Forum:Navigation Bar Change

Forums: War Room → Navigation Bar Change

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Unless there is some sort of crack on the top half of your computer screen, you have probably noticed the wiki's new navigation bar, with all the cool categories, nifty drop-down menus, bold tabs, and...

...and some not so good stuff. It has come to my attention that the new wiki navigation bar may have some issues. And whether they can possibly be fixed or not, I think the community should be noticed. Many useful pages and content hubs seem to have just disappeared from the wiki now. With over 100 links across the expansive complex of different tabs and menus, many pages that everyone in the wiki should be seeing aren't being seen. In fact, it's been taking me a while lately just to find old pages that I exactly knew where to find in the old menu. So I have created the following list.
Navigation Bar Pages Which Are Hard to Find:

These important pages which were once simple to locate in the old navigation bar are either mixed in with not-so-important pages or just are overshadowed by other links. If something can be done, I think it should be done. --BlackMonkey ^{Talk - Fire & Ice} 20:01, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

Those are indeed some important pages. It should be simple to just move them to top of their respective lists. --AvatarRokus Ghost (Message me • Read my fanon)

20:27, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

Moving them to the top of their respected lists may not be enough. I feel that there are just too many unnecessary links throughout the nav bar, it's frightening. There's five categories, and about five categories in each of those - some of the category headers being links, others not - with about six pages in each. Since when have we needed Specialized Bending Techniques, The Last Airbender Actors, or IRC User Times in the main navigation bar? Talk about navigation... --BlackMonkey ^{Talk - Fire & Ice} 20:55, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

I've been runnin' into the same problems, so it'd be real helpful if we could change the pages in the navigation bar. Also, I don't think this goes here, but is the new navigation bar being implemented over at Avatar Answers Wiki? TheOldMasters (talk • contribs) 20:57, October 11, 2011 (UTC)

BlackMonkey: My reaction to the suggestion on this forum is unfortunately total disagreement and opposition. Recently, reasonable requests regarding the new navigation have been quickly accommodated — including links to site maps and a whole sub-menu for the fanon portal — but I'm afraid I do not find this reasonable.

You may or may not be aware of this, but as Facebook "like" statistics heavily suggest, visits to this wiki are heavily concentrated on barely a couple of dozen articles. Even among this subset, a skew towards our Legend of Korra article is immediately apparent. Since it was created under Avatar: Legend of Korra last year, it has been "liked" a total of 27,000 + 19,000 times. By contrast, even our main page and our Korra article only have 1,000. Iroh has less than 100. There is a rule of thumb to web design that says that every extra click to get to a page reduces visits to it by up to 50%, and dramatically increases the likelihood that the reader will think, "Well, I got what I came for..." and promptly close the Avatar Wiki tab in their browser. It's well known that reducing the number of clicks and expanding navigation can only have a positive effect in lifting the total number of pageviews.

We work really hard on all of our articles and community discussions and projects, and we would obviously like to see these hidden gems seen by more people. So what do websites in this situation do? The traditional Wikipedia approach was to introduce navigation templates at the bottom of articles. We used to have them too. We had a general one that was on every article, and others for characters, creatures, locations etc. And guess what — they were a huge resource to load, with all the extra javascript and dozens of those cumbersome links, and because they were collapsed to avoid being ugly and intrusive, many readers never even saw those links. So after this was complained about by a member of Wikia staff, we took action, expanding the sidebar menu navigation we had at the time to include almost one hundred links, which included the vast majority of what is now on our new navigation. (We even had links to every single last episode article.) This system of navigation was in use from early 2009 onwards with remarkably few adjustments until the Wikia redesign of November 2011. Some more experienced users will remember it.

While the links to every single last episode in our last iteration of menu navigation may have been a little excessive, I maintain that this was our most effective period in terms of navigation. The popularity of the site skyrocketed in 2010, but the important thing to note was readers (not necessarily users) stuck around after the excitement of the release of Shyamalan's woeful adaptation. That didn't happen in 2008 during the series finale, when users saw what they came for and left. It's all about making the site engaging, seem full and "stickier". Yes, there were other factors, such as comments, but as one of the central foundations of a site's success, navigation played its part. That was until Wikia cut down our options to a measly 28 links. Since we had disposed of other "general" means (as opposed to the "topical" means that are categories) of navigation long ago, we were thrust back into the Stone Age.

The recent expansion of our navigation is intended to bring more of our content and community projects and pages to the surface. Rather than having to dig through sub-category after sub-category, they can get there without leaving the page they're currently on. Menus are much easier to negotiate, so in terms of content pages, the more we can reasonably fit in the menu, the more likely users will find our less visited content. Moving navigation in this direction makes users more likely to hit all the great content we have, rather than just leaving after making a round trip of our most popular dozen articles. Like I said, we don't want that — otherwise why on Earth did we spend hours writing them?

Moreover, what you personally would like to see and what you personally would find useful is not always or even necessarily what is best for the thousands of readers who want to navigate our content. I understand — regulars will want more prominent links to tools and project pages. But readers just don't care about this kind of thing, and need more links to content, such as the article and the film category you so kindly mentioned. So some compromise is essential to any setup; the idea is that you will get used to finding what you need, anyway. People did that before when we employed an even larger system of menus without a murmur of complaint — in fact, it was when we were cut down to the Stone Age of 28 links that the complaints started.

Speaking as one of the people who have been maintaining our navigation for more than two years, any change will demand some patience as users adjust. I implore you to understand what is being attempted here and try to adjust. Trust me — I know from past experience it doesn't take that long. The 888th Avatar (talk) 10:29, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

I should mention that we're constrained by a limit of five links across for each tab. Moving some of those suggestions up would require the links at the top to be folded into the menu or removed altogether. The 888th Avatar (talk) 10:37, October 12, 2011 (UTC)

Wait a second. What? What I personally want to see? I've made it clear that this is for the community, ARG has responded reasonably and TheOldMasters has supported me. Even with the "experienced user charm" on you side, which makes everything sound reasonable, you're wrong.

As much as I love Facebook likes and a bigger community, maybe you should really think about this. I most definitely understand your concerns that visitors will look at less pages if they have to click more links, but really, I think that's only a minor factor in the grand scheme of things. We've had at least two users joining every day for the past two months, which was back when we had the old navigation bar. Lets add up the points. Two users x two months + old nav bar = the old nav bar still attracted users.

That brings me to another thing. If the old nav bar still attracted new users, which it was, if the new user deal was all wrapped up, which it was, and if the community was still growing, which it was, the more experienced users should be coming next. I'm not really very concerned with the canon articles at all, but when it comes to the community and network tabs, it becomes very hard to find certain pages. One of the things I really don't like is that some of the category headers are links to certain useful wiki hubs, including the community portal and fanon main page. These are pages that many users, new and old, should be seeing on a daily basis. But when someone hovers their mouse over the bold "Fan Fiction Portal" or "Interaction" that would bring them to these hubs, a new snazzy menu pops up with many cool links, which they'll most likely click. My concern is that the subtopics on the menus are overshadowing the large menu topics, which are the things that actually bring people to cool pages.

Concluding this, I realize your points and understand what you're trying to say, but I still think something should be done. As I also realize that it may be hard to do this, if it could be done at all. I don't know why you don't find this reasonable - I personally found your rant a bit out of control. This is an encyclopedia. That navigation bar is the table of contents. Encyclopedia's don't have table of content's leading to different important words, but different important categories of words. The same works here. --BlackMonkey ^{Talk - Fire & Ice} 19:57, October 13, 2011 (UTC)

Your confrontational-from-the-go approach on this thread and in other areas of the wiki recently is something I have not appreciated, I'm afraid, and I think my frustration shows as I tend to respond in kind. Here's a tip: If you don't like a recent change or a state of affairs, consult the person who is responsible for the change first rather than going over their head with a full War Room thread from the beginning. It's just good manners. People volunteer precious time trying to do the best job they can. Further tip: if you find something confusing or just not right and you want change, never make suggestions in a way that can even be remotely be understood to mean that the current system could only have been instituted by an idiot.

Yes, what you personally want to see. Every person — veteran, regular, newbie or reader — will find different things useful on a wiki. If I were to build the entire site's navigation based on what I would want, it would be filled with special pages and maintenance tools, about half a dozen different logs and a score of the user talk pages that I stalk. (*shifty glance*) But is this useful for everyone? Does this cater for the 90% of traffic on this wiki who aren't editors?

I'm afraid I personally don't understand the logic behind your claim is "the old nav bar still attracted users". Since when has the navigation bar been about getting users to sign up? It's about getting casual readers to read more by making it easier for them to find more. The number of users signing up is no indication of a navigation's success, which can only be told by the relative popularity of articles through "likes" and page hits. I would use the latter as it is more definitely accurate, but those statistics are only available to Wikia.

That said, I appreciate your concern about the visibility of the link to the fanon portal main page, and I've just added an additional link to the top of that menu to that page. However, I'm a bit iffy on putting out another link to Community Messages when we already have four links on the navigation to that page and when it's linked every single time we send out a community message. I personally think that'll do, but if you have any other specific ideas, feel free to suggest them. The 888th Avatar (talk) 23:20, October 13, 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, 888, for adding the fanon main page to the navigation bar. I appreciate it. As for the rest of your response, I could most definitely write up a long, angry rant as I did above. But I won't. Because I can see that you are not going to listen to my ridiculous concerns, even if I did add another huge part to this huge debate, and I can tell that you are frustrated. So to do all of us a favor, I am ending this discussion here and now. It's just good manners, as you have said. I hope that this somewhat offensive conversation can be forgotten, although I'd appreciate it if you no longer compared my ideas to ones made by idiots. Thank you for debating with me, as I always have been fond of a good debate, and I hope we can move on. --BlackMonkey ^{Talk - Fire & Ice} 19:05, October 14, 2011 (UTC)

There is however, another small matter I'd wish to have rectified if possible, while we're still on topic regarding the new nav bar. This regards the "wiki activity" button that was replaced. With the previous nav menu, all one had to do to get to the recent wiki activity page was to click the aforementioned button (located to the right of the "random page" button). Since the implementation took place, a user now has to click the replacement box ("Contribute") and then click the "Wiki Activity" subset once expanded. I don't know if I speak for a large constituent of users here, but I at least know that I don't want to have to click twice to get to a page I could previously get to just by clicking once. This is especially noticeable whenever my internet connection encounters periods of sluggishness (which has happened a few times in the last week) and I just want to get to the updates page sooner. Could that subset be taken out of the "Contribute" functions and placed beside it as a standalone function to make it easier to access the wiki activity page? Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem 19:22, October 14, 2011 (UTC)

There is an easier way if you don't want to click twice: I always go to the wiki activity by just hovering over the "on the wiki" and then click "wiki activity". You only have to click once then. Lady Lostris /

SOAP 20:12, October 14, 2011 (UTC)

That's true. Wasn't thinking of that.. thanks. But now it means there are two ways to access the wiki activity page. The function subet of the "Contribute" button leading to Wiki Activity is now considered a redundancy. Is it even worth leaving that in when the link that LL pointed out already exists? Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem 20:41, October 14, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't really like that contribute button. --BlackMonkey ^{Talk - Fire & Ice} 20:45, October 14, 2011 (UTC)

I would recommend removing the "Contribute" button using CSS and/or replcing it with new buttons, which will probably be like the previous "Random page" and "Wiki activity" buttons. You can ask The 888th Avatar for it. :) – Natsu11 · (wall • Nanatsu no Taizai) 01:13, October 20, 2011 (UTC)