Main menu discussion

Inspired by the recent bump of a 2018 thread, I decided to bump this one ^___^

On a serious note, I did not think this question warranted an own thread, but it ties up nicely to one of the posts above:

I could not put my finger on what I found suboptimal about the main menu for the longest time, but finally I can.
It is the “flatness” of the list.

Meaning, each entry is presented only by an icon and a title, but it is so terse.

Some of the entries bring you to a playing area. Some of them bring you to the chat. And some of them can even bring you out of the server, to an entire different page, like the Forums.

I remember now as a newcomer to the site I did not know the first thing about any of them, so I would not go near them. I wonder if others feel the same.

Cutting to the chase, would it be possible to have, either:

  • a Wikipedia-style smart tooltip, with a small image and/or description of that section? (reference link)
    Pros: awesomeness
    Cons: a chunky FR

  • even just a humble tooltip with a short explanation (10-20 words) of what the link will do.
    Maybe with a big indicator, like EXTERNAL - if it will open a new window/tab, or something.
    Pros: almost no coding time needed, just the time to decide what to put into the descriptions
    Cons: none

I mean, anything would be better than nothing.

What do y’all think?

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Relevant conversation: Top menu items get cropped on narrower screens · Issue #1374 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub

Summoning @blindgorgon :grinning:

I moved this to a new thread because too much has changed in the last 7 years.

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Very true. Can we just lock all pre-covid threads?

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Technical threads automatically lock after three months’ inactivity.

Why lock non-technical threads?

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I do think some simplification would be good. For a start just ditch the “leaderboards” item. And consolidate all the Go learning resources together (learn to play Go, puzzles, joseki explorer, other go resources, maybe also the “games” item and even demo board and sgf library). And put “about” in docs and faq.
I don’t know about these things but it seems odd to have leaderboards as such a higher priority than settings for example. And on mobile the menu is very long!

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ditch the “leaderboards” item

+1

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And put ladders and tournaments on the play page (where the graph used to be?!)

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We have leaderboards?? Oh. And there are people on there who haven’t played a game in years!

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New to leaderboards? 10 points if you can guess the metric without looking at the documentation :grinning:

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I had already looked, no way I would have guessed that. But what about all the people with zeros?

Is the number based on sitewide tourneys only? Time to petition for some live 13x13 tournaments!

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Many thanks for the link to the GitHub conversation. I hope they take heed of our humble Forum inputs over here, but it’s already great seeing there’s an active discussion ^^’

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I’d say 50-90% of GitHub issues and discussions are spawned here. There is definitely a tight connection.

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I’ve seen quite a few features come to fruition as a result of forum discussion!

Hardest part about UX discussions like this though is that there is often disagreement in the community. Quite a few open UX threads at the moment with hearty discussion haha.

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I don’t think anyone would have a problem with this. Easy to implement, and might open the door to a more sophisticated feature like the Wikimedia tooltip. Do you have an idea on the text for each menu item?

If the content is agreed upon, I’d be happy to do the coding part (although from other posts, sounds like you might know how to do this yourself)

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Hmm… let’s see. Maybe something like this?

Home | See an overview of your active games, tournaments, ladders, and online friends
Play | Challenge other players via automatch or manual selection
Demo Board | Create a Demonstration board
Games | Spectate ongoing games
Leaderboards | Display the Site Wide Tournament Leaderboards
Chat | Chat with other online users
Learn to play Go | Interactive tutorials for the basics of the game
Puzzles | Explore an interactive puzzle collection
Joseki | Start the Joseki (corner-pattern) explorer
SGF Library | Go to your personal SGF database
Tournaments | Explore Open and Active Tournaments
Ladders | Join or View Site Ladders
Groups | Explore groups, thematic channels based on common interests
Forums | EXTERNAL - Connect to the Forums (opens in a new window)
About | About this website
Documentation & FAQ | EXTERNAL - Access the online-go.com wiki
Other Go Resources | Explore a list of resources - books, videos, blogs, ...
Support OGS | Donate to Support OGS and help keep the lights on!
Profile | Go to your Profile page
Settings | Edit your Settings and preferences
Logout | Logs out of your account

However, I typed them all on-the-fly. Any comments or corrections more than welcome!

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Maybe this should be “go to your personal game record database”

This one could be “don’t bother clicking this”

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