User-friendly P&R?

[picklemonkey]

This place has become a monster lately! I'm curious how the rest of you feel about the usability of P&R. Let's assume for a minute that we had an unlimited budget to hire some developers to make this place better :

How would you change P&R to make it more user-friendly or easier to navigate?

[bobjuice]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

Someone said before about the podcast bot flooding the board which i think doesn't help. But K said the podcasts got no attention when in their own section so not sure what the answer is?
Don't the people that sign up for a podcast get them anyway?
If they weren't coming through p & r it'd make a difference but even without them the place is still a monster..

Would a filter be a good idea? So you could filter in or out podcast posts / members mixes / requests etc.

[feather]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

Don't have any issue with the podcast bots, I like having them around actually. I don't necessarily want to subscribe to the podcasts but certain specific ones I would check out based on the DJ.

Not sure what you CAN do to P&R. It's a monster because the number of daily sets have increased but that's a good thing.

If we separated them into sub forums like the Digweed and Sasha forums, it would only thin out P&R.

What's the problem in P&R that needs fixing?

[picklemonkey]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

What's the problem in P&R that needs fixing?

that's what I'm asking

if we're ever going to grow, first we need to know what needs to change! how can it be better? (btw, we don't have an unlimited budget. more like none )

[GarryX]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

Someone said before about the podcast bot flooding the board which i think doesn't help. But K said the podcasts got no attention when in their own section so not sure what the answer is?
Don't the people that sign up for a podcast get them anyway?
If they weren't coming through p & r it'd make a difference but even without them the place is still a monster..

Would a filter be a good idea? So you could filter in or out podcast posts / members mixes / requests etc.

I would agree with this. As much as i think a lot of the Podcasts are really good music,there are just far too many of them at times. Just makes it a bit harder to pick up the good sets other users post up.
Could a sub forum at the top of P & R not be set up for the podcasts?
Other than that MS is great.

[GarryX]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

Just realised there is a Sub Forum for the Podcasts. That would back up this arguement then.

But K said the podcasts got no attention when in their own section .

[poults]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

Yeah to many podcasts threads would be my only gripe but its not really a big issue tbh.

[Huggie Smiles]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

it is a monster thats for sure!

i dont know a good solution - my request would be that the 2nd main page just becomes a massive page of links - so that sets would stay on the front page for longer.

so the first click would take you to the opening page of subforums (slasha, Zigfried, hernan) and the news items;
but then a click would take you to the everything else - so one entire page would be set links - that way there would probably be 20 more lines worth of sets on a page (so there would be no 'headers' from that point on - just all the links.

The only other way i see would be to divide into many multiple subforums for trance, techno, prog, minimal etc etc live vs studio or .....
I would rather keep it the way it is!

[clintlove]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

I think we could use alot more of the sub forums (Hernan, Diggers ect.) There are a tone of sets in here by the same djs and grouping them all together would make it much easier to find stuff by those artists (Fortier, Burridge, Howells ect.) I also think that would let the lesser known djs get more exposure in the general p&r.

[floridaorange]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

The search feature could function much more efficiently.

[picklemonkey]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

I've been toying around with the idea of creating a DJ tagging system for P&R threads so we can tag and search threads, and show smart DJ info in the threads based on the tags. I don't know if I'll ever get there but I agree on better searching/filtering the results.

I'm also looking into adding a sort by creation date column, or changing the P&R forum default search order to creation date. We'd see threads in the order that they were posted, and if we wanted to see replies to the threads we could change the sort order in the headers to latest replies rather than latest submissions. This one will probably come just after we upgrade the forum to version 4

[Huggie Smiles]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

part of the fun of P+R is randomly scrollign and finding things - just searching or just tagging is great is you want to find X that you know exists.

[picklemonkey]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

how sweet would it be if we could have a "hide this artist" button that would prevent a thread from showing up if you know you don't like a specific list of artists.

[feather]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

^Or inversely, each user profile stores a list of DJs we favour, and thread titles or tags matching those DJ names, will be highlighted so we can zone in on them.

Or rather than automatically hide threads based on DJ names, we also give the option of manually hiding threads we've seen (kinda like marking a forum read I suppose).

[picklemonkey]

Re: User-friendly P&R?

yeah. Instead of marking a thread as read, though, I'd like to be able to just sort by thread creation date. same damned thing with less effort on a per thread basis imo