Forum layout

Eldeban

New member
Hi everybody,

I'm new, but I've been to dozens of forums before. Allow me to critizice the layout of this forum. There is just too much irrelevant stuff on each page, which makes it very confusing to use. This includes:

- Icon row "Gear, News, Videos... Forums". The first time I looked at them, I thought "ok these are quick links to sections of the forum. After I tried out every single one of them, I can now conclude that they all link to a different website, "audiofanzine.com", so I consider them not relevant / "stuff to look over when I use the website"

- Box "Music Gear & Audio Pro news", "Music Gear & Audio Pro reviews" etc.: When I looked at this row, I thought "ok these are featured posts that might have some relevancy". But then I clicked on several of them, and they too link to "audiofanzine.com", so I have to not look at them in the future too.

- no distinction between content and ads on the right: Why don't you add a grey box around the ads? Currently, some ads have themselves a black background and several things on it, which makes it look like several items, not necessarily ads, so I have to look at them and find out laborously if they apply to me or not.

I suggest you rethink your layout, because it is very very confusing to first timers. And I'm pretty sure regular users just look over all the audiofanzine elements automatically, so why are they here in the first place?

Just my 2 cents, keep on rockin'!
Eldeban
 
Shhhh, the icon row is a disguised advertisement.

He needs ads, because he doesn't want to pay for the site out his own pocket like he did in the early days. I don't blame him.
 
Ads pay the bills so you just have to deal with them. I don't really even notice ads on websites anymore. Most are all at the top of the page or either side on every website, it's just normal to me. The one I hate are the popup ones that you have to hit close on. As long as they don't start showing up I'm cool.
 
Eldeban said:
Just my 2 cents,

If you give your two cents to mano, and you can convince every other member to do the same on a monthly basis, maybe he'll get rid of the ads.

As for the layout, it works fine for me.
 
i'm also really annoyed. come on, hosting a site like FP isn't such an expense. a powerful server with unlimited traffic and 1000GB of disk-space costs 100$ per month - and that's really enough for a site like FP.

FP has many unique visitors creating a huge amount of impressions. there's absolutely no problem to find an audio software/hardware company willing to pay these expenses for exclusive advertising rights on FP (i mean no ads from other companies will be placed).

ask steinberg, apple, NI, propellerheads, digidesign, roland, akai, etc.


i mean, placing ads is not a problem at all. but seriously, how can you put ads of a competitor on your site?! not enough, you even fake a main navigation bar with their ads (which is NOT automated double click stuff, this was filled in manually).

i want to be honest, this is by far the most stupid idea you (mano?) had. DO YOU WANT TO KILL THIS SITE?!?

and i highly recommend you to ask a talented designer to edit the forum layout and design. or just go to smashingmagazine.com and read some articles about modern web-design. really, FP looks like a site from 97. this site could be soooooo much more without much effort.. ..just editing a dozen graphics and a css file.

start extending all that personal profile stuff (studio pics, audio player, personal blog), give the "buddy" function more weight, radically change the forum categories and add a wiki. an average developer can do this in 1-2 weeks, without needing changes in the infrastructure.

a better design and social functionality means more money from potential sponsors.

just ask me if you need any help with that stuff, but please do something.
 
guys guys please be PATIENT :)
site will improve

thanks for the input.
enjoy FP - we've been online for almost 9 years, and going strong

BTW this is a DEDICATED, top of the line server, (directly) plugged to a crazy fast OC pipe, and a gigantic amount of bandwidth consumed each month. This is no $10 "shared" solution. There is a separate server for backups, log files so large Linux can't handle them (for 1 day!) ... FP would kill any $10 solution in 30 seconds :)


Anyway... again THANKS FOR BEING PATIENT about the stuff you all mentioned

those who've been here for years trust me and know about countless thousands of people who learned so much here and are grateful for it.
 
Hi everybody!

Thank you for your feedback.

You are right about the fact that we should differentiate the Audiofanzine icons with FutureProducers by adding "audiofanzine links" somewhere, I will do it next week.

Moses > I perfectly understand that you were surprised (in a bad way) if you thought the icons were advertisement, but it is not : as Mano just announced in this sticky thread, we are going to be working on FutureProducers, so consider both FutureProducers and Audiofanzine partners. The sites are not competitors, except maybe the forums, but the forums are definitly more visited on FutureProducers :-) In the other hand, Audiofanzine provides other kind of contents and services (like news, editorial tests, videos, etc...), and Mano told me that it was something of your were asking in the past.

The second thing is that in addition to the cool actual FP moderators, some Audiofanzine moderators will be here as well to help in a short future!

Anyway, we are open to any kind of remarks and hope you will like the future improvments. So don't hesitate to tell us what you think.

Take care,
Philippe (Psycom)
 
Psycom said:
Hi everybody!

Thank you for your feedback.

You are right about the fact that we should differentiate the Audiofanzine icons with FutureProducers by adding "audiofanzine links" somewhere, I will do it next week.

Moses > I perfectly understand that you were surprised (in a bad way) if you thought the icons were advertisement, but it is not : as Mano just announced in this sticky thread, we are going to be working on FutureProducers, so consider both FutureProducers and Audiofanzine partners. The sites are not competitors, except maybe the forums, but the forums are definitly more visited on FutureProducers :-) In the other hand, Audiofanzine provides other kind of contents and services (like news, editorial tests, videos, etc...), and Mano told me that it was something of your were asking in the past.

The second thing is that in addition to the cool actual FP moderators, some Audiofanzine moderators will be here as well to help in a short future!

Anyway, we are open to any kind of remarks and hope you will like the future improvments. So don't hesitate to tell us what you think.

Take care,
Philippe (Psycom)

can't wait to see what happens!!
 
mano 1 said:
guys guys please be PATIENT :)
site will improve

thanks for the input.
enjoy FP - we've been online for almost 9 years, and going strong

BTW this is a DEDICATED, top of the line server, (directly) plugged to a crazy fast OC pipe, and a gigantic amount of bandwidth consumed each month. This is no $10 "shared" solution. There is a separate server for backups, log files so large Linux can't handle them (for 1 day!) ... FP would kill any $10 solution in 30 seconds :)


Anyway... again THANKS FOR BEING PATIENT about the stuff you all mentioned

those who've been here for years trust me and know about countless thousands of people who learned so much here and are grateful for it.

For such a dedicated and top of the line server there are an awful lot of "server busy" and database errors.
 
Can you tell us if there is a particular time the server is down (you are in London, right) ?

I've seen that at 11:00 AM Paris time (10:00 AM your time) the server is busy for about 30 seconds, because there is a backup of the whole database made. Is there other particular times you have the same problem ?

thanks

By the way I think Mano did not see this problem (during the backup) because he lives in the west coast of US, so this is during the night in this area.
 
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I was kinda hoping that the Ad was part of this site, i was thinking that wow - nice icons - i could write few tutorials, articles, software/hardware reviews myself but it took me to other site that i didn't like at all, i didn't find any decent reviews either.
 
It is. Read all the posts made by Psycom to understand.
Some things take time.

thanks for your patience!

PS: you can ALREADY post this kind of content on FP... see the "YOUR VIDEOS" section? that's one place.. etc.
 
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