Creating a useful landing page for the forum

When you want to join the Arduino forum's community you go to arduino's web site and in the community section you select forum

EDIT:
This takes you straight into a complex page with clickable areas doing various things which most people will get confused about and a non obvious one to select would be to click on "Categories"

Indeed although next to it you see "all categories", reality is that the page you are looking at is composed with the latests posts from all categories

clicking on Categories will actually take you to a better place where you can see all categories

EDIT: if you have never visited nor configured your account, you actually arrive here

but reality is half of the real estate is not dedicated to seeing all categories but are the latests posts again and I have to scroll to see the categories (and see very large icons that do not convey really information but use up lots of real estate)

and I still have no guidance on where to post, what is really a category or subcategory, what are the rules and best practices etc...

long story short I feel we need a better landing page accessible from the main site with information about the forum, the dos and don'ts etc and deep linking to the common entry points for new users like where to ask a general question, how to discuss in a non English language etc

What that page looks like and the key information it conveys would need to be discussed. If that idea raises interest then that thread could be where this is being discussed

The benefits would be

  • clearer guidelines and onboarding path
  • ensure new comers read the basic rules and best practices and understand their way around
  • expose non English speaking sub-forums more prominently

➜ overall the hope would be to minimise the chances of a new comer to post in the wrong place and in the wrong way β€” which triggers the usual "use code tags" or "read the rules" or "I moved your post" type of answers (sometimes by more than one frequent poster) which are not so welcoming for your first interaction with the forum.

Any interest ?

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side note : I would not recommend to use flags for the so called intentional category as languages and countries are two different things

see this discussion on the topic

The forum home page is configurable in your user account preferences:

https://forum.arduino.cc/my/preferences/interface

The default setting of the "Default Home Page" preference is "Categories". This means that the home page for new users is this page:

https://forum.arduino.cc/categories

The screenshot you shared would only be the home page for a user who had changed their account preferences to set the "Default Home Page" preference to "Latest".

ah good to know. I forgot I did that.

the rest of my message still applies as this landing page is cluttered anyway

Absolutely! I think it is a very important subject.

There is a desktop category page style forum setting that can be changed to remove the latest topics list from the "Categories" page (which is also the default home page as previously discussed). Here is a preview of how the page layout would look if that setting was changed to "Categories Only":

image

It should be simple to replace the existing images with scaled down versions.

Something to note is that the forum does have some onboarding mechanisms that are not visible to those who joined the forum before the migration to the Discourse forum framework.

I made some attempt to describe these mechanisms here:

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I guess my point is to suggest to think out of the box and not rely on the forum framework as an entry point (because it's more targeted at a social network type of engagement) and create a dedicated hand crafted page that would give us more control of the onboarding process.

I don't know what it looks like, but for example if you speak only German and want to participate in the German speaking forum, English pages and explanation in English won't cut it.

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Using and android phone and chrome, I see the below for the first main category (Using Arduino)

No topics column at the right hand side, three latest topics under the main category). This can also work for the desktop side.

Not having the topics column will allow more horizontal space for the sub categories reducing the vertical requirements.

using an iPhone and Chrome (which I never used to log in so default preferences, no cookies) I see this

not so much useful content... But we already discussed the choice that was made to not take into account the poor use of the page's real estate

I configure my launch icon to the URL (with arguments) I wish to land.

yeah, I've a shortcut as well in my browser for the sections I access more frequently

the point is not about power users, we kinda know what we are doing and how to navigate through categories etc. The point is more about new comers and how to fast track them into becoming power users by avoiding common pitfalls

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And, just maybe, reduce the noise-to-signal ratio here on the forum, to the benefit of all.

I am This profile is relatively new to the forum, and I was walked through How-To pages for a few the first few sessions. I thought it was good (enough) to show me where to post, what to post, how to post, but was easily click'd-through.

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There is localization of some of the onboarding mechanisms:

image

The exception is the "Unformatted code detector" dialog and the "community guidelines" page. It seems there is no internationalization framework for those assets.

yeah here and there you can find helpers

creating an account seems to be in English

so I guess some English is required to participate anyway (and browser can translate too nowadays)

There is a specific plugin for Discourse that will help international users.
Was already mentioned elsewhere in another thread.

Seems it is IP address based and picks a suitable language based on that.
It would be a "no-brainer" for most of us that it was made use of.

image

The currently useless space could be occupied by, for example, links to the various international sections and to the forum guide, with links to its translation where there is one (German I think).

As a side note I am almost blind to big blobs of nothing because of years spent learning to ignore advertising. Anything that my brain interprets as possibly advertising I instinctively ignore.

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Discourse has a sidebar that can be used; you can personalise your favorite categories; image for demonstration purposes

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A more modern design would be nice too:

This good, can it be made like that by default?

Still a lot of whitespace between the title and the initial content offering.

Also still a lot of whitespace in the left hand column.

Getting there though

:+1:

Suggest a few tweaks but not sure how easy it would be.
Reduce the red areas a little more or include more of the relevant content ?