Suggestion Prefix Suggestions

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icuurd12b42

Guest
I been looking at the prefix options under the various forums and it has come to my attention that many forums offer confusing option and in some case option that are not very relevant to common posts.

It looks like a lot of sub forums from the old forum were converted to prefix. which is some case is good while in other case, not very relevant...

Let's take for example the Programming Forum

upload_2016-4-22_22-40-53.pngupload_2016-4-22_22-41-27.png

I'm not saying this is the wrong set of prefixes, yes sometimes your question is Platform specific, but that is pretty rare so that list should be bottommost.

The Support list should be directly related to Studio Programming Concepts
Arrays
Data Structures
GM Physics
Events
Asynchronous Events
and some of what is currently there

The Support list should be before the Platforms list as these question happens more frequently

I would like another Category, General Concepts
Platformer
Top Down
Collision
Multiplayer
Optimisation
AI
and so on

That list should appear first because general programing questions are usually more common.

I'm not going to go through the entire forum and scrutinize everything but I think we should take a good look at the prefix feature so that users coming in can have the means to find at a glance things they want to know about.
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Yep I agree and if everyone wants to join together to hammer out a better list for the Programming forum (and I think the tutorials forum too) then please go ahead. However keep in mind that the whole idea of the prefixes is to keep it GENERAL and then use topic tags to narrow down the field. A user doesn't want to have to scroll through 50+ prefixes to get to the one that applies to them, so ideally it's be no more than 20. I may also remove the platform ones from the programming forum, as I do think you're right and that they will be very under-used as they are irrelevant in 90% of the cases.
 
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2Create

Guest
I'd say that, keeping my knowledge of the respective parts of Game Maker in mind, I might be looking for broad subjects to help people with or to be helped with. These are some of the things that come to mind:

Shaders
Drag & Drop
Data Structures
Multiplayer
File handling
Extensions
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Could we get the SOLVED prefix a different background color (e.g. slightly darker green)? I browsed through Q&A and right now the solved topics don't really stand out enough from the ones with another prefix.
 

Coded Games

Member
Sort of unrelated:

Another suggestion I have is to move the thread filter options from the bottom of the page to the top since tags are the new way of organizing things. I don't know how much freedom the new forum software gives over layout but I think moving that would help a lot in the future when all the threads are full and you have to scroll a mile to get to the options.
 
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icuurd12b42

Guest
Now that there is more traffic since the forum has gone real-world-live, these tags a #$%^ anoying!!!

These are a real distraction from the content. look at this rainbow of distraction!!!

upload_2016-6-21_7-16-48.png

My first issue is these are prefix. ruining my ability to fast flow through the listing. it ruins my concentration

Second issue is they are all different sizes making a mess of the content indentation. having to force my eyes to move left and right when scanning for questions of interest...

Finally, the rainbow.... a mess of different colors, some colors are magnets to my eyes making it extremely difficult to read as my eyes constantly have a fit over what the focus should be on.

Frankly these suck, long story short.
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Okay, so the colours were designed to make it more recognisable what section/subject is being dealt with but I do agree that it is far more of a distraction than a help, and so I'll maybe experiment with making them all grey/scale or at least a uniform colour. I can't do anything about the size of them I don't think, however... BUT I will look at the CSS and see. Note though that we will NOT be removing the prefixes as they are pretty important now that we have fewer subforums... I think that if we can sort out the colour/size issues though they'll be a lot better to use.
 
S

Shadowrend

Guest
Make the tags vertical, instead of the blue dot, or just a single letter? Change the text or background colour depending of the topic (have like 3-4 topics (official, programming, graphics, solved)), etc…
 

RangerX

Member
First thing there's shouldn't be many tags really. It should be for differentiating what was in seperate forums before (mainly).
In programming forum, we only need the platform.

Having stuff like "solved" as tags is also wierd. If we ever search by tags or tags + text down the road, this will not be efficient.
 

woodsmoke

Member
I think the tag(s) should be after the thread title.

Also remove tags free/demo/alpha.. from project threads. Only tag the OS. Too many different tags now.
Actually I liked the OS specific sorting of projects from ye olde forum.
 
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N

NPT

Guest
Now that there is more traffic since the forum has gone real-world-live, these tags a #$%^ anoying!!!
The tags (Prefixes) are #$%^ anoying!!! because the new forums are trying to reduce the number of sub-forums with prefixes.
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I think the prefixes would be less annoying if they took up an uniform amount of horizontal space so that all the actual titles are aligned (or on a new line like @Joshua Allen suggested). Also, would it be possible to make the topic titles' color change from green to whatever the prefix is?
 

BLang

Member
Another idea is to shorten the tags to 3 or 4 letter abbreviations and use a monospaced font to show them.

However, I do like this idea a lot:
Make the tags vertical

Or even just making them use a fixed width. But I think it's more important that the tags be unobtrusive (while still being informative as to what's going on in the topic), so the smaller they are, the better.

EDIT:

Why don't you just put it on the second line?
View attachment 305

It's smaller, out of the way and still visible at a glance.

This too, it looks very clean
 

MrDave

Member
It’s a shame to not have a HTML5 prefix. I was about to post a work in progress and I would have thought users would like to know a game is playable in a browser as it is easily accessible.

Also many bugs only happen in HTML5 so I would have thought there were lots of people with HTML5 specific questions.
 
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icuurd12b42

Guest
Okay, Prefixes are no longer on the left of the topic title and thread view, but instead floated right. There are a couple of minor formatting issues with this which we're looking into solving, but hopefully this will make browsing the forums easier for everyone. :)
Bravo!!! Much Better!
 
G

GVmG

Guest
I'd prefer the previously stated option of having the prefixes under the title like @Joshua Allen showed, because right now on the right they feel too "far".

To be honest I'd actually prefer them on the right (at the end) of the title like this:
 

Roa

Member
Okay, Prefixes are no longer on the left of the topic title and thread view, but instead floated right. There are a couple of minor formatting issues with this which we're looking into solving, but hopefully this will make browsing the forums easier for everyone. :)
That works way better, I was going to make the complaint about the tags pushing the titles at irregular intervals throwing off flow pretty harshly, but people beat me to it. It's substantially more stomach-able now. Thanks.
 
A

Aura

Guest
You should perhaps add a Discussion prefix to the Programming forum; not everything posted there is necessarily a query.

You should remove the platform prefixes as well as they serve no (very very little) purpose in the Programming forum, save them for the Community Tech Support forum. All they're currently doing is diluting the efficiency of the topics filter.

Also, the Solved prefix is still not catchy. Perhaps make it lighter and everything else darker. The best solution, though, would be to use a different colour combination IMO; make it slightly pink-ish.
 

Turgon

Member
Adding this CSS rule looks nice:
Code:
span.prefix {
     min-width: 70px;
}
It makes the tags the same size (unless the text overflows, in which case it is wider).

Screenshot
 
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