Is BGG working on a site overhaul?

[Crokinole Dundee]

It seems like a while ago, there was talk of a new site redesign. Is this something in the works? It sure needs it badly. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything. 

[Maarten]

Yes, the team was working on a new design, and some could even test
the beta. However, at some point news and updates simply stopped
appearing, and development seemed to stall. It wasn't until a week or
two ago that Aldie in a casual and off-hand manner described what had
happened: the site design would simply have tacked a different skin
onto a MVC-style code base which Aldie had literally grown fed up
with. (MVC is ICT-jargon, being an abbreviation for 'model view
controller', meaning that you have a DB full of data, and then program
various shells which retrieve, modify and present this same data in
various ways, depending on the needs of the user and he wants to
achieve.) It was not true MVC, it was old, it was grown organically,
it was quirky, and it would not have solved what he perceived to be
fundamental issues, like for example having crappy support for mobile
access to the DB. He was currently in the process of reviewing some
3rd party alternatives to his own MVC-code base so that he would be
freed from programming and maintaining the bare MVC-basics, focussing
instead on the implementation specifics which would make BGG BGG. And
not just on a computer or laptop, but also on a tablet or smartphone
or app or whatever. He was also studying ways to offload the
generation of the HTML necessary for the user to interact with the
website to yet another 3rd party framework, again with the intent of
not being burdened (as much) with the basics of this process. Some
geeks offered brief suggestions for these quite specialist packages,
highlighting various strengths and weaknesses. And that was basically
all.

So, summarising: the redesign we've been hearing about for the better
part of two years has been effectively shelved. Aldie is curently
looking at a far more radical and fundamental redesign of the website
than he had ever planned or envisaged. There is, for the time being,
also no longer a date when the job will be finished: there are too
many variables and uncertainties to consider, and a lot depends on how
easy it is to move important subsystems (like for example the
notifications) to these new frameworks. One advantage, though: when
Aldie's done, the website will probably be a lot less quirky, and have
a lot more consistent interface no matter how you access it.


Maarten

On Jan 14, 12:26 am, Crokinole Dundee <b...@bobwardcreative.com>
wrote:

[Crokinole Dundee]

Thank you for that really thorough update. I hope we see something come out of this. Then if BSW would just scrap and redesign, then it would be a utopia.

[Digren]

While I understand the desire to do something of a much larger scale, it's too bad that the new site didn't get a chance to go live before its replacement was planned.  Not only is (was) it incredibly clean and easy to use, but it often wouldn't go down when the main site would.  Last few BGG outages the beta site would still serve some content (sometimes nothing from the database, sometimes so).  It was a lifesaver when trying to look up game FAQs at parties. =P

While I had to switch back to regular BGG on my laptop to do some things (mostly requiring geeklist manipulation), I used the beta site exclusively on my iPad for the past year, finding the interface significantly nicer (albeit still not made for a mobile device, sure).  It turned off entirely a few weeks back. =(

[Maarten]

I found the beta redesign to be flawed to the core, actually. The
problem I had with it was that information about games in collections
and/or search results was now no longer presented in a table, but
rather in AJAX-able blocks. Forum discussions likewise. That meant
that scanning vertically to look for something in a particular column,
which I do very often, was no longer possible because the information
was interrupted with stuff and crud. Similarly, the redesign thought
it clever to always use the width of the page column to display
information. Granted, it looked cool. But now you had to put in effort
to read from left to right as well as from top to bottom, and this was
damned tiring to the point where I simply did not look up information
as much as I used to. In a single sentence: BGG would have become
much, much harder for me to use. Now I understand why you'd want these
blocks: they're much easier to manipulate than full-blown tables,
they're just DIVs. But frankly, it depends on how you access the
website. On wide screens, like that of my laptop, tables are really
more efficient. On small smartphone and tablet screens, blocks are the
smarter choice. I SINCERELY

[Maarten]

Damn, posted too early... ;-).

On Jan 14, 10:15 am, Maarten <irm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I found the beta redesign to be flawed to the core, actually. The
> problem I had with it was that information about games in collections
> and/or search results was now no longer presented in a table, but
> rather in AJAX-able blocks. Forum discussions likewise. That meant
> that scanning vertically to look for something in a particular column,
> which I do very often, was no longer possible because the information
> was interrupted with stuff and crud. Similarly, the redesign thought
> it clever to always use the width of the page column to display
> information. Granted, it looked cool. But now you had to put in effort
> to read from left to right as well as from top to bottom, and this was
> damned tiring to the point where I simply did not look up information
> as much as I used to. In a single sentence: BGG would have become
> much, much harder for me to use. Now I understand why you'd want these
> blocks: they're much easier to manipulate than full-blown tables,
> they're just DIVs. But frankly, it depends on how you access the
> website. On wide screens, like that of my laptop, tables are really
> more efficient. On small smartphone and tablet screens, blocks are the
> smarter choice. I SINCERELY

hope that the new new site takes this into account.

Finally, I don't think that you can compare the stability of a beta
website to that of the main one. The number of users is of a totally
different order, and what works on one may fail completely on the
other.


Maarten