Question Too many clicks

I'm sorry to have introduced such trauma into your lives by adding a whole click and page load to the effort of accessing the forums.

I put things in the menus to keep them at no more than six items. I took into account that while yes, many people DO land on the site and go directly to the forums, others (MANY others) do not visit the forums at all. Their first and sometimes only action is to pull up the stories list and read the next story. So... ya... if you 'have' to bypass the front page because you can't bear to click on Community before loading the forums... adjust your bookmark.

Hey, that's a great idea.. why didn't I think of that. Oh. right. I probably did and probably found a reason why it cannot be done that way... you know.. like that there are TWO active timelines currently releasing stories and those stories go into different category lists and defaulting to one over the other means at least half the time, you land on the wrong list and have more clicks and page loads as a result.

And hey, let me alleviate your concerns about those page hit trackings, since you're so worried about those. You won't artificially inflate a given story's hit total by clicking on the Stories menu button over and over. You know why? Because its not actually landing on the story's page. It's landing on the "featured stories" page. And I can technically 'feature' any story I want, including fan fic or library stories... or if shit is going down and people need a reminder, I can point it to the site rules.

Many people (out of 419 registered members of the site about 380) don't see more than HALF of the options on the menus. Of the roughly 40 who see more, only 4 can see all of it. 1 of those accounts is the whateleyadmin account that sends out all the site email and two of the other three are mine. So, your concerns are noted. Already considered and long since dismissed, but noted.

Also, next time... don't ignore the snark. The snark is your warning sign that you're approaching pissing me off.

DanZilla wrote: Great work on it by the way... a lot of people don't realize the trade-offs that have to be made in creating a website. Especially when it's based on a platform that you can only change some of.

Ya. Ultimately none of the existing CMS or site platforms is really designed to support the creation and direct online publication of a shared universe fictional storyline and its fan community. It's not like that are millions of people running sites for that. Or thousands.... even hundreds. At some point, to get what we really want out of the site, we'll probably have to create/code our own extensions. That would enable the implementation of code alteration for tailored modules that do what we want instead of using the modules someone else developed that do something similar to what we want but do it in a way that requires some workarounds.

For instance, I have an extension loaded that is a MUCH better content system, especially for integrating embedded media and graphics, but also just for its ability to work with tagging and search utilities, etc. But it doesn't have any neat orderly category type lists, such as the ones in the stories section. So before I can integrate that and greatly expand our ability to create custom fields that will allow sorting by all sorts of factors, I'll have to figure out some way to generate an organized presentation of those things, similar to the existing category lists.

The same sort of thing applies to the menus... because those aren't just links made to look like buttons. Menus are modules and they load other modules in specific locations. Some modules work in some places and not in others. And some things can't be duplicated or called by more than one other module. Sometimes it makes sense... sometimes I just have to experiment until I figure out why a certain set up doesn't work.