40k hobby articles

[amrogers3]

Not sure where to post this but snice its regarding 40k articles, ill post here. Apologies for being negative but I'm not a huge fan of the new webpage layout. You used to be able to see the game alliance network articles posted on the right side of the bols page. And there was a large number of them and you could see the articles from several months back. Now they are the bottom of the page and there are only a few posted. I rarely remember to make it to the bottom of the page. I saw a 40k article posted a couple days ago and now it's gone. Anyone know if it's possible to pull up an article from a couple of days ago that has disappeared from the bols game alliance network feed.

[Badtucker]

agreed..... i loved that section of the page... now all we get is a few at the bottom of the page... and they never seem to rotate much.

[Lord Manton]

As someone with a blog on the alliance blogroll, as well as someone who loves reading other people's blogs, I have to agree with you. And the fact that there's no way to see all the blogs on the blog roll on one page. It's a big design flaw.
I've noticed a big drop-off in traffic from the change.

[Bigred]

Let me explain what the new BoLS frontpage blogroll does and why we did it.

First some basics: The BoLS blogroll has over 250 members - that is a very large blogroll by website standards.

The default blogroll widget for both wordpress and blogger is a very badly written piece of code. For example, on each and every pageload it reached out across the web, and grabbed EVERY blogroll member's latest article, title, publishing info, favicon, (possibly thumbnail) then sorted them all chronologically. So it was pulling down over 1000 text and images assets from all over the net on every pageview - all to display the default 10 most recent blogroll members.

It was the single biggest slowdown to website performance and loadtimes. We benchamarked it and sometimes saw pageload delays of 15-20 seconds because of the blogroll. It was simply not going to work with our traffic needs. For years everyone blamed ads on BoLS slow loadtimes, - but it wasn't the ads - it was the blogroll. And there was nothing we could do with the default blogroll widgets out there.

So we hired a programmer and made the new custom BoLS one that is extremely efficient and high performance. How fast? About 500 times faster. It loads routinely in less than 1/10th of a second. The new blogroll displays a random 3 members of the BoLS elite on the top row, and a random 7 members on the bottom row. These selections are chosen at random each hour. This ensures that every member gets equal exposure over time.

Blogroll location. The new blogroll was not moved to a lower position on the page, but instead starts at roughly the same vertical location as the old one the same distance from the top of the page. The difference is it now is horizontal instead of vertical, which had the effect of shortening the overall height of the page. Basically the old one extended way down the bottom right side and made the page very tall. The new one reduces all that empty white space under the left and middle column, so the page is more content rich and dense with less total height.

Things that were left behind. The old blogroll did have the "extend" button to see the entire 200+ members. The new one does not have that feature, as that would again cause pageload delays. Our analytics showed that less than 1% of users ever used that feature. We are monitoring the situation and may one day add a separate blogroll page (so it wont affect mainpage loadtime) with a full listing of all members chronologically.

It is on the list, but we are still actively working on other server projects to bring down total page loadtimes - something that positively affects 100% of the readers.

I hope that sheds some light on why the change happened.

-Larry

[Lord Manton]

@BigRed Thanks for the clarification, no GW-esque wall of silence for BOLS, eh?

The explanation clears things up nicely. I think the separate page would be good. I know personally I like to scroll through the blogroll when I'm done reading all the new posts on the main page, and an easy-access index of the various blogs would be an awesome addition as it collates it all into one place where we can browse to our hearts' content.

In terms of the location, the only down side with it coming out on the bottom of the page as opposed to the side bar, is that now there is a big empty space on the side of the page (just have a look at the latest ForgeWorld article with Eidolon that was posted). And it means that you have to scroll all the way the down to see the blog roll, having to go past a lot of comments.

Again, thanks for the update. Keep up the good work.

[Morgrim]

The length of the comment section on many articles stops me from checking out the stuff at the bottom of the page, I agree. Doesn't Discus have an option to minimize the entire comment section, kind of like how you can minimize individual comment threads? If you could enable that on BoLS maybe that would help?

[The Girl]

The length of the comment section on many articles stops me from checking out the stuff at the bottom of the page, I agree. Doesn't Discus have an option to minimize the entire comment section, kind of like how you can minimize individual comment threads? If you could enable that on BoLS maybe that would help?

That is set in embed code provided by Disqus... and, like the spam filter, is defined by the system rather than publishers. There's not an option in the control panel to change it. It's not a feasible option.