Lambda the Ultimate

ok, so that wasn't the most constructive comment i've ever made. can you tell i hate my job and am currently fighting to get some work actually done instead of spending another 6 months messing around with political infighting?

anyway. here's some suggestions:

- move the sidebars off the thread pages so that more of the discussin fits on a screen.

- move the navigation to the header/footer areas for the same reason.

- provide a tree view of posts as a summary above the main text (both collapsed and expanded on one page).

- provide clearer separation between the different sections of the the page. blue links and black text everywhere is cool oldskool for sure, but a good graphics designer does more than just make things pretty.

- another one - perhaps something i've missed - allow the page format to be changed "momentarily" without it changing the defaults. so i have a default view that's threaded expanded, but an easy, non-permanent way of selecting compressed.

- and on the flat view, include links that allow in-thread navigation. so you can both follow the threaded discussion and see the temporal order.

fwiw i find the interface here awful, but every time someone complains there's a chorus of how good drupal is, so i guess i'm just pissing in teh wind here...

My first response to this is that I would really like an answer to the question "awful compared to what?" (Surely not the old Manila blog, for example?) Which sites are models of functionality that you'd like to see here? Note that the "fantasy football" approach of picking and choosing your favorite features from a number of different sites running different systems isn't much use, realistically.

Re your specific suggestions, some of them could be addressed by a theme, and to the extent that it's easy to create such a theme, that's a possibility. However, anything requiring major modifications, such as big enhancements to how thread display works, is unlikely to get done unless someone volunteers to do it. Also, major customizations need to be carried forward to new versions of the software, which creates maintenance issues. It would be best if anything like that were developed as a general Drupal module, to make it more likely to attract outside development assistance.

My general strategy with respect to hosting and administering this site is to use tools that work well, provide most of the needed functionality as standard, and are actively being developed and extended so we can count on having new features available to us in future. Some of those new features are already waiting for us, and we'll see them when we upgrade from Drupal 4.4.1 to 4.6.3. Now that the site is on the new server, I'm going to try to expedite that upgrade, at which point we'll review the outstanding requests and see which ones we can satisfy.

This is a good point. LtU is a community site. For all of us this is a labor of love. We have jobs, studies etc. etc. Anton is doing a great job hosting and administering the site, and he deserves our thanks (especially after yesterday!)

We will, of course, keep an open eye for feature requests that are easy and unproblematic to implement, but it would be great if people with a bit of free time and the appropriate skills volunteer to help. I expect all those who corresponded with me about wikis, will share the effort once we get the LtU-wiki up and running, for example.

Same goes for the content itself. Editors should post more often, and keep the information flowing. LtU is for participants, not viewers (guests are welcome, of course, too).

i know that running a community site is a thankless task and i apologise for criticising without having a solution to offer.

i'm honestly grateful that you run this place, and i should probably have kept quiet. sorry.

No problem, really. I just didn't want to leave those points unanswered.

I definitely don't want to discourage feedback about what people would and wouldn't like to see on the site, but it should just be kept in mind that we're not a venture-funded community-software-building organization. ;)

Your suggestions about the sidebars are worth considering as a theme option at least, and relates to an earlier request for a mobile-friendly theme. Something similar goes for the graphic design aspect: going forward, I'd like to use a more CSS-based design, so even if the basic site look doesn't change much, it would make supporting multiple themes easier, and you could even make the sorts of changes you want using a personal stylesheet.