Forum:New front page!

I dunno if your request for general feedback includes a wikinoob like me, but:

I like the idea of changing the format and/or colors of the front page, even if not the contents of the page, every once in a while... it keeps my eyes from getting bored, and a change of scenery is generally a good thing. There's a lot to be said for knowing where to go to find what we're looking for, though, so maybe not too much shuffling things around; just (for example) a shift of color palette and main artwork once a month.

I'm not a huge fan of slideshows, unless it's easy to pause/stop it. I like taking my time to look, without having to manually click on the thumbnail to get the picture back when it scrolls away. And when I'm done looking at all the pics, the periodic scrolling is distracting while I'm reading the rest of the page, so I usually try to push it off the top of the page. *shrug* Probably just me.

BadCatMan is my hero, with the point about the Shadowdale article. As a noob, this is exactly what I need: one article that shows how to do all the spiffy things that the wiki allows us to do. I would be perfectly content if this article never changed. I mean, if/when you have a bunch of articles that fit this description, cool, change it up whenever... but from where I'm sitting, the value of drawing everyone's attention to a Featured Article is in having that article show off everything the wiki can do/be. Yea, experienced users might ignore that little corner of the page, but there's something for them too...

"Did You Know" factoids are brilliant. Maybe a collection of three little blurbs... doesn't have to be long. Alustriel's real name. The Simbul once hooked up with Lauzoril. Elminster was once a woman. If you can get a random script to do this somehow, then it could be three new facts every day, and there's probably two or three users who would log on every day just to read them... which means additional prompts for them to expand stubs or write new articles/comments or whatever. If they're only cycled once a week or less frequently than that, I think they would start to lose appeal for daily/semidaily users/updaters of the wiki, but maybe that's just my short attention span talking.

I totally agree that the wiki isn't a news channel, but I like the idea of having links to the three most recently published novels, to encourage us to expand the wiki. This would be a neat list to have. I would definitely check it out on a regular basis.

A quote of the day would also be cool, especially if it puts more links on the page.

Other than the factoids and the quote/pic of the day, which are probably too big of a headache if they can't be done by random script, I don't think very much of the front page needs to scroll/change... precisely because this isn't a news channel. General users come here for information, which means the goal to shoot for is to present clear and all-inclusive organization of information... the random blurbs are icing on the cake.

I don't know how scripts work here... but... can my browser execute the script each time I load the front page? As opposed to the site executing the script once per X days/whatever? So that I could just punch F5 and get a new quote and factoid? That would be pretty awesome.

Anyway, cool project, and sorry if this was just an admin discussion. :)Wanderscribe (talk) 07:43, December 18, 2012 (UTC)