[quote name='Kevin Hawkins' timestamp='1303215856' post='4800323']...

Thank you, I liked that reply. It made me take a closer look at the front page and I think I can pinpoint two specific points of the design which significantly contribute to make it seem so cluttered/spammy to me.

1. Not counting the main menu, there are eleven different modules displayed. I read somewhere that in order to avoid choice/information overload five or six branches is about the upper limit, which seems about right to me. So if the number of modules on the front page could be reduced to about five or six I think that would help a lot. That could be achieved by personalization as previously mentioned (seems like the ideal solution but might take time to implement), or simply by the site managers reorganizing the modules (which would likely be a quick solution though not as ideal as personalization, perhaps a temporary solution till personalization is implemented?).

2. The news feed is enourmous. There are twenty six news stories in the first page of the feed. I think it would be a good idea to reduce that to a digestible number like [s]ten[/s] six or lower. Simply reducing the number would be a solution, but if increased selectivity of news stories/sources were applied so the frequency of new items would be lower, then the exposure time for each item would not be adversely affected.
[/quote]

I don't think the number of news items should change, however they could be hidden a bit. My suggestions are:

• Maybe show the 10 most recent newsstories and allow the users to activate a collapsible panel to see the rest.
• Allow registered users to see how many news items at a time they wish to see. 5, 10, 20, 35 at a time. Just like that Active Content page (formerly known as Active Topics).
• Allow registered users to choose in what order to see news items:
  • Most recent
  • Most voted
  • Most likely to want to see
  • Only the news items the user voted on

Particularly once a lounge thread like this makes its way into my notifications, chances are that it will rapidly bury any notifications I actually care about - and also require me to obsessively 'mark as read' my notifications if I want feedback when *new* notifications arrive.

To further illustrate my issue with thread notifications, take a gander at the following screenshot:



If notifications are going to be a useful way to keep track of thread replies, then we need automatic threading/collapsing of notifications generated by the same thread...

[quote name='swiftcoder' timestamp='1303240628' post='4800467']
If notifications are going to be a useful way to keep track of thread replies, then we need automatic threading/collapsing of notifications generated by the same thread...

protipe: if you don't want to get a notification for each reply in a thread, don't pick the, "Delayed Notification" or "Immediate Notification". It wouldn't make any sense if they worked any other way than they do.

Select "No Notification" then use the "Manage Watched Topics" page to look at your subscribed topics. Manage Watched Topics could be somewhere easier to get to though, like in the profile drop down.[/quote]
Yeah, no, see, that is worse than useless. I need notifications from every month old thread which I have since forgotten about, and I don't need some random mod discussion in the lounge to bury everything else.

Notifications from a given thread *should* stack (just like facebook notifications).

Did you try what I said? You talk like you did, but it sounds like you did not. If you do what I said you will be able to see every thread you have watched as a single entry and whether or not there are read or unread posts.

I am talking about every thread I have ever replied to (i.e. hundreds already, and increasing daily), because I have set up for auto-subscription to all threads I reply to - particularly in my slow-moving alt games forum, people sometimes don't reply for days at a time. If I manually watched 50 or so important threads, that might be a viable option. But paging through hundreds of threads to see which have new posts is not really time-efficient.

To be clear, I like notifications - they are a huge improvement over the previous system of bookmarks. But they need some tweaks to be fully effective, and one of those tweaks is facebook-style notification aggregation.