Let's talk about GP's menus

I think we all agree that the GP menus need work.

There's a balancing act between what helps new users navigate the site (they'll have fewer characters, fewer games, and less idea of where certain forums are hiding), and the needs of power users.

This is a public thread - let's see if we can work something out.

Maybe you can just make it an option? Something like "Quick access dropdown menus". Disable it, you don't get dropdowns. Make it enabled for new users, and if/when they don't need it anymore, they will disable it. Satisfies both sides! :D

I think somebody (who?) suggested being able to bookmark games and characters.

I don't mind adding a little ajax toggle somewhere on the header (or something) to add things to the menus, but I don't know what to do if people leave a game and are then unable to unbookmark it (and I can't face writing a "manage bookmarks" page).

Ideally for me:

The characters dropdown has two permanent buttons: All Characters and Create a Character. Then the actual characters page lets you favorite characters and those favorites also show up in the dropdown (and that shouldn't just be limited to three or four. If that dropdown goes off the page, that's the user's own problem).

The games dropdown has three permanent buttons: All Games, Join a Game (though that one may be debatable, since we want to phase that page out. I have some thoughts on it) and Create a New Game. And then it also lets you favorite games to show up in the dropdown (ideally not just your own but public games as well).

The forum dropdown seems fine to me. Maybe with an added Game Forums button to make @KCC happy.

I'd like the menus if they worked. I don't have many games, so that menu almost works for me. For characters... no. It's just hopeless for me.

I have had gamers ask how they're supposed to access their games and characters when they have more than five, because they're not on the menu anymore. So, I know some people use them.

Make bookmarking independent of whether you are in the game or not? Maybe some people would like to bookmark public games they like reading, too! So as long as you can get to game details page, you can bookmark/unbookmark it, no matter if you're a player?

Counter-argument: if Characters were to always lead straight to the https://gamersplane.com/characters/my/, then new users would always know about existence of the full character list, and won't get confused about dropdown losing characters.

Ah - game details is a good idea. That's always accessible.

I can't remember who suggested bookmarks. Chal? Windy? Vague? It sounds like a vagueGM suggestion.

I definitely mentioned it multiple times. But I was probably not the only one

My apologies.

So:
* Toggle bookmark on game details page, characters page, *somewhere* on forums
* All Characters and Create a Character on the Characters menu
* All Games, Join a Game (to tavern...?) and Create a New Game on the Games menu
* If no bookmarks are found, the site carries on giving its list as at the moment

Now I'm using custom GM char sheets for my notes, I'd really like to be able to pin those to the menu.

Sometimes I think of something (who knew?) that I'd like to say in my game, and go to make a note in my GM sheet. By the time I've found it, I've forgotten what it was.

If I want to get to the tavern, I'll go to the tavern. I go to the join a game page if I want to find a game to look something up (which it's fairly useless for most of the time 😄). But I wouldn't want to move the tavern link to this sub-header

Okay. Would you care to share your ideas about "join a game" in a new thread? I know it's a problem, but I'm clueless about the solution.

Agreed.

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I can't see myself often wanting quick access to a specific character when I am not looking at the game already, so they are on the bottom bar anyway.

I only go to the Characters page to make new characters, add them to the library, or to look at all the characters.

I don't recall suggesting that one, but it seems like a good enough idea that I don't the credit. :)
Sounds good.

The tavern would already be bookmarkable as a forum, so I think skip Join a Game if we are not going to make it the right place to join a game.

If those could have snippets (and such) that we can click and paste into any post anywhere (like the character sheet integration) that would be gravy. :)

I'm surprised our Introduction bot hasn't already asked for this (or maybe she has, and I was ignoring her again).

I was also looking for them in the New Thread page, for boilerplate welcomes to new players in my high turnover games. But the Introduction Bot is copy/pasting a lot more than I am. :)

The reason is that I still haven't figured snippets out. I know they exist and that they're useful. But what exactly they are... No idea.
I really liked the extension snippets, though. Still sad that we never got those back

I rarely use the drop down menus for Characters and Games and I probably won't use the drop down menu for Forums. But I'm not opposed to them either. I can see why some people like them.

However, I love the bookmarks idea! I feel like it would be a good replacement for the drop downs.

The way I would like to see bookmarks implemented would be a new Bookmarks header (which maybe has a little arrow to indicate it has a drop down). The first link in the drop down list is the link to a My Bookmarks page, which is a page with two lists.
1) gp urls that you want in the Bookmarks drop down that would populate under the first link which is reserved for My Bookmarks.
2) gp urls that you don't want in the drop down, but you want to save for reference on the My Bookmarks page.

There should be some buttons to easily rearrange the lists (e.g. move up, move down, move to top, move to bottom, move to position __#__, delete bookmark, etc.), so you can organize the order however you like.

You should be able to manually copy urls into the lists. And on each GP page (regardless of type, so on a game details page, or a character page, or a forum, or a thread, or a post, etc) there should be a bookmark button that if you click, it copies the current url into your list (maybe sort of like the subscribe button).

With this new Bookmarks drop down, I would guess the other drop downs would be redundant, so I'd remove the drop downs from the other headers (Characters, Games, Forum) and instead they would just be links to the relevant pages (My Characters, My Games, and Forum).

For new members, I would auto-populate the Bookmarks drop down with Introductions, Guides, Questions and Help, and Games Tavern.

I think this would improve site navigation.