Thread: July 27th Homepage Update Feedback

I'm going to start off saying that it's coming together really well and looks pretty professional.
I did like the old homepage quite a bit but this one is looking much nicer now.

Some things I have mentioned in the box and may have been taken note of already but I'll go ahead and mention them here as well because it could get the "juices" going for other people who want to help out with ideas as well.

First, I believe that the thread previews on the home page look best around 200 word count, sometimes they are currently going well over that and it gets a bit bulky. When the threads are at about 200 they look much more streamlined. It also gives people incentive to write a nice introduction to really grab peoples attention insted of rambling on incoherantly until the thread ends.

Along with this, it would be better to make the limit of shown threads to a nice clean number around 10. At 15 people are a lot less likely to have even scrolled down that far (If they have at all) and it causes the page to load slower too for those with an older internet connection. It would also be better to only show threads that have had some responses that way spam threads / advertisement threads or just uninteresting things won't be taking up as much space for a hot thread.

The hot threads list way at the bottum is fairly unlikely to be seen, I think it would be much better to be placed in the empty white spot under the blog posts. It could be even better to be displayed prominantly on the top.

To go along with the blog posts, I noticed that there is a twitter account for free frag. I believe it would go along way to get new followers if a live twitter feed was shown somewhere above / below the blog posts.

Global awards could also be displayed to take up this white space on the right.
Since FFN is very closely tied with HLS stats, I believe it would be a great idea to show some sort of "Top performers" in some different categories. It could be best just to show the top five killers, but perhaps have some options to look by class or server.

Something which would be very interesting but likely hard or impossible to pull off would be to show a live feed of dominations happening around the servers. I do not know how the information from the servers is sent / stored or brought to HLS so I do not know if this is even possible, but if it was I think it would be a neat thing for the home page.

When checking the forum list, It could be very handy to give a viewer the option to click on each player and take them directly to the steam profile / HLS stats webpage. There could also be a "report user" button to help make mods aware that there could be a hacker on. Of course, only someone with an account should be able to use this.. perhaps a level requirement as well to prevent spammers. It could send some sort of PM to mods currently online and be able to more quickly handle problems.

The Forum -> New Posts dropdown link on the front page is broken, tells me no search results are found. Going to the forums page and then clicking on 'New Posts' works fine though.

Fixed