The Energon Pub

I'm running with the Transmissions them. I really like that name over "News" since a lot of our "news" includes information about site features or other information that isn't really "news".

Anyways, I've wanted to completely change how the news section worked for years. Here's a really near finished version of what I had in mind. It's not as "dynamic" per category as I had envisioned, but it's functional, clean, mobile friendly and covers a lot of info in way less time than the old primary news page did.

SEIBERTRON Transmissions
https://www.seibertron.com/transmissions/

I haven't worked in category pagination yet. I have a different way I plan to do this (I think) but it conflicts with how I want the search to work so I'll have to ponder it some more. As I'm typing this, I'm thinking I'll probably just end up having it work in a way that the "sort order" links in the toy galleries are integrated initially with the search form and add some pagination in. Gotta ponder the SEO ramifications as well for legacy stuff. Maybe I'll end up with just a list of transmissions that are shortened like the old homepage.

Multiple full news stories per page like we used to will be no more going forward. I never liked that, it was never intended to stay that way 20 years ago and was just something that worked at the time, people seemed happy with it, so I never did anything with it. Until now.

If you have any feedback to share on the new Transmissions page, I'd appreciate it. Just keep in mind that there's currently NOT a way to get to just "toy news" currently.

I like the idea- the "News" ends up holding so many toy reviews and other things- I think "transmissions" is more accurate

I wouldn’t seperate per category, since it just repeats articles as you scroll down and looks bad due to the repeating. It would be better to just have all news, with the latest stories in big and older stories smaller, which looks good the way you did that. And then after 10 stories have a link to the previous page where we have a list of the stories before that, in the smaller format.

Right now, if I want to catch up on older stories from May, I have no where to go.

Thanks for the feedback, william-james. I'll address a couple of the things you mentioned later (like the repeating news stories ... I haven't added in the same logic that is on the homepage that prevents that yet).

In the meantime, I did a bunch of work to the new "transmissions" news section tonight. There's a little more to be done, but I thought I'd give you guys a preview.

https://www.seibertron.com/transmissions/

From that page of the primary news sections, you can get to the individual news articles such as:

https://www.seibertron.com/transmission ... ers/48591/

From there you can click on the categories at the top of the page, and it will take you to the category view where you can do the more traditional paginated walk through our news archives (such as the TOYS category):

https://www.seibertron.com/transmissions/category/toys/

I'll add in the ability to like and favorite tomorrow. I haven't decided if I'm going to split off the comments for news finally from the forums or not. It's always been kind of "jank" how the comments work with the news and I think it might be best to let news have its own comments section separate from the forums.

I'm undecided at this time. For now I'm leaving it as it has been, but it's something I really want to change. Open to hearing everyone's thoughts on the matter.

I agree with Glyph- the way we "news" already rides on the forum- so Im not upset keeping everything in the existing forums- unless there is a possible overhaul on how we will "news" in the future

kuhlio wrote:I agree with Glyph- the way we "news" already rides on the forum- so Im not upset keeping everything in the existing forums- unless there is a possible overhaul on how we will "news" in the future

There is absolutely an overhaul on how news will happen on Seibertron in the future. I want to go to a model where news can be posted by anyone via the forums and we'll use an "upvoting" system of sorts to have the system determine which news gets front paged or "converted" to official site "news".

What I don't like about the comments in the news section currently is that the comments don't necessarily pertain to the news article because it's just showing the comments from the associated topic that happen after the timestamp from the news article. It's kind of janky how it works. I think people are just used to it. However, now we have a real comments system that the Caption Contest and Toy Galleries are using so I can't help but think the natural progression should be to flip the switch on the news section. However, I'm concerned that with the current setup that doing that would cannibalize the forum discussions. I'm not sure what the right solution is yet. Open to ideas and suggestions. If you aren't familiar with the caption contest or the new comments feature in the toy galleries, please check it out. it's the exact same code that is managing both sections.

There's also a massive feature I'm working on that I haven't told you guys about yet. Let's just say "S.T.A.R.S." and "Robot Points".

Glyph wrote:Think you left the ChatGPT marker in the message...

Whoops. I did. I thought that would be more efficient having it clean up my local links when I was on my phone right before I hit the sack. Oh well. Fixed!

Glyph wrote:Re the Transmissions name - I think it works well in general, but from a new/guest user perspective my question would be: "So where do I find news?" Transmissions suggests blogs/articles to me, and I don't see a prominent "News" keyword anywhere.

The word "news" shows up 7 times before the first news article at https://www.seibertron.com/transmissions/ That's not intentional and I'm planning on changing the news categories to drop the word "news" because a lot of it is blog-like stuff and articles and not necessarily "news". I'm also looking to just do something different. I think the word "Transmissions" sums up what our "news" section does very well since a lot of it isn't actually news.

Glyph wrote:For these redesigns, are you just going with a gut feel / personal vision, or also surveying what works elsewhere (i.e. how other sites are doing it)? I was encouraged to see the gallery functionality added, for example, since that's something I've long felt our news section lacked compared to others.

It's a mix. Some of it is influenced by how I enjoy features on other sites. Some of it is looking at major websites to see how they do things. Some of it is trying to honor the legacy of this site. Some of it is inspired by a couple of fully fleshed out bootstrap templates I bought back in 2017/2018. Some of it is inspired by screenshots I've taken over the past 15 years of things I liked that I saw on other websites. Some of it is inspired by feedback from you guys or features I've heard people suggest that we need but I've never had time to implement.

The new Transmissions section is coming out of a desire to shake things up, Space.com news structure and subsequent pages, and various Bootstrap "news" sections that I've looked to for inspiration.

That's it. The "news" section as we knew it is no more. Transmissions is the latest "branded" section to join Energon Pub, Caption Contest, Heavy Metal War, etc. Just need to come up with something clever for "Toy Galleries". And I really want to change "Energon Pub" to "The Hub", but that might wait until I relaunch the forums, or at least introduce "upvoting" to utilize the forums to upvote content to "official" status.

Glyph wrote:Taking Reddit as the obvious prior art, a system like this would really need two things to work well: a sufficiently large & active user base to distinguish a signal to noise ratio rather than 'blips' of just a handful of users; and strong, active moderation to prevent brigading, outrage bait, pile-ons and other forms of bad mob behaviour. We don't currently have either of those things.

You're right -- We [i]currently[i] don't. But I think we will as I continue to roll-out more changes and make additional significant improvements to the overall experience and usability of SEIBERTRON. I'm a big believer in "if you build it, they will come." It will take time to right the ship, so to speak.

Glyph wrote:Do you intend this to be completely system-driven, like a social media recommendation algorithm, or would there still be a staff layer before stuff is actually posted out? The latter would have more safeguards - it'd function more like "bringing newsworthy stuff to the News Crew's attention" rather than "what's trending on Seibertron.com", but would avoid the system tweeting out something false / defamatory / flat-out vile to the wider internet with the site's name tagged onto it, just because a lot of users had commented on it. It's not like we haven't spent the last 10 years watching real-time case studies in how social media algos incentivise the worst behaviour in their users!

I agree with what you wrote. I'm sure there will be a significant learning curve here. It will need to be tweaked. But yes, heading more toward a social website platform is my intention and moving away from a standard "forum" experience that is significantly outdated. I just want to be able to get back to doing galleries. I loved doing that. It was awesome. But I can't right now because I need to build a new experience on SEIBERTRON. It's a lot of work for volunteers to post news. This has weighed on me for decades and I am determined to find a different solution. I can and should be contributing more to the news section (or at least more content like galleries), but I need to spend this time building the tools necessary to make it easier for everyone to help out.

Glyph wrote:IMO our biggest issue with news is the lack of active news staff, and I see how this system is intended to get around that; but the very same issue of a small user base makes it more prone to swings and extremes.

The news staff gets burned out. It's a lot of work, as I mentioned above. Do you have access to the news section? I'd really like to get your feedback on the process, Glyph, if you'd be interested in working with william-james and maybe even ScottyP or D-Max or any of the other staff members who have been around for a while to walk you through it so that I can get some more thoughts on how to improve the current process.

These ideas I have about the direction of the forums and turning SEIBERTRON more into a "social" platform are for later down the road. My goals first are to improve and/or fix the existing sections of SEIBERTRON (sightings, HMW, etc) while still working on implementing new features (S.T.A.R.S, Big Broadcast, etc) and bringing back some older features like screen capture galleries.

The phpBB forum system we use is from 2007. It's 18 years old. I have been hacking it apart for years and sucking it in more and more to work directly with SEIBERTRON. I have stripped out functionality of phpBB (like their session ID handling that drove me crazy for years) and have been making subtle behind-the-scenes changes to make it easier for me to work with their code (which is surprisingly really well written even 18 years later). I strongly despise their cached "template" / files system and that is something I want to remove as I don't think it's necessary on SEIBERTRON. I might keep it, but it causes more problems than I think it solves. I have been addressing issues with "slow" parts of phpBB by just updating the database queries to be more efficient (again a behind-the-scenes thing that none of you will ever see other than experiencing better load times).

Glyph wrote:Sorry to be the wet blanket! I know how I look here, but part of my IRL job is to think about the ways an exciting project could potentially go wrong. I post because I want it to succeed, not because I want to tear it down.

You're not a wet blanket and I appreciate you taking the time to provide all of the feedback you have for this site. It means a lot to me that you are passionate enough about Transformers and SEIBERTRON that you would take the time to provide such detailed feedback here on the forums and via email.

Glyph wrote:I don't think that's something that needs a code solution; it needs moderators to say "that's an interesting discussion, let me split that into its own thread where people will see it" instead of "please keep all posts about SS86 in the 651-page Studio Series thread." That then also makes it much easier to newsify just that small thread and keep the comments related to the article, rather than eventually filling up with unrelated stuff in the mega-thread. I feel that a news post should pretty much always be a separate thread in itself, not just one post in a long-running topic thread.

The mega-threads are definitely not working. I also don't know about the alternative which is a new thread for every Transmission (i.e. news). It was a lot of work getting people to stick with whatever rule we had at the time (i.e. news about Alternators Hound should have it's own topic) but it gets messier when there are multiple releases at a time or ongoing news about an event like BotCon back-in-the-day. I still don't know what the correct solution is for that nor do I know who will enforce it because that's a lot of work as well. Hence my desire to just figure out a different way to approach all of this. I have not liked the mega threads for over a decade but I don't know what the proper solution is either.

Glyph wrote:It would also be good to have a weekly summary post / article collecting "all the stuff that happened in the world of TF last week." (But those really need to be written by an actual person rather than auto-generated in order to have any kind of quality control! But it could certainly include something like "top 10 discussion threads from the last week" as well.)

There's absolutely a way to automate that. It's just putting the logic in place for it. I'm working on something very similar to that for the SEIBERTRON Store so that I no longer have to spend the time building out these newsletters that I do for my store. Automating those is very top-of-mind so that I don't have to spend 30 to 60 minutes building those either.

Glyph wrote:

Seibertron wrote:Just need to come up with something clever for "Toy Galleries".

...But why though?

You're right. Maybe I don't. I just like the "branded" sections. Imagine if I had just called Heavy Metal War "Seibertron.com's Game" or "The Game at Seibertron.com". Other sites have Toy Galleries. TFW is unfortunately doing something with "Reflector" in the name of their gallery section, otherwise I'd run with something like that. Or maybe you're right and I just really need to take ownership of "The Toy Galleries" at SEIBERTRON because they really are something unique to this site.

Glyph wrote:

Seibertron wrote:There's also a massive feature I'm working on that I haven't told you guys about yet. Let's just say "S.T.A.R.S." and "Robot Points".

Cautiously optimistic, I'm guessing something like reputation points or activity rewards.

You've got it. This is something I've been wanting to come up with for decades, in part to encourage user activity and mostly to figure out how to provide some form of a reward to volunteer staff. This new feature is basically going to gamify the entire website in a different way than HMW. I'm very excited about it and can't wait to reveal it.

Glyph wrote:I'll be honest, this is also a thing that I've worried about for a while - hacking into the phpBB core rather than building wrappers around it, which essentially made it impossible to apply any of their improvements over the last 18 years or anything else in the future. I understand how we got here, but still, here we are.

Just got to Seibertron HQ to do the 30 store orders for the day. I wanted to respond to this real quick and will respond to the rest of your message later tonight if time allows.

Our phpBB has been hacked apart since the moment I "upgraded" to phpBB 3.0. We're about 18 years past implementing wrappers around their code and I have very little interest in upgrading or using their system as-is out-of-the-box. I've made hundreds or thousands of changes to their base system to make this thing do what I want it to do so far. phpBB 3.0 is long outdated but the core database structure is really good and the overall code structure is good for the most part. It will serve my needs and will be just fine as the basis for my overall vision. No need to reinvent the wheel, I'm just going to make phpBB 3.0 do what I want it to do in order to better serve SEIBERTRON and its community.

Let's not put the cart before the horse. phpBB initially needs to get the Bootstrap overhaul like the rest of the site. There are a lot of things that need to be updated stylistically before I need to worry much about an upvoting system for content generation. All of the HTML needs to be updated. The buttons also need to be modernized. The layout of pages need to be updated. The "author" column will be changed as well as the heading and footer of each post. Open to ideas and suggestions if anyone wants to start tackling ways to visually modernize the forums.

And so on ...