STF

A thought on ‘fleet identity’

Posted Aug. 5, 2019, 7:28 p.m. by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) (Joe P)

Posted by Fleet Captain Adam W. (Former Ruler of the Club) in A thought on ‘fleet identity’

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in A thought on ‘fleet identity’

Posted by Ffion Grace in A thought on ‘fleet identity’
As a newish (sorta) member I have begun reading some of the various splinters and branches of the discussion regarding fleet commanders and their roles.

So, using the form suggested, there is a small suggestion I would like to make.

Problem: There are often references made to the various fleets having their own identity, character and history and so on which to myself is simply not visible and mainly appears to live in the memory of longer term members than myself.

I personally like the idea of each fleet having a visible and tangible character but I believe part of problem in making this more apparent lies in the way the site is navigated.

I may well be the only member that does this but I suspect this is not the case. I access the site almost exclusively via smartphone. To navigate between content (my ships) I press the ‘fleets’ tab which gives me a drop down list of the fleets. From this I select the fleet my ship is in, presenting a further drop down list of ship names, from which I select my ship of choice.

Thus, until very recently I was unaware that each fleet even has it’s own page, as navigating via my smartphone bypasses this automatically. Thus to me, visually, a fleet is basically a sub menu header used to group ships and nothing more.

Suggestion: If reviving ‘fleet culture’ and individual character, history, etc is considered important, I would suggest the club modify how the site is navigated via smartphone to a model where selecting a fleet takes you directly to the home page for that fleet rather than simply a drop down menu of ships. Individual access to each ship can then be presented on that page alongside interesting information such as fleet history, vacancies, articles on personalities, ships, etc.

Cons: would slow navigation of the site.

Pros: would increase visibility of the fleet as an entity in it’s own right.

Just my two pennies worth, from the point of view of a newish/inexperienced member with only basic techie knowledge :)

  • Ffi

I’ve looked into this a bit more.

I said earlier that this is not a smartphone issue, but that is not completely correct; someone pointed out that it’s impossible to click on Fleet pages if you are viewing the site in portrait mode on most smartphones.

The only downside that I see to the proposal is that relying on Fleet Pages to provide links to ships is not entirely reliable. Several of the Fleet Pages were ported over straight from WeBBSpace with minimal adjustment to make them render properly, so their links refer to where the ships were in the old system, not the new system. Fleet Commanders generally haven’t been keeping those pages up to date (and we’ve had three different cabinets come through, so it’s not like a single person isn’t doing it). Also, even if that were not a problem, it’s possible for anyone maintaining those Fleet MOTDs to break links on those pages in any number of ways by accident.

I think the solution to that is for the system to provide a uniform ship navigation menu of some sort that only appears when you are on the Fleet page. That I think requires slightly more thought than I orginally indicated, but it still shouldn’t be that hard; we had some early mockups of one and I can imagine several ways it can be done.

Everyone said they liked the idea and nobody said they didn’t like it, and I think it’s low effort, so I will make a point to include this in version 1.8 of Exodus (Version 1.7 is going to release tonight; the changes are all pretty much baked in and I don’t want to delay it any further because the CMM wants people to start opting in for the newsletter now).

Joe

I’ll more directly state then that I dislike this idea. In theory it could be a good idea, but I just don’t believe there will be content on the pages that’s worth seeing on a very frequent basis. There’s a downside every time I want to go to my ship page and I’m not anticipating an upside.

Adam

Ahh, sorry, I misread your comment about wanting buy-in as being a necessary condition as being supportive if people were keeping those pages up to date. Didn’t mean to mischaracterize your opinion.

Joe


Posts on The Command Ship

In topic

Posted since


© 1991-2024 STF. Terms of Service

Version 1.15.9