Forum Restructuring

[TinCow]

Now, I realize that this does create blatant problems for the plans of "shortening" the entire size of forum and its sections. Personally, I regard that idea (even if I can fully understand the motive for it) as rather dubious and unrealistic as it basically aims to wet-nurse people who are openly too lazy to do some mere scrolling. It also makes the highly questionable assumption that new TW-releases will not ever happen and yet again expand the forum all over again... And in addition to all that, why should other and older games be punished, as to cater people who are so lazy that they can not bother themselves to scroll? Are such people really the future of this site? I seriously doubt that, to be perfectly honest here. I have yet to see anything that would actually support that with some credibility (by all means forward it, if it exists).

The forum length will get ever longer, regardless what you guys do, as another and another TW-game are released eventually. To shorten it, in effect "dumb-it down" with careless cuts in sub-sections will only make various people scream and possibly even make them leave this site. How is that a good thing? All for the sake of wet-nursing people who are too lazy to scroll. It just don't add up... Am I missing something?

- A

You seem to be missing the point of reorganization. The purpose is to make it easier to navigate the site with a streamlined structure, not by hiding anything. You seem to assume that we will be making "careless cuts", and I think that criticism is unjustified. You haven't even seen our proposal yet, so concluding that we will hide important sections is, I think, a bit premature. If anything I expect that it would make some areas more visible, because at the moment many people simply collapse existing categories altogether if they do not regularly read them to reduce scrolling. With the new system, collapsing will hopefully not be needed to keep the forum manageable. Our objective is to keep as much information as possible on the main index, while at the same time reducing the number of clicks and scrolls that people have to engage in to get to the content they want to see. Yes, the forum length will get longer as time goes on, but the scale of that length can make a big difference. The basic forum structural layout has not changed since MTW, when there were only two games to list fora for. Now there are six, and each one takes up, on average, four entire forum lines on the main index. We think it will be possible to shrink those four lines down into a smaller unit while still maintaining the accessibility of the information on the main page. The idea at the moment is to reduce the index space of all TW games except Shogun 2 in this way, with Shogun 2 retaining its current size. Whenever the next game comes out, Shogun 2 will then get the compressed size, while the new game take the top slot with the current full sized selection.

In any case, we will be posting screenshots of the way the final product would look for public feedback before we make any decision to implement it. At the moment we are still discussing the changes ourselves.

Why the removal of that illustration from the Guild skin?

I was doing some work on multiple skins today, and it occurred to me that it was odd that the Org logo was missing on three skins, so I added appropriately colored versions.