Font Color & Condensing the Forum

Font Color: Quill may recognize this comment, as he's already fixed it in the treasure creation manual. I've also come across it in the Character Creation thread, though, in the starting PWC and racials. HC turns to a dark red font whenever something is to be emphasized. However, with the new background color, this makes the text either impossible to read or a complete literal headache. You may want to consider changing it to a different color.

Condensing the Forum: Something some of us may have noticed looking at the forum index is that we have a LOT of forums and subforums. ...a LOT. This may be intimidating to new members, who may wonder where to begin, which subforums are relevant and which are not, or outright give up before even trying, turning to our simpler competition.

I'd like to suggest merging some of the forums and subforums to make the index a little less confusing and involve a little less scrolling. In order to keep the overview, I would also suggest lessening the number of subforums overall.

For that last part, you could merge the 'completed dungeons' and 'dead dungeons' with the 'completed threads' and 'dead threads' respectively, and put them all into one big archive along with the rejected/retired characters.

Similarly, the Quest Bureau could be made a subforum of Role Play discussion, and Handheld and Console Zelda could become subforums of General Zelda Discussion, which could be renamed to Zelda discussion.

This is all I can think of on the spot, but I'm sure that if we all put our heads together, we can come up with more ways to condense the index and make it overall less daunting and cluttered.

As for the font color, can you take a screenshot and let me see it?

Secondly, for the forums. I'll first address the larger amount of zelda discussion forums that are on the board. I mainly did this so that there is more space taken up on the main page by it. Before, the page was dominated by the Roleplay board and it felt as if we neglected discussion a lot. I wanted to balance them out which is why I added more.

As for the archives, completed threads and whatnot I don't see why these are a problem. They are hidden away and are a great way to organize things. If someone wants to see what a classic dungeon is supposed to look like, they can look at the completed dungeons thread, and they are so out of the way that they don't really cause clutter or confusion at all.

The Quest Bureau is important enough that I don't want to hide it away as a subforum of a forum that has less significance. In theory, Role Play Discussion and the Quest Bureau are similar topics but the Quest Bureau is of a much higher level of function and value to the roleplay itself so making it harder to find is less than ideal.

To be honest, I don't think our forums are daunting or overly large at all. Its very simple, and unless you've been told by a few new people that its overly crowded or whatever else, I don't see why you would see it necessary.

Lastly, I have thought of condensing a few things, but this would be things like deleting the Death Mountain forum, deleting the Role Play information forum once everything is up on the website, and things such as that.

Well, you could at the very least group 'Northern Hyrule,' 'Southern Hyrule,' 'Death Mountain,' and 'Classic Dungeons' under 'In-character Areas' or something... I think that alone would already remove a lot from the front page, as well as making the discussion to roleplaying ratio less obviously tilted in the favor of roleplaying.

On that note, Toko, YOU don't see it as intimidating. You are also not a complete newcomer who might not have any experience with roleplaying whatsoever.

EDIT:

Find me an example of an RP such as this, whom you label our competition, and tell me if ours looks more complicated then their's. Often an RP forum will have subforums for each individual area, such as Kakariko Village, Hyrule Castle Town, Darunia, etc... We have three (aside from CD and BA), which is far less daunting than a site that has twenty or thirty areas. I really just don't see where this is coming from. Is this just a suggestion for the sake of suggestion, or have you been told by someone (singular or plural) that have had issue with it? In that case, it'd hold more weight.

Someone has told me that the index looks cluttered, yes, especially compared to -I apologize- Ylisse. They've counted it- 29 forums and subforums for Hyrule, counting all the archives, against 16 in Ylisse counting all archives. But they feel that bringing it up is relatively pointless, so I volunteered to do it in their stead.

Honestly, I'm not interested in comparing Ylisse and Hyrule, and I will say that Hyrule's Role Play IS more complicated simply because we have things such as Treasures (along with their creation), Quests, and other areas. However, the archives are not intrusive at all. They are a way for the mods to keep organized, and really shouldn't bother anyone. I'm glad that you're philosophy is to look as small and simple as possible, but we differ in opinion here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we can't condense it or that we can't make things appear better because we probably can, however I'm not to keen on just shoving things in to subforums.

I actually think that the forums are rather bloated, and reorganizing some things would be a good idea. Some forums could probably be merged and others, like Role Play Information, which has only seven topics total, could just be sticky posts in all the Hyrule RP forums. As it stands for the Hyrule RP, there are 39 forums, subforums included. I understand that some things are important, but, just looking at it it's...very daunting and intimidating. Of those, 13 are visible from the main forum page. I've shown the forums to a friend of mine who is a huge RPer, and her reaction was that it was too complicated and she'd stick where she is. I'm not trying to downplay the RP section at all either, it's important, but it's so damn intimidating...and I think I can say this as I don't RP here and have felt this way even before the software upgrade. Just my two cents and honest opinion. It just looks messy. Maybe the amount of text in the descriptions makes it seem that way. Or maybe the forum icons on the left side for read/unread are rather large. Not sure. But there are like 29 visible forums, I think, and that's a whole lot, especially since to be honest we're not all that big.

Most people lurk on a forum before they post. Even though forums are more prevalent today than they were, there is still a huge barrier for people to register and post. I do think the clutter is a barrier and I've told some people about the RP here and the general response I get is, "where the **** do I start?" So they don't bother.

Rest assured, I don't like the comparison either. But I remind you that between the classes/level/promoting and the weapon system, as well as our gradings, the workings of the Ylisse RP are not easily explained in one thread either.

At the very least, could you include a function that allows us to 'collapse' certain headers of the board so that I don't get confused by the multitude of headers when I'm looking for the roleplaying information?

I'm going to stop arguing this for reasons of my own, but I hope others have thoughts to post on the matter.

Ok. Well, after thinking about it for a bit, I do agree. There can be some condensing that goes on, and I'll talk with the Moderators about it today.

Edit: For now this thread is closed. I think its safe to say that there will be condensing going on, so there is no need for further reply here.