Suggestions for Apolyton's Future

[Nikolai]

In short, now it's messy/cluttered with a lot of dead forums effectively hiding the important stuff. With this suggestion I hope to make the forums more accessible, by reorganizing the main page to be shorter and (hopefully) logical.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

So your main point is to turn a lot of slow folders into subs to make the root directory shorter and sweeter.

I have no strong opinion about that, though I'll note that we're an OCDish community that tends to get upset when the furniture gets moved around much. You may well be right anyway, and you're not the only one to suggest something like this - worth considering, for sure, (provided AC gets moved up with Civ where it belongs).

It would tend to have the advantage of the root looking more active, and those kind of appearances matter to a site looking to build/recruit.

[ColdWizard]

All the sections are collapsible already. I've thought about complaining to Aeson that I can't collapse the CivBE section, but he has enough to do and I don't really go to the main forum page very often. And there's not much to collapse yet.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I wonder if vBulletin will easily make individual folders collapsible?

[notyoueither]

I agree with Lancer that the OT would be a more civil place if we could respond to inane trolling with physical violence.

Can we also have a forum that is a safe place? Like, where we can talk about our feelings... maybe using only "I feel..." statements.

[Aeson]

Can we also have a forum that is a safe place? Like, where we can talk about our feelings... maybe using only "I feel..." statements.

I feel that such a forum would be a pain to moderate*. So no.

Spoiler:

*as in, painful to read

[Aeson]

I'll look into collapsing folders which have only one entry.

In general I want to keep from having too many subforums. This is because subforums are displayed above the threads in the main forum, and so pushes the content down further on the page. I will look into a way to improve this. In general the site has far too much "header/nav" pushing the content down. Generally speaking you have a half second to grab a new visitor's attention when they land from a search engine, and header/nav isn't usually a good way to do so.

[Nikolai]

Then what about consolidating?

Civ1-3 could go together.

Civ4 and Civ5 should be kept separate.

Civ: BE needs its own home of course.

SMAC is old but active, no?

CtP series could go with: Civ general + alternate civs?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I don't keep proper track of the Spanish forum, but I believe that recently AC is the most active on-topic gaming area... Possibly BE, though. There is decidedly non-zero activity in Civilization IV Multiplaying talking about setting up hotseat games, Ronning posts content stuff in Civilization III frequently, and Max_Smirnov posts some excellent fic in CPT1 once or twice a week.

I try to keep all forums marked as read to make spam-spotting easier, so I notice the on-topic posts when they make Bot-slaying tougher by using the forum the way it's supposed to be used.

[Aeson]

I think one of the mistakes Apolyton made was getting rid of old forums. Pages have value in search engines. They don't have to be active to be valuable in that manner, they just have to have good content. Apolyton's best content was around early Civs. Dropping so much of the site structure surrounding those topics was something that likely hurt the site in search engine rankings.

If you look at CivFanatics, they never consolidated anything. They have tons of Civ II and Civ III forums still open.

What I meant by subforums is:

Forum Home
--- Civ V Forum
------ subforum

The subforum will show at the top of Civ V Forum when you click to go to the Civ V subforum. This causes the content of the Civ V subforum to drop down the page that much more. Since we can assume someone going to the Civ V forum wanted to go there, it doesn't make much sense to hide what's there below somewhere they didn't chose to go.

Forum Home
--- Civ V Category
------ Civ V General
------ Civ V Strategy
------ Civ V Multiplayer
------ Civ V Mods

That is ok, none of the "subcategories" to Civ V Category are subforums. But a forum under Civ V General would be a subforum, because Civ V General is itself a forum.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

So making something a sub hurts SEO? Interesting conflict of needs to balance.

[Aeson]

No, not directly. But it can hurt user engagement, which can hurt SEO ... because if someone lands on a page and doesn't see the info they were hoping to see ... the likelihood is they won't even scroll. They're just going to hit the back button. Google watches this. They notice people searching for "X", going to a site, then coming right back and searching for "X" again ... and they start to understand that that site wasn't a very good one for "X". One of many things they watch, but I think it's now one of the most important factors, perhaps the most important one.

So the best practice is to have good content above the fold that engages a visitor right off. It should be applicable to what the user was searching about. Subforums push the content of forum pages down in most themes.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

...But separate listings push CPT, for example, way down below the fold, even though CPT is more active than Civ4 & 5. I know there's far less future in CPT, but still...

[Aeson]

Well the main forum isn't much of a landing page. It's a navigation page. There's nothing to really read there. Google isn't likely to put it in the rankings for anything having to do with CTP since the CTP forums and threads are all much better CTP resources.

So if a visitor searches for something about CTP, lands on the main CTP forum page, and all they see is navigation to submenus, they may not realize that the answer to their question is a thread on that page, it looks like a navigation page rather than a content page. That's putting the visitor in a bad place where they have to take extra action to even get to the content to assess the value of the site, and people aren't often willing to do that for new sites they aren't familiar with.

This and a general lack of suitable content on landing pages, and other navigation problems are a big part of the reason why Apolyton has a bounce rate (% of visitors who view one page or less) that's in the 70s and an average time on site of about 2 minutes. Those help explain why return traffic is very low. Most of it is new players or those who haven't visited for quite a while from search engines. We get about 4k visitors a day, but not many of them really stick around very long. We change the content so that bounce rate and time on site change too, and not only will there be more activity per visit, but visitors are more likely to bookmark or remember the site, and keep coming back.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I do understand where you're coming from - at AC2 you get fake forum money every time you post, and we ain't got enough forum goodies in the shop, so the sticky your thread item is a little popular with the regulars who can afford it - I had to ask one of my guys two weeks ago if I could move his thread to a less-cluttered (and more appropriate, + w/o two subs) forum so I could sticky something more important without having to scroll down to see the topped thread every time.

I spend a lot of time there, so the second spent scrolling each time adds up - and more importantly, I don't want anyone else to have to scroll to see.