Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

It works for me.

6 (31.6%)

It does not work for me.

1 (5.3%)

I'd be willing to help test it.

6 (31.6%)

I'm not interested in testing it.

1 (5.3%)

I might be willing to help test it.

5 (26.3%)

Total Members Voted: 14

[dorf]

I've tried it in Chrome and FF and it works as well as before, IIRC.

[Angle]

Excellent, I can see your posts! Mind if I delete them to keep the forum tidy?

Oh, and what do you think? Is there anything in particular you think need to be done next? Maybe auto-sizing posts? Or making it so you can click the blue button and get a pop-up menu of posts, and load them individually?

[crazyabe]

PTW.

[Angle]

PTW.

Did you check out the test site? It's mostly functional, if somewhat obtuse.

[crazyabe]

Sort of, I think you Might want to Include A Bit of Info On what does what, Because It Currently Looks like a Sandbox Toy and I have no Clue How to use it.

[Angle]

Yeah, good idea. I'll have a basic explanation put up on the home page.

[dorf]

Excellent, I can see your posts! Mind if I delete them to keep the forum tidy?

Oh, and what do you think? Is there anything in particular you think need to be done next? Maybe auto-sizing posts? Or making it so you can click the blue button and get a pop-up menu of posts, and load them individually?

Sorry for not elaborating, I thought you just wanted to know whether it works.
Yeah, of course you can delete my ugly posts. I would have done it myself, but I didn't find the button that does that.

I think that at this early phase we can talk more about defects than functionality. If you think UI/UX improvements are not necessary at this phase, I'd suggest implementing more features and fixing bugs.
Personally, I'd like to see a functional prototype.
Currently it's difficult to navigate the posts. The graph is too wobbly. To the point that I couldn't click any buttons because it hasn't stabilized yet. Navigation needs to be really, really smooth before any kind of public release.

The mouse-wheel zoom is a nice feature and helps with readability!
Thread view might be nice. You press the blue button on a post somewhere in the graph and you get the whole conversation in a thread-like interface. That's what I imagined when you mentioned pop-ups anyway. This will get tricky when posts will have multiple parents though. S/he will have to annoyingly select the whole path.

[Angle]

Sorry for not elaborating, I thought you just wanted to know whether it works.
Yeah, of course you can delete my ugly posts. I would have done it myself, but I didn't find the button that does that.

I think that at this early phase we can talk more about defects than functionality. If you think UI/UX improvements are not necessary at this phase, I'd suggest implementing more features and fixing bugs.
Personally, I'd like to see a functional prototype.
Currently it's difficult to navigate the posts. The graph is too wobbly. To the point that I couldn't click any buttons because it hasn't stabilized yet. Navigation needs to be really, really smooth before any kind of public release.

The mouse-wheel zoom is a nice feature and helps with readability!
Thread view might be nice. You press the blue button on a post somewhere in the graph and you get the whole conversation in a thread-like interface. That's what I imagined when you mentioned pop-ups anyway. This will get tricky when posts will have multiple parents though. S/he will have to annoyingly select the whole path.

Ah, good to know! I'll work on getting the graph less wobbly, and start implementing the thing for loading posts individually. I am considering how best to implement a kind of "conversation follower". I think first we'll need to add types to replies, so that your reply can be an attack, or a support, or reference another post, etc, etc, and depending on that we can track the flow of a conversation. Combined up and down voting and SAA, we can track which posts are more or less important, and have the conversation tracking ignore all below a certain threshold. That's a little ways off, though.

[dorf]

Heh, I had a few more ideas I could have mentioned. I had to deliberately stop myself to write them out since, like you've said, some dreamy features are a little ways off

I'd go for no wobbling myself. Make it as static as possible.
I had a student show me his work: some interactive JS graph-like visualization thingy. Whenever I clicked/changed something the whole graph spun off the screen completely and then spun back into view wobbling around until it finally stabilized. I really hated that. I think other users will too.

Once you'll have the reply types figured out the conversation follower feature should fall into place nicely. The "meat" of the conversation will probably have a recognizable pattern (OP post -> attack -> attack -> attack, with various supporting replies mixed in). Such conversations can probably be easily visualized. Or at least easier than graph visualization!

[Angle]

Heh, I had a few more ideas I could have mentioned. I had to deliberately stop myself to write them out since, like you've said, some dreamy features are a little ways off

I'd go for no wobbling myself. Make it as static as possible.
I had a student show me his work: some interactive JS graph-like visualization thingy. Whenever I clicked/changed something the whole graph spun off the screen completely and then spun back into view wobbling around until it finally stabilized. I really hated that. I think other users will too.

Once you'll have the reply types figured out the conversation follower feature should fall into place nicely. The "meat" of the conversation will probably have a recognizable pattern (OP post -> attack -> attack -> attack, with various supporting replies mixed in). Such conversations can probably be easily visualized. Or at least easier than graph visualization!

Well, I managed to cut down on the wobbling significantly, though not completely, and make it so that you can right click on a post to see what all the other posts connected to it but not loaded in the graph are, and click them to load them. I'm also considering a significant number of issues towards a UI rework.

*allowing people to pin posts
*making posts prettier
*Making it so that you can click anywhere on a post to select it.
*Making it so that you can make new links by clicking and dragging.
*making it so that when you want to add a new node to the graph, it just adds a post like when you load an existing one, except that it's text fields are editable. You can then select any number of posts and connections that haven't been added yet, and submit them by clicking the submit button.

After that, we have a couple more functionality oriented changes

*Making more types of connections between attacks, so that you can have attack, supports,
*SAA! Yes, voting and solving for relative value of different posts!

Any idea what all should be prioritized, or anything you'd like to add?

[Angle]

So I'm thinking of launching a Patreon page for Agora? And a proper front page for the test website, too. Anyone have any advice? Oh, and should I register a trademark, or is that unnecessary?

[Angle]

I switched the forum to use a static layout. It should eliminate the problems people have been having clicking on posts and such. What do you think, people? Is it an improvement?

[Eagleon]

I didn't mind the floatiness once the posts froze when you interacted with them, I think this form will break more once you get into lots of cycles with attacks, but that's less important than getting this polished so that we can have fun with it while it's developed It's usable in its current state either way IMO.

More feedback! Sorry that I still can't contribute more time to this, I've got my first real commercial music project going =3 pretty exciting

• Everything should, visually, have its own layer not necessarily using the same cue, just different. Most of this is about that.
• Dragging posts is still awkward because there's no visual cue that a post is being dragged. A small icon is all you'd need if there's no way to get a transparency of the post itself. Also nice would be to draw the connections as you drag them, because where it ends up isn't always too predictable, so you have to search for a second or two after it's dropped.
• The post title should be above or next to the red dot, maybe right-justified into it, or worst-case limited in length. As it is, some of the text is hidden if the title is too long. The dot also doesn't need to be nearly so large if you keep it at the same scale while zooming. Might look a little strange at first, but it'd be worth it for being able to focus on the posts themselves more.
• While zoomed out, we probably don't want to read the post text itself so much as the titles. Scaling them differently might work?
• It should be easier to visually transition from title to post, while still making the title most prominent - maybe a line/divider in bracket shape below the title?
• The background should, IMO, be darker than the posts to make them pop out more, or else the border of the posts should be a bit stronger. If you relied on the border, you could potentially get rid of the right side and make it look like it's being peeled up from the page.
• Having a seperate page for composing a post feels a little jarring. Many times I'll reference what's been written in previous posts in a conventional BBS, and this would make that impossible without opening another window. But maybe a pop-up is what you need, since you still want to be able to move stuff around to read through the network. I dunno.

You're treading new territory for UI design, and I'm not a UI designer by any means, so all of this should be taken with a grain of salt of course. As far as patreon, I have no idea D: I've never run one. Couldn't hurt?

[Angle]

I didn't mind the floatiness once the posts froze when you interacted with them, I think this form will break more once you get into lots of cycles with attacks, but that's less important than getting this polished so that we can have fun with it while it's developed It's usable in its current state either way IMO.

A lot of people were complaining about posts moving, hence the change. It also lets me ditch the obnoxious code for freezing posts.

More feedback! Sorry that I still can't contribute more time to this, I've got my first real commercial music project going =3 pretty exciting

Hey congrats! I'll look it up.

Everything should, visually, have its own layer not necessarily using the same cue, just different. Most of this is about that.

What all do you mean? Links are already displayed behind posts. Do you mean like in terms of contrast and what stands out and draws the eye?

Dragging posts is still awkward because there's no visual cue that a post is being dragged. A small icon is all you'd need if there's no way to get a transparency of the post itself. Also nice would be to draw the connections as you drag them, because where it ends up isn't always too predictable, so you have to search for a second or two after it's dropped.

I actually just fiddled with that. It's still a little finicky, but it's a fair bit better now than it was.

• The post title should be above or next to the red dot, maybe right-justified into it, or worst-case limited in length. As it is, some of the text is hidden if the title is too long. The dot also doesn't need to be nearly so large if you keep it at the same scale while zooming. Might look a little strange at first, but it'd be worth it for being able to focus on the posts themselves more.
• While zoomed out, we probably don't want to read the post text itself so much as the titles. Scaling them differently might work?
• It should be easier to visually transition from title to post, while still making the title most prominent - maybe a line/divider in bracket shape below the title?
• The background should, IMO, be darker than the posts to make them pop out more, or else the border of the posts should be a bit stronger. If you relied on the border, you could potentially get rid of the right side and make it look like it's being peeled up from the page.

Yeah, rearranging the post displays will probably be my next task. I need to do a bunch of cleaning up on them. Give the posts proper windows, make sure nothing overlaps, rework the colors, etc, etc.

Having a seperate page for composing a post feels a little jarring. Many times I'll reference what's been written in previous posts in a conventional BBS, and this would make that impossible without opening another window. But maybe a pop-up is what you need, since you still want to be able to move stuff around to read through the network. I dunno.

I actually already have a plan for that - I'm gonna change the button so it just adds a blacnk post to the graph, and you can click on it and type in it and make links between it and the other nodes, and even add multiple of them and then submit them all at once.

[Eagleon]

All sounds good, and yeah, the visual contrast between elements (title, post, buttons, links, and even background), what their mode of interaction could be, and what information they have at a glance, is what it's missing most right now IMO. It just looks flat :F

The music will be in a CYOA style novel, who knows when the game will be released, I'm just happy I'm starting to get to that point haha. My insane paranoia is that it'll all be "but the music sucks! D+ try again" when it gets to greenlight stage x3 Just have to win a grammy, and then I can stop hating on myself.