Creating a useful landing page for the forum

[sterretje]

@PerryBebbington

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

Yes. You can make your preference known in Alternative layouts for the forum (posts #1 for the home page, and #2 for the first level of the subcategories).

[sterretje]

@Ballscrewbob

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

Point taken; making it smaller however might make the clear separation of categories smaller less obvious.

@Ballscrewbob

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

If a user has a lot of categories and/or tags in the left hand column, it will be full.

[sterretje]

Especially for you, note the Motors etc category

Image not resized; zoom 1x. As you can see, no wasted space in the left column.

[J-M-L]

Is there a way to hide the left column?

[cloudDev]

Yes, press the button with the three lines at the top left!

[J-M-L]

Cool thx

[cloudDev]

Please!

[cloudDev]

But I have a little free space to the left. Why?

[sterretje]

@cloudDev

But I have a little free space to the left. Why?

The width of the total layout is fixed. If your browser window is bigger than that width, you will get the wasted space. From memory, it was one of the complaints when this forum replaced the old one in 2021.

[cloudDev]

@sterretje Thanks, that's really annoying. Hopefully that will change! So far it doesn't look like that. There are also people with big screens!

[cloudDev]

Poor Appearance and usability of forum on mobile devices

Arduino Forum is built on the free open source Discourse forum framework. The first thing to determine is whether a defect is in the Discourse framework itself or specific to the Arduino Forum. This information will allow reporting the defect to the people who are able to investigate and fix it. Please check to see whether the faults you experience on Arduino Forum also occur on the try.discourse.org sandbox forum provided for testing of the Discourse framework: Open https://try.discourse.org…

Arduino Forum is built on the free open source Discourse forum framework. The first thing to determine is whether a defect is in the Discourse framework itself or specific to the Arduino Forum. This information will allow reporting the defect to the people who are able to investigate and fix it.

Please check to see whether the faults you experience on Arduino Forum also occur on the try.discourse.org sandbox forum provided for testing of the Discourse framework:

1. Open https://try.discourse.org/ in your browser.
2. If a forum account is required to perform the actions that produce the fault, sign up for an account.
   You can't use your Arduino Forum credentials to log in to try.discourse.org.
   try.discourse.org is reset daily so even if you signed up for an account in the past, you will need to sign up again for this test.
3. Perform whatever actions produce the fault here on Arduino Forum.

After doing that, please make a reply here to let me know whether you were able to reproduce the fault on try.discourse.org.

[pert]

@cloudDev

that's really annoying. Hopefully that will change!

As @sterretje mentioned, there were some complaints about the page width limit after the migration of Arduino Forum to the Discourse framework in 2021. Here you can see the response from one of the Discourse staff members who provide support for Arduino's Discourse instance:

@jomaxro

@Deva_Rishi

the main waste is still in the margins

That's very intentional. Studies going back decades have evaluated how humans deal with lines of text. It's generally agreed that there is an upper limit of how many characters per line one should use on a webpage. Surpass that it gets harder to read. Those interested may wish to check out this article which goes into more details.

So this particular thing can not be considered a bug in the Discourse framework because it is the intentional design.

I would guess this can actually be adjusted via a custom theme component in Arduino Forum settings. If not, a feature request could be submitted to the Discourse developers for adding such a capability.

[krishna_agarwal]

Can you please share the link of this page I wana to also experience.
Can you pls justify the use of this page

[pert]

@krishna_agarwal

I wana to also experience.

Hi @krishna_agarwal. This screenshot comes from a "sandbox" instance of the Arduino Forum (referred to as the "staging site" forum) we use to do testing and experimentation. It is currently in use to test some changes to the forum layout being proposed by @sterretje:

Alternative layouts for the forum

As mentiond in https://forum.arduino.cc/t/restructuring-forum-categories/1102089/141, Discourse supports various layouts that can be used for the forum; below are a couple of examples. The screenshots were (basically) taken width the same width and zoom settings of the browser so it's easier to compare; zoom settings were choosen so a bit more of a page's content could be shown. Screenshots were taken at different times in the development cycle so there might be differentces in available categor…

If you would like access to that "staging site" forum so you can try out @sterretje's changes and other experiments for yourself, please send me your email address in a forum message.

You can do that by opening this page: Profile - pert - Arduino Forum and then clicking the " Message" button.

[sterretje]

Adding to @pert's reply

This was a direct reply by @alranel to the complaints about the wasted space: Do you like the new forum? - #1744 by alranel

[cloudDev]

NEW DESIGN?

Here are photos! Since I am a German user, the language of the forum is only unfortunately also in German. How do you like this design?

Much more area is used here. You can easily change that in the CSS code.

[UKHeliBob]

@cloudDev You seem to make a habit of posting links that are not immediately connected with the subject in hand. How is this one relevant ?

My malware detector advises me not to open the video so I have not seen it

[cloudDev]

I wouldn't post links if I could just paste the file. But since it's an mp4 file, I have to share it somehow with an online tool, since it's not allowed to upload mp4 files here on the forum. Finally, the topic is "creating a useful landing page for the forum". I played around a bit and changed the CSS design a bit to use more of the screen. I can post it again as a screenshot though. Now do you mean by this statement that it is "relevant"? If not, I can delete it again!

@UKHeliBob

You seem to make a habit of posting links that are not immediately connected with the subject in hand. How is this one relevant ?

My malware detector advises me not to open the video

@UKHeliBob

VS

[UKHeliBob]

@cloudDev

Now do you mean by this statement that it is "relevant"?

I mean that it is not obvious that the link that you posted has anything to do with creating a landing page for the forum