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In lugnet.admin.general, Bruce Hietbrink wrote:
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In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman wrote:
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Well, LUGNET was created to unite the LEGO community online, not to segment
it. The current homepage feels rather isolationist.
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Agreed. In the legofan.net thread there were several posts that sounded
offended that anyone would consider another location (posts positing LUGnet
as “THE” home for on-line LEGOdom, which ignored other huge sites, or people
arguing that other message boards were somehow illegitimate). I think it’s
healthy to promote that we are a portion of a network of AFOLs and
KFOLs--perhaps we are the largest portion of the English-speaking
general-theme adult fans, but that doesn’t mean we should isolate from other
groups that have higher kid populations, primary languages other than
English, or are very theme-specific.
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Exactly.
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I actually think that the Top Stories box should be removed from the
main LUGNET homepage. It’s redundant with the News homepage.
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I would disagree. Unless there is some serious, oft-updated content added to
the front page (e.g. admin-blog or rotating images), the Top Stories box is
the only reason I keep coming back to www.lugnet.com, rather than making
news.lugnet.com my preferred bookmark. If the front page becomes static, who
aside from brand new viewers cares what it looks like, because experience
members will go directly to their respective corners of LUGNET.
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I’m up in the air about keeping ‘Top Stories’ on the main page of LUGNET.
Perhaps it should stay, and have a bit less prominent position.
What I’d *really* like to see is a magazine-style news posting system where
articles (not posts) are written for the LUGNET main page. Take a look at
BZPower, BrickFilms, or
FBTB among other sites to see what I’m talking about. This
feature wouldn’t take up the whole main page, but could have a significant part
of the middle devoted to it.
If written the right way, it could tie in news from across the community and not
just LUGNET. LUGNET could have an editorial staff that publishes a small handful
of articles each week, to keep the content on the main page fresh.
Also, others could get together to create a “New to the hobby?” guide for
newbies. That could provide some copy orienting them to the various sites and
services in the community, and point them in the right direction.
Now below is a novel idea, so please don’t jump on me for it - just
brainstorming here:
I wonder if “Newsgroups” should be renamed to “Discussion Groups.” I don’t know
how the LUGNET population breaks down, but on the internet today far more people
use online discussion groups than use NNTP news. New users will likely identify
with the word “Discussion Groups” or “Forums” much quicker than they would
“Newsgroups.” Note: I am not suggesting eliminating NNTP news, I realize
that’s important to a lot of LUGNET readers. Perhaps though, the
http://news.lugnet.com could redirect to something else? Could it be written in
a way that it doesn’t break existing links?
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** Perhaps the links page could be totally revamped if we asked theme
moderators to submit their lists and someone could compile a master list
of links. We could also put a big announcement on the front page asking
people to submit their own, living links. Otherwise, someone would have
to take the current list and try every site to see what is alive and what
is dead--a tedious job when there are over 300 sites listed under
“miscellaneous”. Also, when was that page created anyway? I know my site
isn’t on it, nor is the Brick Testament (we went up about the same time 3
or so years ago). There has to be a ton of great sites that are not
included.
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When I was brainstorming the WorldLUG project with Paul Hartzog, one of our key
ideas was a central links database - like an open directory project. Allow
LUGNET members to update their own URLs that are listed in the links database,
and set up a few admins to manage links to non-LUGNET-member sites.
There could even be a redirect URL which would always point to the current
location of a site, by way of the central link database. For example, if I own
www.foo.com, and I want to link to www.geocities.com/~bar/glort.html, but I know
that page will probably change in the future, I can link to
www.lugnet.com/link.cgi?id=x (where x is the link ID of the page I’m linking
to). The LUGNET server would then redirect me to
www.geocities.com/~bar/glort.html - and if that ever changed the link would
point me in the right direction once the link database was updated.
That way, I wouldn’t have to manually change my links to another community site.
-Tim
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