website Feedback

[iiMStevo 55]

The new website homepage looks good, however I feel there's too much emphasis put on the scrolling panels and animations, rather than the overall functionality.

I mainly use the website while I'm at work (as my home PC is still under construction, who knew watercooling would be so expensive?!), so the laptop I'm using is probably about 15 years old, and has a potato for a CPU. This means that the new website is jittery and much slower.

Upon reaching the homepage, there's a loading symbol which takes around 5-10 seconds to load the actual site content (which isn't too bad). However, due to all the animations and changing imagery, the page scrolls slowly.
The top header looks great with the three buttons either side of the icon... and I feel it's unique shape should be kept as the default header throughout the website.
However, as soon as you scroll down slightly, the header collapses and looks less unique and clean, and it seems to use considerable memory/processing power to handle the simple animation of collapsing (it takes around 2-3 seconds on this laptop to properly close-in). On a couple of occasions, Google Chrome seems to have frozen completely on a black page while everything attempts to load a simple scrolling of the mouse wheel...

 

The new shop element, again, looks great... but it lacks slightly in functionality and is extremely slow to load due to the scrolling animated banner tile at the top. I've also noticed that the prices don't make much sense.

I've got the $60 pledge as player-owned already... however, upon purchasing the next available pack (the homeowner pack), it's standard value is $90, but instead of it costing me $30 to receive the additional items in this (taking my total pledge value up to $90), it instead costs $54.78 (extremely random price). which doesn't make much sense to me?

I'm also struggling to identify the shop page which simply allows you to buy specific items from the shop itself. It appears every option is only the "Packages" where as browsing to the shop from your own profile's items, you can get to the specific item purchasing page where there are things like pets etc... there should definitely be the same options when accessing the shop from the header bar "shop" button as opposed to accessing from player items.

I'd also like to see the community forums be revamped into the similar style, as well as further expand upon character integration with the site. Having your account display information on the homepage under one log-in, and then having a separate log-in for the forums isn't ideal and should have the accounts merged together (which should also limit anyone creating duplicate accounts for forum spamming etc due to needing an actual game account linking with steam etc...)

[subway244 205]

On 8/14/2018 at 5:14 AM, iiMStevo said:

I'd also like to see the community forums be revamped into the similar style

I'm not a tech genius, but I think a lot of the options for the community can't really change. This forum is powered by Invision Community, the same people who power the LCPDFR/LSPDFR forums and the SecondLife forums. As you can see by visiting these forums, they are very similar to each other and to the Identity RPG Forum. I would assume that because the forum and the main page are two separate entities, they would have two separate logins, and if they tried to change the forum to a new type of forum (not Invision community), it could delete all of our progress. But as I said, I am not a tech genius. (I may be wrong.)

 

Please contact one of the staff for more help on this. 

[iiMStevo 55]

On 8/24/2018 at 6:48 AM, subway244 said:

I'm not a tech genius, but I think a lot of the options for the community can't really change. This forum is powered by Invision Community, the same people who power the LCPDFR/LSPDFR forums and the SecondLife forums. As you can see by visiting these forums, they are very similar to each other and to the Identity RPG Forum. I would assume that because the forum and the main page are two separate entities, they would have two separate logins, and if they tried to change the forum to a new type of forum (not Invision community), it could delete all of our progress. But as I said, I am not a tech genius. (I may be wrong.)

 

Please contact one of the staff for more help on this. 

 

Oh, I know...
But for my community's Website + Forums for our Altis Life server back in the day, our resident texture guy also did PHP coding, so designed us a website with custom forums. It tied our website account with the in-game account using specialised queries to the MySQL database, which then displayed information for users (like badges, trophies etc) on the forums so our community members could better recognise certain players. Also where their in-game names differed from their community names, it highlighted what their in-game name was which again allowed for better recognition.

With Identity, the same should apply. While using third-party forum providers is the easy option, in the long-term it's not as financially secure and has limited to no customisability without heavy additional costing. So... since Asylum just revamped their website with an external provider, they should have also looked to create the forums as a customised entity instead to allow for the flexibility in the future.