Well, I don’t think is a good idea having a forum with latest post. When the game comes out, there will be a lot of guild recruitment post, trades, etc. If you want check the latest, you already have a button on forum home page which you can add to bookmarks.
Honestly in the end, categories would be the smarter choice for an international community, because most of the international community is used to traditional forums as opposed to bbs boards in Korea.
However, latest view is very intuitive and something I think the West should adapt to.
Why?
People only view categories when they want to focus in one or two. People who prefer latest view means they want to see everything regardless of category.
It makes sense to have the latter as the preferred option, since people that want to view category will naturally have more clicks to deal with if they want to focus in on one or two categories. They’ll also be clicking the categories button to constantly switch between categories if they plan on viewing multiple categories, or they’ll never leave the one category they put most of their attention to. This is opposed to someone who uses the latest feed and never really has a reason to look at categorical view.
But really, we just need a Discourse plugin to allow users to set their preferred option.
Reading through my entire post also makes me think it’s pretty silly having a serious discussion on which view we should see xD
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Yer, its not really important. They could just put a setting in preferences called. “Set home page” <_>
In regards to some people liking to use the latest page only. I bet that becomes a less attractive option when the forum picks up and you get tons of pages in that view overnight. In a really busy forum, that view will lose tons of recent posts in the massive scroll down XD
I agree that for now “Latest topics” is more interesting, but when the forum has more users “Catergory List” will be better.
At first we got the “Latest” as default and there was some people complaining about it so IMC changed it to “Categories” as default. 
But I guess now most people already miss the “Latest” / Redditsh style. Uhmm, for me I would like to check everything posted/hot topics so… “Latest” it is. 
I’m just gonna put my post here because only less people seemed to be looking at this particular topic:
Or is this really hard to implement atm?
Discourse doesn’t support it naturally.
Admins are the only ones that can setup the default view.
However a plugin may be able to do the job, doesn’t seem like any are available, but maybe someone can look into it.
I doubt that there is actually a plugin out there that is capable on doing a custom feature like this one. I mean, I only knew Disclosure (LOL srsly me? I meant Discourse) from this website. Before, I haven’t got any clue about this forum’s package.
So, if that is the case, then I would choose the category view since latest topics view seemed to be a massive scroll parade and its appearance isn’t something that has a wow factor. The current category view is really great aesthetically and will surely bring more people to come into this forums. Just my two cents though.
I think a category list, where the latest topic within each category would best cater to everyone. It would allow the players to look at the category which they are most interested in and just look at the latest stuff there.
Fact is some categories will be more popular than others. If you prefer the off topic or general discussion pages, then you are in luck, because they will most likely be the most updated sections of the forum. Followed by probably community. However if you just want to look out for guild recruitments, feedback/ideas, updates by the staff and so on. Then the latest updates page will probably have nothing to show for most of the time, and you will just have to filter through the category lists.
I also feel that a latest updates as the main page will make the forum too convoluted and jumbled, it offers less structure and makes it harder to dive through the forum quickly as you need to read the title of each new topic because your not sure if the contents even applies to your interests.
Those are just my thoughts~
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I think we need to seperate our view from being like reddit.
Fact is the game isn’t out yet and there’s alot of speculation on the game. Even I, a person who really doesn’t focus on much of the forum side of games have found myself clicking on almost all the latest topics. However this is not reddit, because eventually we will have a game to deal with.
Once the game is out, I think people will be spending a lot less time reading everything and anything that’s on the forums. Especially where there is no “upvote” system like reddit, and the games player base will spike. I believe a more structured approach would be smarter, not just because internationally we are more used to the system, but also because it just makes more sense. Segment the website into groups, make it the main page for easy access and don’t bombard the players with hundreds of new updates in which they would need to read through each title at-least to understand if it’s even relevant and worth reading.
Offering the choice of both is clearly the best outcome, or offering a latest updates on a “watched category” would also be awesome. However out of one or the other, I’d pick Category, not only for myself, but the community as a whole.
(sorry for double post)
Anything is fine, really. What I really want is every single soul on IMC working on the international beta build.
I can send you guys a notepad file with my feedback if needed so don’t worry about the forums for now.
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(Pst~I assume they have multiple teams, one team might (almost definitely) end up being dedicated to the forums/website management, so changing the forums won’t actually take away any time it’ll take to build the international beta build)
Wrong.
Programmers drink a lot of coffee. Coffee isn’t prepared by magic. Hey you forum manager, have nothing else to do? Go make some coffee. Maybe a little massage on the lead programmer shoulders, maybe you can even grab their kids at school.
Just do that before I go to Korea and start putting staff members in cages T_T
I’m rather lost at this reply xD?
Can I assume your joking without taking offense? Programmers do need that coffee and energy drinks (that’s so true xD). However if they are asking us how the website should look, it means they have the spare man power to focus on the forums without taking away the time from the game. Scripters/webdesigning is a different profession to server and client side computer programming. No one programmer can program in all languages/code. They will have split their staff to cover both sides~
(Btw a strange man who picks up their kids from school sounds like the start of a Taken movie)
I don’t understand the Reddit connection, there’s no upvote system, or a decay over time system.
Literally any post that get’s a reply, edited, or anything goes up on the latest feed.
But as I said, I do agree that categories is the smarter choice. But it doesn’t hurt anyone to have latest feed as the default view, and in the long run is more intuitive for active forum goers. If someone wants to hone in on specific things, they can easily go to categories and have their choice.
Either way, it’s all 2 clicks to anywhere, and you can use a redirect plugin on Chrome/Firefox to simply choose if you want latest/categories regardless of what get’s decided in the end.
They probably meant the way this forum is designed is similar to Reddit, although I’m with you that this forum is nothing like Reddit.
If I were to say, this is like the combination of Reddit and a common forum style that is taken to the next level, aesthetically and functionally.
But can you imagine if this forum gets super active… the amount of updates that will flood the main page if it’s just latest topics that come up…
If a problem occurs, say some people can’t log on. 50 topics which would be in the technical error section would flood the main page about being unable to connect…
It doesn’t make it more intuitive, I’d say it makes it less. It’s intuitive to look in the general discussion section, to find new general discussion topics. It isn’t intuitive to look on the main page which is filled with Community/Feedback/Guild/Guide/Off Topic/Update/International(or other language)/Bosses and so on topics to find out what’s new… because at that point it’s literally anything goes. Honestly, I don’t believe this forum will become THAT community friendly, where everyone is interested in absolutely everything that’s going on.
But we can agree to disagree if you don’t think so.
Edit: A solution, so I’m not just disagreeing with you, is to offer a “favourite section” or “watch” option, so on the latest updates page only topics within certain sections appear.
IDK, but I thought the opposite. When the game is up, I doubt that the forums get to get more active, simply because people will be busy playing the game. Probably some people will create guides and people will lurk the forums, but that’s probably just it.
They have actually implemented the “bookmark” where you can bookmark specific “topics” not category sadly.
EDIT: The bookmark seems to be off for some reason.
EDIT2: You can actually watch the category of your choice. Go to your profile preferences and go to ‘Watched’ in the category section. But IDK where to see the watched category.
thats an awesome pool plugin.
I like latest topics more, as I want to be up to date.
although in the end, when we have much more user there, the categories will be more useful , because you wont be able to read all
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What I mean is right now we are a relatively small community because the game isn’t out. We are the few who actually know of this game and stay up 2 date with its development. I agree people will mostly be playing the game, however once the game is out, that’s when more players actually join the forums. That’s when youtubers start reviewing the game, and friends start telling other friends to play. Right now most of us are Ragnarok fans. Once the game is released, I feel the forum will be more active simply due to the larger player base.
There are even things we can’t do now, which we can once it’s available, like making guides, asking for parties, hints on bosses, selling items. So much of this forum isn’t even in use at the moment.