• Steam recently changed the default privacy settings for all users. This may impact tracking. Ensure your profile has the correct settings by following the guide on our forums.
  • If your profile is showing up as Not Ranked, please review our rules page and follow the appeal process detailed there.

x3sphere, the forums are too messy =(

solarnoise

solarnoise

New Member
Hey x3 (and staff)

I've been a visitor and fan of the site for a pretty long time. I've been coming here to discuss PSP homebrew and things like that for as long as I've had my PSP.

This forum used to so well organized, it was so easy to get right to where you needed and filter through all the threads... I even liked coming to the forum just for the News, rather than look through a huge gaming news site.

But now when I come here it just looks like a jumbled mess... there's all these sub-forums and different categories... what if I just want to see the latest news? Why do I have to guess between Articles, Announcements, Breaking News, etc...?

And trying to find nice, concise info on PS3/PSP homebrew these days is just impossible. You guys used to do an awesome job of setting the record straight with PSP homebrew with your guides and straight forward forum structure.

But now, especially with the PS3 Homebrew scene opening up, the info is garbled and thrown around everywhere.. I hate to say it but exophase doesn't seem any more organized than the dozens of sites showing up on google with the words "Ps3" and "hacks/hackz" in their URL's

Please guys, condense the forum a bit, get rid of unnecessary sub-forums... make this as tight and to-the-point as it used to be. I'd love to be able to just look at ONE forum for the latest news you guys report. And then look at ONE nicely organize psp or ps3 forum where homebrew guides are stickied at the top and everything is easy to find.
 
i'd suggest using top stat's at the bottom of the forum index to stay up to date(if it's disabled check in the quick links list for an enable button), sorts all threads by latest post's, has a column for the latest news stories, and makes it easier to find out what's going on in the forum/latest news

overall, personally i find the current forum design to be easy enough to navigate, but that's just my opinion.
 
The forum structure was something we've been using over at M for Mature before the eXophase merge (prior to the merge the forums were even more of a mess, at least IMO). I agree however that there might need to be some pruning of unnecessary forums, merging of others, and better division of discussions. If you have any potential suggestions as to what to do specifically we'll take it into consideration.
 
Using the Old forum skins helps imo. :p
 
I feel the old forum structure worked well back then as 90% of people came here just for PSP info. Navigating through the PSP stuff was a breeze, yes, but the other sections suffered. The old way of doing things would not be sustainable with the amount of topics we have now, at least IMO. I think right now we've reached a good balance, but it's not perfect. There's room for improvement.

As far as the "news" sections go, I think the distinction between 'eXo Announcements' and 'Articles' is clear. One is for site-related updates, the other for general news (which encompasses everything we post on the main page). The 'Breaking News' section however should probably be renamed to something like 'Submit News'.

I agree the homebrew section could do with less subforums, so we'll have to figure out which sections should be removed/merged there. We also need to figure out a better way of organizing guides. How does adding a filter system sound? By default it'd show ALL guides for a particular section, but you could narrow it down to emulation, theme, CFW, or plugin guides.

Also: in the coming months we plan on switching our forum software to XenForo. I think the clunkiness of vB 4 isn't helping things. XF is leagues ahead usability-wise.
 
I usually browse the forum using the "new posts" link, so no categories apply for me anyways xD

Daily postage traffic is not as high as to make the new-posts search too overcrowded, so it's easy to snag interesting posts - as well as recent news :)
 
Good to hear that there's a move planned to XenForo. After seeing it on a minecraft plugin related website, I thought it looked really nice.
As for the 'mess' of the forums, I do think that there needs to be a concise guide rewritten for most stuff in the forums and have them updated. There's a lot of repeated and redundant stuff mentioned in multiple guides.
Would start on something more but I'm away from home at the moment. Also, I do the same as Hellcat where I pretty much just check out the new posts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top