It’s all about the content. Not only for blogs, but for forums too. I was reading 10 Clean Forum Designs and noticed forum theme designs are becoming more simplified. No more real need to see who’s online or how many users are online at the moment.
This is good because many designers are starting to think and question what information is more relevant to the user. Sure, seeing 1,000 members online as an owner gets you off, but it’s worthless to the active user of the forum.
Even in the Low Yat forums, I have only bothered looking at the who’s online portion once in my entire membership. That was because I was bored even.
So if you’re a community forum owner, you might want to reconsider what information is important to your members – not you. :)
Hey Danny, thanks for your feedback.
It used to be that we showed all the thousands of members that were online (as per the stock forum code), but that has since been cut down to the first 20 when I realized it was doubling the HTML size.
That said, I wouldn’t agree that it’s totally worthless – I recall a number of occassions where the moderators have been contacted for urgent action due to their name appearing in the online list. Other than that, it’s mostly a general curiosity feature that has been in since day 1.
I’ve tried to reduce clutter in the Kopitiam forum once by reducing avatar size, removing signatures, and removing profile info. The result looks like:
Original: http://home.doubleukay.com/lowyat/kopitiam-fullscale.png
Slim: http://home.doubleukay.com/lowyat/kopitiam-slimscale.png
Much easier to glide past the posts. Well, it turns out that the cleaner look was voted out 3 to 1 :) Our forumers are comfortable looking at the clutter.. I guess.
And just to add some variety to the discussion, we can have extremely cluttered designs that are unclean (discuz.net), but also simple designs that are unclean (4chan.org).
You’re a staff or mod I presume? :)
Anyway, not everyone likes change – like the new Facebook. But if it does improve the communal experience, then it’s a good change in my book.
Nonetheless, probably in the future forum information is fully customizable. Things which we want to see and others which we feel we normally overlook.
For the LY forums, it’ll be about studying the general repeat visitor experience and behavior to offer the best experience to them. :)