4.3: Club forums in main index

[evandixon]

So, I appreciate that you allow club forums to be on the front page, but I think it can easily get to be a little much. In my test instance (which is an older copy of our live site), I see 23 club forums on the forums index page. 5 of them have very large descriptions serving as guidelines, and because those are in an Open club, they'd be visible to everyone on the site. All of those forums together makes the page height more than double what it was before.

It'd be nice if you guys could add an option to limit how many club nodes show in the main site, or better yet, give us an option to whitelist clubs. Might also make sense to show each club as a category, and have the club's forums in that category.

[Nebthtet]

I think whitelisting and the category idea both are awesome.

[opentype]

1 hour ago, evandixon said:

It'd be nice if you guys could add an option to limit how many club nodes show in the main site, or better yet, give us an option to whitelist clubs. 

I would disagree since it defeats the entire purpose of how the function is set up. It’s not “5 recent or admin-features clubs” or anything like that. It’s club forums the individual user(!) has access to and which can be shown along with all other forums. Hiding stuff again would only cause additional confusion. Either the accessible club forums are shown with the regular forums or not. 

[evandixon]

20 minutes ago, opentype said:

Either the accessible club forums are shown with the regular forums or not. 

I'd say that anywhere that allows users to create clubs would not be able to use this feature then. Take a look at my test instance (white boxes hide private info) and see how busy it is, then imagine how busy it would be if things continued:

This comes after months of trying to get the forums index as small as possible.

If I enabled this for the main site, the UX would suffer for some people, and I could only imagine it getting worse. Maybe if only featured clubs were shown. After all, the ability to feature clubs is already present.

Perhaps it'd get better if I removed the ability for anyone to create Open clubs, and it'd all be opt-in, though this would still be a burden on anyone who's in a lot of clubs. Might even be a reason for some people not to use clubs.

[opentype]

6 minutes ago, evandixon said:

 Maybe if only featured clubs were shown.

As I said before: that is not the purpose. The purpose is, I can join clubs and then have them easily accessible on the main index (which might even be the site homepage). And that is just an example since I believe the same feature is available on other apps like gallery and calendar as well. 

If you want a way to showcase featured clubs, rather ask for the existing club widget to get a setting for featured clubs. It fits there. 

 

P.S. I do agree that the large descriptions are a problem. That should have a truncation applied by default. 

[Hezeber]

Problem is with open clubs, the users don't even have a way to not have to see the homepage cluttered with dozens of club forums they have no interest in. Right now it's like we have to choose between "club forums are buried in the back and cumbersome to navigate" or "get a ridiculously cluttered index page that is possibly doubled, tripled or quadrupled in size". There should be some in between option allowing either the admin or user to filter out the clubs that they don't want to see there. Maybe something as simple as a "hide this club" option for users on open clubs would help too, so at least they have some control over how messy it can get.

[mrbowers]

Most you can do for now is use the side bar for clubs to show listings under the setting options. You can pick what you would like members to see, their own clubs or everyone's by making that number big. 

 

I also use other app from market called collaboration. Only up for it right now is the fact it allows bit more options for now. But fair warning the app maker has not shown any interest to correct some other problems with it as well.

 

 

[Optic14]

@evandixon I wrote a similar topic here:

But in my case I am using Fluid Forum View, so the height effect of exposing all the Clubs is not as bad when compared to yours where you are using the normal Table forum view.

I think we just need an option to show "Last x amount of recently active clubs", with a button below (similar to "View All" on the Your Picks block) to expose the rest of the clubs, or show the full list.

[Sx5Ve]

I need to echo the thread starter as our forum has over 30 clubs for which almost half are open. There should be an option to only allow for clubs that a member has joined no matter the status of the club type which allows for members to be able to join clubs they wish and it doesn't clutter up the main forum for all others who have no interest in clubs. The answer can't be to make all clubs closed as that creates undue burden a club leader when we have clubs that want to allow for any member to join the club if they wish without restriction.

[Jed Rosenzweig]

Yeah, just turned on clubs and it's a mess on the homepage when you get any volume. One issue for us is that clubs are like subscriptions but the public club is a forced global subscription so it appears in all these places when the member hasn't really subscribed to it.