That's what I give the new version of RPOL! :)

*Woots around.* I agree!

 Woot around v.
   The act of spinning in circles while flailing arms and shouting 'Woot!'

counts currently active characters

Hmm...I seem to have eighteen characters active right now, so if they all give their thumbs up (and they do!), that's thirty-six thumbs up.  (None of my characters have more than the usual allotment of hands.)

And my own somewhat less imaginary ones, too, for thirty-eight thumbs up!

Great, but it seems so tiny on my high res monitor and I want my games on the right.

Oh well, at least the forums are seperated from my games.

Fo' sho'!

Everything seems to have gone smoothly as far as I can tell... it's just... every time I reload the front page it skips automatically to the bottom... Ah, well!

Double-woot!  My game count is now up to 5.  :D

This takes some getting used to. At first I didn't like it, but now I realize that having the forums separated from the games, instead of lumped in the middle, is good. In a way I wish we still had category breaks, though.

I like having the search thing down there. I haven't used it yet, but, is it still possible to get the old category lists and browse them like we used to?

In reply to SageBahamut (msg #7):

it is opossible, leave the search area blank and just pick a area to search

I like this version ^.^

Big hug to everyone!

Everytime there is a change, I wonder how I could live without it before :)

The new layout of the main page is probably half as big as before (in d/l size). That will save me some money when updating on my cellphone, but more importantly, probably will lower the time and bandwidth to create it for RPOL since it is the most downloaded page.

Very very good, Jase. ((Takes of my imaginary hat and bows))

Just do a Search and select up to three categories. You don't even have to enter anything in the text field.

Meh. I think it's a bit of an improvement, but I'm not ecstatic. If you fellows like it, that's good enough for me; but I won't be jumping for joy until I grow to like it.

It's certainly more practical :)

I'm glad the games are in one place :)

Nice

I'd say the new layout is an improvement, I rather like how its turned out.

And it sure seems faster...
Woohoo!

Would it be possible to get the page back (not on the main but some way to get to it) where you can browse the genres and all the games in each genre? I love how the main menu groups all my games together, but I did quite frequently use the game browser feature to see what new games were up in each category.

Also I'm not sure search is working right. I did a search for "deadlands" and came up with nothing even though there's a lot of deadlands games on the site. I had checked active, inactive, deleted, and unchecked "looking for players" and it came up with zip, nada, nothing.

The search worked fine for me. I even searched Deadlands and I got several results. Just make sure you don't click any of the genre buttons and you can search for a game with a specific game name.

And it is possible to just search a genre. All you need to do is click the genre and push the search button and the games will come up. To look at all the games you just need to keep pressing the "Next 25" button at the bottom of the list.

I quite like the new version, I have only one complaint. On the search menu, when searching for games which have more than 25 possible matches, the "Next 25" button at the bottom of the screen is hard to see, and in the Black colour set-up that I employ it blends into the background. I had to search around for it for a while before I noticed it.

Ah, I have a wee suggestion, if possible.

While searching for games, I note that the search results only show up 25 to a page.  Would it be possible to have a drop down box with differing numbers of results?  25, 50, 75 and 100?  Or whatever might be appropriate?

And if this feature exists and I simply missed it, kindly hand me back my spectacles and point it out?  :P

25 is a good compromise between displaying as many as possible and throwing too much work on the server at one time.

Edited, because I can't count...
This message was last edited by a moderator at 14:22, Sat 07 June 2008.

In my mind I figured the reason would be that.  Ah well, no harm in wondering or asking.  :)  Thanks BBR.
This message was last edited by a moderator at 14:25, Sat 07 June 2008.

     For myself, I prefer the old layout, where my games were seperated. As it is now, I have forums mixed in with games, which makes it more confusing. I'd rather be able to choose whether or not to have the categories. That said, I am very grateful to jase for everything he does.

Huzzah!

Multi-genre games...

*tehehee*

If my maths servers me correctly I think there's a combination of 4,369 genres any individual game can belong to now.  It can belong to one, two or three genres, and any combination of.

Displaying it the old way with games under individual genres means the likelihood of having one heading per game is very high so as to make the headings just make the list twice as long as necessary and rather meaningless.  Just wasn't going to work!

Actually, if I calculated it right...

19 options for 1 category...

19*18 options for two categories...

19*18*17 options for three categories...

I count 6175 possible combinations! ^_^

It's only 18, since one of the options is RPoL Forums... *grin*

Which gives me... 4869, still more than what Jase posted.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:32, Sat 07 June 2008.

D'oh!

In that case... 5220 =p

Mobile internet sees us with it snapping down to the search box. Any way we could avoid this?

The popup list's minute timer seems to be on the blink. I hit refresh at 13:42, and here's what it's telling me:

13:42 = current
13:46 = 1 mins ago
13:50 = 2 mins ago
13:54 = 3 mins ago
13:57 = still claiming 3 mins ago, but it refreshed

edit: I think it starts claiming "1 mins ago" before the minute is over.
edit2: uhh... and while I was typing that, it rolled over to "0 mins ago" at 13:59
This message was last edited by the user at 18:13, Sat 07 June 2008.

Ooo, I should make a new game to test this out ;)

:(

I do not like this new layout.

AT ALL.

Number one: Sticky list is unbalanced. I had a perfect balance of games and categories picked out - and was purposefully NOT joining any extra games or deleting others - because it made my list look even. Now it just looks disgusting. To others this might seem a minor problem. To me it is MAJOR. I have to have my sticky list balanced, or else I will literally avoid coming to the site for days. It ruins whatever mood I'm in. To me this issue alone has decreased RPoL's usablity by at least 50%.

Number two: Whoever had the idea to group all the different games into one heading should just... I don't even want to type what my brain is saying. When I have more games than I do, currently, I don't remember my games by their names/titles, I remember them by the genre. Luckily this is only a minor concern right now because I only have two games on my list... one that I GM (but which has all but died due to some problems on my end, including going into the hospital after I had said "I'll start posting again tomorrow!") and one that I play in. However, if I ever decide to play in more games, I will be at a sore loss and will actively have to search for what game it is when I open it up. Before anyone asks, no, I never play in more than one game per genre. I haven't for a while now because I'd screw up characters.

Number three: I do NOT like the new search option. I want the old option where I can pick and choose a genre, and then see everything on one page. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to reach this forum! This is a minor issue as well because, unfortunately, it's usable, which means it will probably never be fixed, which is a major shame.

Number four: Multi-genre games? Are you kidding me? The only thing that this will do is encourage shoddy "cross-overs" that will make a majority of games too discouraging and child-like to play in. Game owners SHOULD be required to choose one genre for the game, and one genre ONLY. It makes them think about where the game really belongs because, I'm sorry, but you should NOT have a pokemon game set in deep space where the players are all from the renaissance era (for those not paying attention that's "Pokemon/Digimon" "Sci-Fi" and "Historical" all in one). I could maybe understand letting GMs have the ability to "associate" a game with other genres, which would let it show up in searches for those genres, but as I also believe that the best way to browse games is through genre, not searching. I think that they should all be forced to pick one major genre, and have the game called and cataloged as though it were the ONLY one.

I guess I'm pretty lonely as far as dissenters go for this update... but I truthfully think that the site's useability has gone down a significant amount through this new configuration.

The new categories won't see Pokémon fencing in space. It's more to give an idea of exactly what the game is gonna be like. Specificality.

And if people did want to make a game just like that then they can now do so with more detail :P

(I'm looking forward to testing it out, I like balance too so all I need to do is either join another game or make one to get things worked out completely. I like having all the games I run in one place :D)

To MagickalMelody:

1) I understand, if not empathize with, your pain. Hopefully that will sort itself out as soon as possible.

2) Again, understandable; although I cannot well relate to it. Unfortunately, I believe that you are in a rather small minority on that point - and consequently will be ignored.

3) I do sympathize with this; and would agree with you if a coherent cause were established. However, I do not quite care about this enough to argue with jase and company.

4) Although I am mildly opposed to the cross-genre system; I think this is a bit pessimistic. People seem to like it; and therefore it is serving its purpose.

I believe that the best people can do is keep an eye on the Beta Site in the future, suggest and/or oppose things there while it's in developments stages and such, that is the best way people can find something that they all can work with. :)

I should certainly look at the Beta Site more often myself, I like to make sure I know what's going on so there isn't too much of a surprise when things change, so far I've been lucky with things. (I remember when we last had the 'Big' Upgrade I admit I found things a little confusing at first but it grew on me, there were a great deal of people then who did not like how things were changed etc. In the end it's nigh impossible to please anyone and I sympathise for those who are having difficulties :( )

MagickalMelody, I hear your pain on the first three points, but I can't say I sympathize, since they don't really bother me at all.

As for multiple genre games... I think it's a good idea.  Which category would you put Shadowrun in, for instance?  Sure, cyberpunk is an obvious choice, but, it also fits under sci-fi and fantasy.  d20 Modern and d20 Future could fit under contemporary and fantasy, and sci-fi/post apocolyptic/fantasy, respectively.  It seems to make sense to have multi-genre games.

Besides, all things considered, we had a couple of cross-genre categories on the old layout.

• Historical Fantasy
• Sci-Fi/Fantasy (which oddly is where most of the SW games ended up... that still confounds me)
• Medieval Fantasy

I'm sure there were more, I just can't remember them right now...

     My layout has been changed back to almost what it was before, which helps me immensely. Thank you jase.

Bah. I think it's horrible. It's pretty much a toned down verison of what was before, with the exception that I can't just click on a Game category and view the games, isntead I have to search the game categories and hope for miracles.

just click the genre you want, then browse...

I usually go for newest post, because games that no one goes to are unlikely to accept me.

If you want to see ALL the games, go genre by genre.

Congratulations on the swift upgrade, I know how harrowing they can be. Everything seems faster, no problems here.

thanks for providing us an awesome community.

I still preferred the old layout. It felt more accessable to me.

I only started RPoL two days ago, even though I have known about it for quite some time.  So I just missed the old layout to the new.

Another observation about the popup sticky - it no longer tells you what you're looking at. Is that a bug or a feature? I liked seeing that info there before.

Feature.