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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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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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LUGNET doesn’t equal news/forums. LUGNET has news and forums, and the
homepage should make it very easy for everyone to find the news homepage,
but the main homepage shouldn’t over-emphasize LUGNET News at the expense
of the bigger picture, namely that LUGNET is a network of people.
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Yes, but. We are a network of people, but those people are networked primarily
by the forums. To my usage, LUGNET is made up of three things: --Forums
--Set guide
--CLSotW (currently defunct)
To a lesser extent I would say links page, but links are currently sporadic.
Different themes have current links in their sidebars, but the “Everything LEGO”
links page is sufficiently difficult to use (hard to sort, full of dead
links**). There are also ways to go through member pages and get links, but
these are also quite cumbersome to navigate.*** There are other underused
portions of LUGNET, like the ability to set up your own page. How many people
even reallize this or know how to do so? Perhaps this is an area where we could
really grow LUGNET. Polls are also relatively underutilized and could be made
more transparent to the newer posters. Are there other features I’m missing? If
so, they’re sufficiently in the shadows that a regular poster like me doesn’t
recall them off-hand.
- Is there a link anywere to www.lugnet.com/clsotw? I know that there hasn’t been a new selection in months, but this doesn’t mean that the archive isn’t still the best listing of LEGO fan sites on the web, but only for those of us who already know the url. Often when I’m looking for a cool site I remember I’ll skim through the archives to find the proper address. We should include a button somewhere on the front page that links to the archives, even if it is a while before new site selection is revived.
** 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.
*** One programing suggestion. Currently if you go to members and list by name,
it comes up with a page that lists the alphabet at the top, but also loads
in the total list. This takes forever, and I’ve got a fast connection. If
someone is on dialup this member list is pretty much useless for anyone
below the A’s in the alphabet. It would speed things up considerably if
that first page just had the alphabet, and then when you clicked on a letter
you would link to a page with only those names starting with that letter (or
do A-C, D-F, etc). There could also be a “view all” option for those who
didn’t really want to see Kevin Zwicker anyway. (Just kidding, Kevin,
you’re just last on the list alphabetically, except for the O with the
umalot(sp?).)
Bruce
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