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Revamping of the front page, easier-to-grok summariesAs per a thread in the forums here a few weeks ago, I finally got around to modifying the front page. The goal is to create summaries of what's happening on the site in an easier to understand style/format. Now all forum posts and forum comments have been put into two new groups, one longer one for the "user to user" help forums, and a shorter one for the "miscellaneous" forums. The "recent content" and "recent comments" blocks no longer display anything from the forums (that data is in the forum blocks :-). Those content/comments blocks will only display stories, blog entries, book entries (etc.) and their related comments. Over the next week or so I may create some additional blocks and generally tweak things more. Don't be surprised if the blocks change, and feedback is welcome. Also note that the left/main menu will change too -- e.g. an "unanswered forum posts" link was added today, more changes to come. Bookmark/Search this post with: 
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A thought or two
Bah, I had just started to like what we had!
Still, it's not bad. The one thing I might suggest at this stage is that there is a paragraph welcoming people to the site above the 'Posts from Users Helping Users Forums' box --- it seems a little stark and unwelcoming. That box is quite long, spilling off my screen, and the first impression is that the page is a series of links without any content of its own. Is there a way for it to take less vertical space?
One way this might be accomplished is to take out the 'x seconds ago' thingy in the 'Last Post' column. It doesn't add any useful information to the site and frequently seems to make the row spill to a second line. A similar thing might help in the 'Replies' column, but that is more useful.
Of course, this is highly dependent on browser settings, so feel free to ignore me!
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A tidy house is the sign of a stolen computer.
Re: Revamping of the front page, easier-to-grok summaries
Yup, I know what you mean.
My thought on that is to display the "first" article/story, then the info/status blocks, then the rest of the articles. But that's on the to-do list.
On the whole I think the
On the whole I think the changes are a step in the right direction. It's nice to see the help requests featured so clearly. I agree with cammoblammo that a short welcome message--maybe just a sentence or two--might be a good idea. But I would vote to keep the "hours and minutes" ago feature.
puts the help back in debianHELP
Yeah, I know, that is lame, but I couldn't resist :-).
But it really does. When the site comes up, it is immediately clear who still needs help. Nice going!
I'm only worried about the seconds!
The hours and minutes are fine. Seconds seem a little fine grained though.
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A tidy house is the sign of a stolen computer.
Re: I'm only worried about the seconds!
But details are important! :-)
(That's just the way the time's stored and it's easiest to parse it out that way.)
Looking good!
That looks a lot better --- the small summary box at the top breaks things up nicely.
I've noticed since thing have been changed that 'Recent Comments' doesn't seem to update.
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A tidy house is the sign of a stolen computer.
Re: Recent comments block
Those comments are now only the non-forum comments.
To include the forum comments in that block would either make it too long or would cycle through so fast as to be useless.