EPTChangelog
Reorganization of esports forum blocks (previously SC2, Brood War, and Dota2)
- The three separate forum blocks of "SC2, Brood War, and Dota2" have been broken up and reorganized under three new forum blocks called "Tournaments, Games General, and Strategy." The "Tournaments" block lists the Tournament forums for all games, "Games General" lists the general forums for all games, and so forth.
- League of Legends forums have been moved from the Sports and Games forum block to their appropriate locations in "Tournaments, Games General," and "Strategy." If you do opt to change back to per-game blocks in your settings, League of Legends will now show as its own game block.
- The default order of the new blocks is: Tournaments, Games General, Strategy, Community, Other Games, Blogs.
Reorganization of non-esports forum blocks (previously General and Sports & Games)
- The old "General" forum block has been renamed to "Community" and has been moved below the esports related forum blocks by default.
- The "Sports & Games" block has been renamed "Other Games."
- A new Sports forum has been created and is listed in the new "Community" forum block. Sports related threads from the old Sports and Games forum have been moved to the new Sports forum.
- The Health and Fitness forum has been closed, with popular threads moved into the Sports forum.
- Fan Clubs and User Streams forums have been moved into the "Games General" block.
- Added a new Media & Entertainment forum to the "Community" forum block. Relevant threads in the General forum have been moved to the Media & Entertainment forum.
- Bunker build time increased by 5 seconds.
Visual Improvements
- Widened left and right sidebars by 39 pixels.
- Added comment counters for individual articles in the News block on the left sidebar.
- Added viewer counters for individual streams in the Calendar and Live Streams sections on the right sidebar.
- Changed the design of the left and right sidebar headers.
- Changed border color for the left and right sidebars and news column.
- Changed border color for forum posts.
- Borders removed from all sub-sections in the news column (main rotator, community news, featured articles, TL store, etc.)
*You can still customize the forum order in the site site settings. You can also choose to revert to the old organization system.
Explaining the changes.
Though a number of the changes are pretty straight-forward, I'd like to explain some of them in more detail. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to post them in this thread.
Breaking up and reorganizing the SC2, BW, and Dota2 forum blocks.
This is probably the biggest change. As mentioned before, you can go back to the old ordering system by changing your site settings.
There are a lot of reasons for the change. We need to design TeamLiquid.net keeping in mind that we're designing for a wide audience, not just for hardcore esports fans. The majority of TL visitors don't use site customization, and we needed to better prioritize how we used our vertical space for people who don't know TL like the back of their hand.
Although it made sense to have our SC2 General and SC2 Tourneys toward the top of the page, it didn't make sense for forums with lower activity like SC2 Strategy and Custom Maps to push down all of the major forums for Dota2 and Brood War. The general and tournament forums are some of the most active ones on TeamLiquid.net, and we wanted to prioritize their visibility.
Tournaments above Games General
The main reason for Tournaments receiving the next highest position below News was because the most visited and active threads from the SC2/Dota2/BW general forums are typically found under featured and community news already. It was often the case where you would have three links to the same forum post on the front page, which was not an efficient use of space at all.
We also like that visitors are now immediately presented with tournaments, as tournaments are exactly what TeamLiquid is about.
Changing General into Community and moving it below the esports forum blocks
Moving the Community (old General) section below the esports section is another big change. It's a very important and popular section for our hardcore users, but as an esports site covering multiple games, it didn't make sense for general community forums to push everything else down.
Again, regular users of TeamLiquid.net can customize the forum order to bring the Community Forum block back to the top.
Widening the sidebar
On paper this is just a small change, but in practice it makes a huge difference when browsing TeamLiquid. Before, posts and article titles were frequently cut off before you could really tell what they were about. We believe this change will make browsing TeamLiquid much, much more convenient. Our width stays below 1280px, which should still allow TL to fit horizontally into the vast majority of displays.
Because the new sidebar is so different from before, we weren't able to preserve individual sidebar customization settings. Our apologies to everyone who lost their settings.
If you want to pay your respects to the old TL layout here is a screenshot. RIP. TL has come a long way since 2005.
On November 02 2013 02:14 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:
Changes/Fixes:
Changes/Fixes:
- Changed the block section header graphics
- The block section headers link to the forum pages again
- Mouseover shows the full title when it was cut off
- Fixed an issue with the right sidebar being bumped down
- Expanded the cutoff for blog titles and limiting user name length in the blog section
I like it though.
