am absolutely fine with it if you want to bring guest authors to mobafire and if you want to give them publicity, but do not give them a special place on the mobafire front page AND let them fill "popular champion guides". This is complete nonsense. What about the new guides made by new mobaferians that actually might be good but dont get attention? Remember when we had a "new" section for guides with at least X amount of words? Yeah, that aint there anymore, now all new guides get the same publicity as a comment. A comment... No wait, comments get a better treatment because comments cannot be put off in the activity feed. Mobafire please, bring the extra tabs back and do not give double publicity to guest authors, please. [b]Q&A[/b] Yes the Q&A. The Q&A used to have a clear overview of 2 recent questions, 2 popular questions of the month or something and a button to go to the full Q&A where all questions and answers are visible. What do we have now? Some dumb arrow pressing system that shows 1 question at the time with a total of 10 questions where some of these questions are severely outdated. As a bonus, there isn't a link to the full Q&A. In order to see whether there is a new question in between, you might have to click 10 times to see if there is something new in between or go to database tab and see the Q&A section just too look whether there is a new question or not. You cannot efficiently help people out if you have to go to a different page for blogs, Q&A's and editor+ threads instead of having them collectively shown on the front page. This is so silly. Then I didn't even really talk about the fact that there is a question about season 3 in there. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that all questions that are older than X shouldnt be in there, there are questions out there that are timeless (mobafire related questions or technical issues). Can't there be just some quality control? Just a mod/admin that checks whether a top rated question is timeless or timebound before putting it on the front page? It isn't that much effort. If I could do it, it would've been finished before I even published this post. [b]Newsfeed[/b] The front page is pretty much only news. Better said, more than half of the front page and for what? There are no blogs anymore next to it, most of the older news posts can be reduced to a spoiler-like post on the frontpage instead and the stuff that is all the way on the bottom will be seen by nobody. It is like the admins do so much their best to reduce the size of everything on the front page while they still make the newsfeed huge. It just seems very illogical to me. Why get out blogs, why make the Q&A compact if size is not an issue? You have so much room on the right of the news, nothing is done with it. Why keep the news as it is if you are not going to do anything with that space? Might as well shrink the newsfeed too. There are seriously too many issues that came with the update of the frontpage, which made it more of a downgrade than a upgrade. The only thing that was a nice thing that was added was the searchbar, but that does not grant enough added value in comparison from the value that was decreased. What do you think? Agree or disagree with any of my statements? Do you use the "only comment" button? Can you think of any solutions? Please post it down below, I am interested in what you have to say. Thank you for reading, Meiyjhe[/quote]

[quote=Janitsu]I agree with the Blogs, Guides and Q&A parts and I think that there should be a filter for the activity log thing to prevent guides called "Lucian the black mofo wifestealer wrecks" with 100 words from getting to the front page[/quote]

[quote=Jack Rubino]i am with the banana.[/quote]

[quote=Vynertje]Idem[/quote]

[quote=jhoijhoi][b]"Only comments"[/b] I don't like this either. I think that new guides being published and appearing on the front page should either be taken out, or only show guides, not builds. [b]Blogs[/b] Blogs should come back. [b]Guide publicity[/b] Mej has a point. C9 are already displayed, their guides don't need double exposure. Write a script to only show guides that aren't C9? I prefer the compact look of the new page, but I think the "New", "Rising", "Scouted" tabs should come back to that portal. Would it be hard to have those tabs attached to that portal? [b]Q&A[/b] Needs quality control. So many new mods and admins, I'm sure they can spend 5 minutes a day each looking at Q&A threads and clicking a tick button next to "feature" (similar to blogs). Hell, turn the responsibility over to vets if you want to give us something to do. [b]Newsfeed[/b] ^^ With you 100%, Mej. I've always said the news section is far too long. And with the removal of all the side bar stuff, it seems even more unnecessarily long.[/quote]

[quote=PsiGuard]Only Comments: The guides-not-builds approach sounds good. I think I remember Mowen/Matt saying we'd get more filters than Comments Only but maybe I'm wrong. I'll bring it up. Blogs: You'll have to provide examples after a short while because newer blogs always generate more interest than dated ones. I could easily argue that new blogs (under the old system) got 100+ views because most of the regulars hadn't seen it yet, then they stopped generating views once they'd been read by most people who bother to look at the blog section. I don't really like where blogs are now, nor where they were before to be honest, but the reason they were removed is because (as Matt said in a post a while back) blogs were one of the least used features of the site and took up a lot of space on the front page. In order to reduce clutter on the front page of the site (#1 complaint about front page), some of the least used features like blog posts and the esports hub were removed. Perhaps there's a less intrusive way to highlight new blogs? Guide publicity: Your point about double publicity makes sense, I'm sure we can get that fixed. As for the extra tabs, I think Matt said he'd consider adding them back in. Hopefully that happens, I liked them too. Their reasoning is that most people just want to find champion guides but I think the extra 2 or 3 tabs aren't too intrusive. Q&A: This is going to be automated (I for one don't plan on manually checking each question before it goes to the front page, not sure if that's what you were suggesting) and there's still a bug with old questions being featured. Thanks for your feedback about the presentation. [quote=jhoijhoi]Q&A Needs quality control. So many new mods and admins, I'm sure they can spend 5 minutes a day each looking at Q&A threads and clicking a tick button next to "feature" (similar to blogs). Hell, turn the responsibility over to vets if you want to give us something to do.[/quote] The vet thing could be possible but we already have an up/down arrow system. I don't really see why it couldn't be properly automated. Newsfeed: The feed is pretty long for sure. I'll bring it up.[/quote]

[quote=Meiyjhe]To add up: It seems if someone answers a question in the QnA and that answer pops up in the activity feed, the link is broken and brings up an error page. EDIT: The answer also mysteriously disappears from the activity feed after a while[/quote]

[quote=PsiGuard]Thanks, reported it.[/quote]