Membership Board Layout?

[Kit the Human 759]

My apologies! I did not mean to slur TNI (as I think it came across?) I was thinking that generally, forums are pretty unfriendly to mobiles. 

 

I don't know enough about your forum software to comment about adding some links to your mobile menu! It is lovely and simple to use though.

 

And yeah, I meant websites more generally, not just RP boards. 

 

Thanks for your response though! It sounds like a habitual thing to me and I'm not inclined to change how I do things based off of habit....Unless it's an overwhelming habit that the community at large shares. Until then, I do me. You do you. And we all respect our differences and support each other in our quirks. 

 

[kjSage 81]

Ooh, where to begin?

 

I love sidebars, especially fixed sidebars with a toggle. I will admit that I can't stand having them on the right side of my screen, though. If they are it's not the end of the world, just having it on the left is so much better on the eyes for me. (And my neck, since my screen is large enough and I lack the peripheral vision so I have to actually turn to see something past a certain point) I'm also very guilty of coding my sites specifically for my own preferences, including color scheme. Been slowly trying to break that habit because as much as I -love- the black/grey/blue combo, it does get old and not everyone else loves it.

 

Fixed userslinks/navigation are also nice to have, means I don't need to scroll back up every time I'm reading a long thread and want to go back to the main forums or whatever else.

 

High contrast between text/background is a definite must for me as well. I also hate all-caps and entirely serif/fancy script type fonts used all over the place. For title bars it's perfectly fine, along with links in a sidebar, but I'd like the rest of the board to be readable and not some tiny 5pt serif font in all caps crammed together in forum posts and board descriptions and general things.

 

I also like grid/side-by-side layouts provided that nothing breaks with a long forum name or longer description.

 

Hovers over important information annoy me, if there's no indication it's a hover, I'm more than likely not going to figure it out on my own for a few minutes. Similarly with font awesome icons, if they aren't made accessible (aria and title, more-so the title attribute though) it makes it harder to navigate and figure out what's what. That said, I'm quickly starting to like font awesome icons, hated them a year ago lol.

 

As far as forum setup goes, 

0. Staff area (only visible to my admin group, and with trash can as a sub forum)  Announcements/important info (though I prefer using webpages for the important things) and OOC things (OOC can be dropped below IC things too, depends on the board and the mood I'm in)

1 Character application/plotting

2. IC stuff, no more than 8 boards per category and no more than 3 subforums per category. If you're going more than 1 layer of subforums, you've gone too far. Preferably no more than 3 categories and one catch-all category that has no more than 4 forums total.

3. Advertising/affiliate stuff, OOC things optionally just above this

 

And speaking of affiliates, keep them off your sidebars/headers. They belong at the very bottom and below everything else. I didn't click your site to have everyone else's buttons shoved in my face. Bonus points if the affiliate table is collapsible, too.