Sidebar Changes

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Teh_ping
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Sidebar Changes

Post by Teh_ping »

Is that list updated? I might want do an overhaul of the navbar within a week or so.

The main idea is to sort projects into certain groups, like from A-D, E-H, and so on so that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such. If there are inactive projects (more than 3 years), they may end up being 'shafted' into another section, so to speak.
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by EusthEnoptEron »

Teh_ping wrote:The main idea is to sort projects into certain groups, like from A-D, E-H, and so on so that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such. If there are inactive projects (more than 3 years), they may end up being 'shafted' into another section, so to speak.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but what happened with the proposal (?) of using a purely categorized system? (Not that I'm against alphabetical grouping - I even wrote a proof of concept for it). ...Or will those sections be implemented as categories?
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by cloudii »

Teh_ping wrote:Is that list updated? I might want do an overhaul of the navbar within a week or so.

The main idea is to sort projects into certain groups, like from A-D, E-H, and so on so that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such. If there are inactive projects (more than 3 years), they may end up being 'shafted' into another section, so to speak.
Ping, I recommend you pop into IRC and talk to DarkoNeko a little bit. I know he's started a lot of work already, so maybe he can tell you what he's already gotten done.

The list at the front of this is no longer accurate. The most accurate list can be found here.

*Goes back to taking finals* cramcramcram xD
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by zzhk »

Teh_ping wrote:Is that list updated? I might want do an overhaul of the navbar within a week or so.

The main idea is to sort projects into certain groups, like from A-D, E-H, and so on so that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such. If there are inactive projects (more than 3 years), they may end up being 'shafted' into another section, so to speak.
Before we do an overhaul of the sidebar, I think it'll be instructive to first clarify the side bar's purpose. Without clear goals or objective criteria, modifications will only end up catering to people with the loudest opinions and merely greasing the squeaky wheel in an ad-hoc, piecemeal manner.

"So that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such" would be a perfect example of subjective complaining without any clear standards. What exactly is "a lot of scrolling"? Is it even possible to reach a consensus? That's precisely the kind of impulsive, shallow mentality that leads to knee-jerk reactions such as adding collapsible sections to project pages that don't really need them, e.g. Date A Live, Owari no Chronicle (layout reverted now) or Seikoku no Ryuukishi. Just because certain readers have read the earlier volumes and wish to save themselves a little scrolling, they decide that their preferences apply automatically to everyone else.

Anyway, back to the sidebar, let's start by brainstorming why a list of projects needs to be on the sidebar. These reasons are by no means exhaustive or definitive but just to get thoughts rolling.

1) Prominence
This is probably the main reason why people are sometimes eager to push for teasers to become "full projects" and gain visibility. But naturally, with each new title added to the sidebar, the prominence of everything else is diminished slightly, gradually and eventually reaching the current state of massive bloat. On the other hand, no matter how bloated the sidebar, a project is still more visible there than under Pending or Teasers.

Another factor is that the App uses the sidebar to get the list of titles (does it still do that?), which is why certain readers complain when they cannot find projects there. With the creation of the Light novel (English) category, this shouldn't even be an issue in the first place, since the App should simply retrieve the list of titles from the category page.

Compared to a long listing, dividing the sections alphabetically would further reduce prominence, because readers now have to open multiple sections instead of one.

2) One-click Access
Self-explanatory. Projects are listed on the sidebar for instantaneous accessibility. By scrolling or the use of Ctrl-F (Cmd-F for Macs), readers can reach titles just by knowing part of a project's name.

If collapsible sections were divided alphabetically, a user would need to know exactly how a title begins in order to open the relevant section first. Otherwise, they would need to open up each section successively to search.

Regardless of how the sidebar is arranged, one solution to guarantee all projects accessible within 2 clicks would be to have an All Projects link which brings the user to the full listing.

3) Browsing of Titles
This would be the case when a reader is scrolling through the sidebar looking for titles to read, i.e. they do not have a target in mind. Dividing sections alphabetically would mean they would have to expand multiple sections instead of one.

Again, as with 2), having an an All Projects link would split the need for a place to browse titles off from the sidebar's purpose.

=======================================================================

On a personal note, dividing into alphabetical sections is actually worse than before.

Given the old, single group:
I click once to close it when I want the listing to be short, e.g. when "Tools" needs to be accessed.
I click once to open it when I need to access a project title.

Now, given that there are 7 alphabetical groups:
I need to click 7 times to close them when I want the listing to be short, and even then, it's still 6 entries longer than before.
Depending on whether I am accessing a targeted title or browsing through the list, I need to click between 1 to 7 times to open the groups.

Of course, usage differs from person to person, which is why gathering more detailed data would be more desirable and objective than simply responding to vague opinions along the lines of "it's too long" etc.
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by Teh_ping »

'
zzhk wrote:Before we do an overhaul of the sidebar, I think it'll be instructive to first clarify the side bar's purpose. Without clear goals or objective criteria, modifications will only end up catering to people with the loudest opinions and merely greasing the squeaky wheel in an ad-hoc, piecemeal manner.
I'm glad you took the time to express your thoughts about it, and I am looking for ways to improve the sidebar (I am without any valued feedback other than yours atm)

My opinion, looking at current trends, is that most people tend to look at the flavor of the season, whether the LN of particular animes are being translated, and to what extent. Most of our popular translated LNs have anime versions, and most of the time, we get our viewers through word of mouth (or keyboard in this case).
zzhk wrote:"So that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such" would be a perfect example of subjective complaining without any clear standards. What exactly is "a lot of scrolling"? Is it even possible to reach a consensus? That's precisely the kind of impulsive, shallow mentality that leads to knee-jerk reactions such as adding collapsible sections to project pages that don't really need them, e.g. Date A Live, Owari no Chronicle (layout reverted now) or Seikoku no Ryuukishi. Just because certain readers have read the earlier volumes and wish to save themselves a little scrolling, they decide that their preferences apply automatically to everyone else.
Unlike the projects you mention, I do find that readers typically have an idea in mind as to which series they would want to read, because when they come to BT, they typically have a few series in mind, and then slowly work their way from them. Also, I do think that the collapsable format isn't about a case of having read the earlier series, though I do understand where you're getting at. I do however think that two clicks , first one on the tab will be faster than having to use the search function or scrolling down to the project we want. (and I dislike the fact that the tabs don't automatically close once we enter a new page.)
zzhk wrote: Anyway, back to the sidebar, let's start by brainstorming why a list of projects needs to be on the sidebar. These reasons are by no means exhaustive or definitive but just to get thoughts rolling.

1) Prominence
This is probably the main reason why people are sometimes eager to push for teasers to become "full projects" and gain visibility. But naturally, with each new title added to the sidebar, the prominence of everything else is diminished slightly, gradually and eventually reaching the current state of massive bloat. On the other hand, no matter how bloated the sidebar, a project is still more visible there than under Pending or Teasers.

Another factor is that the App uses the sidebar to get the list of titles (does it still do that?), which is why certain readers complain when they cannot find projects there. With the creation of the Light novel (English) category, this shouldn't even be an issue in the first place, since the App should simply retrieve the list of titles from the category page.

Compared to a long listing, dividing the sections alphabetically would further reduce prominence, because readers now have to open multiple sections instead of one.
Another reason why I think people are eager for teasers to be 'full projects' is the impression is that BT will be more focused on translating them if it happened, not knowing that a full project is just a 'seal' of completion. Right now, we have 115 titles on the sidebar and 93 teaser projects. In the off-chance that all 93 get added to the sidebar (in 2009, we only had 26 projects, so you can imagine how much the site has grown), the sidebar will become more bloated than before. I do find difficulty scanning through each projects when they fill the left side of the monitor, so the added alphabet categories are meant to narrow the searches down.

Furthermore, I don't think prominence will be reduced just because multiple sections are stored. I do think that multiple sections allow readers to narrow their searches down rather than navigating through the entire page just to get to a project, and sometimes, we can be very blind when it comes to looking for things. My thinking here would be more of 'reducing the amount of hay in the stack to get to the needle' (which certainly is a hyperbole).

In fact, I wanted to go beyond the distance by adding tabs like 'stalled' and 'inactive' and such, but after realizing that it would take a lot of work to edit the pages and move them, I chose not to.
zzhk wrote:2) One-click Access
Self-explanatory. Projects are listed on the sidebar for instantaneous accessibility. By scrolling or the use of Ctrl-F (Cmd-F for Macs), readers can reach titles just by knowing part of a project's name.

If collapsible sections were divided alphabetically, a user would need to know exactly how a title begins in order to open the relevant section first. Otherwise, they would need to open up each section successively to search.

Regardless of how the sidebar is arranged, one solution to guarantee all projects accessible within 2 clicks would be to have an All Projects link which brings the user to the full listing.

3) Browsing of Titles
This would be the case when a reader is scrolling through the sidebar looking for titles to read, i.e. they do not have a target in mind. Dividing sections alphabetically would mean they would have to expand multiple sections instead of one.

Again, as with 2), having an an All Projects link would split the need for a place to browse titles off from the sidebar's purpose.
For the bolded, the only active series I think would have such issues would be Haganai (and maybe Index), and even then, it would be impossible to search it through the find function. I feel that people that are referred to BT through word of keyboard, either by sharing links (which would typically lead them to the projects themselves), or through search engines. Of course, this is when the projects have established a fanbase or sorts. For sleeper projects like Mushi no Medama, some may not be able to remember the name, but a quick search in the 'search' tab should do the trick, I think.

In the instance that people are browsing through the projects, my objective is that readers are able to limit their selections to a given few and read through one set before moving to another. To be honest, browsing for titles can be very varied. Some would want the entire selection available, which we can offer on the category page, others would want a certain few, which is what the current sidebar is meant for.

I'm heavily leaning towards the addition of the 'all projects' onto the sidebar though. Thanks for the heads up.

=======================================================================
zzhk wrote:On a personal note, dividing into alphabetical sections is actually worse than before.

Given the old, single group:
I click once to close it when I want the listing to be short, e.g. when "Tools" needs to be accessed.
I click once to open it when I need to access a project title.

Now, given that there are 7 alphabetical groups:
I need to click 7 times to close them when I want the listing to be short, and even then, it's still 6 entries longer than before.
Depending on whether I am accessing a targeted title or browsing through the list, I need to click between 1 to 7 times to open the groups.

Of course, usage differs from person to person, which is why gathering more detailed data would be more desirable and objective than simply responding to vague opinions along the lines of "it's too long" etc.
I can't refute your personal remarks about this matter as my own style of navigaing the sidebar is different.

Typically, I would focus on one project when navigating, so the subgroup is only about as large as the page itself. I would typically refrain from opening the tools tab unless I really have to. For example, if I want to search for Index, I just have to click on the T-Z tab, and then the second link instead of having to press 3 'page downs' or doing a search function. While I will have to open another tab if I want to look for a series like maybe Absolute Duo, I can simply close it if I want to, and then open it if I want to.

To summarize, I do think it is a case of different preferences on both sides, whether the user prefers to click tabs or scroll. I'll also wait for more feedback on this, but it's likely this will stick unless we can get something better (and I'm doing this just to spur people to post).

PS: When Index is taken down, the New Testament series will be under the title: 'Toaru Majutsu no Index: New Testament', replacing the original.

EDIT:
EusthEnoptEron wrote:
Teh_ping wrote:The main idea is to sort projects into certain groups, like from A-D, E-H, and so on so that readers don't have to do a lot of scrolling and such. If there are inactive projects (more than 3 years), they may end up being 'shafted' into another section, so to speak.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but what happened with the proposal (?) of using a purely categorized system? (Not that I'm against alphabetical grouping - I even wrote a proof of concept for it). ...Or will those sections be implemented as categories?
...I'm very sorry for not noticing this post earlier...

As you can see right now, the alphabets are in categorized form. I can try it, but it'll take a website shutdown for me to do it safely (either that, or I'll have to do this check within 2 minutes). How's it supposed to work?
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by cloudii »

Wow, I'm amazed that zzhk wrote such a long post. <33333

Anyways, I'll come out with my opinion:

If we're going to change the sidebar but not remove any titles, I don't think any form of reorganization is going to help.

Grouping by Alphabet: Like Teh Ping mentioned, there are series that you can't be sure which section it's going to be under. For example, the World Only God Knows or OreGairu.... sometimes the projects are listed under their English titles. It's probably going to be frustrating to click on one group, search the list, and then need to click on the next section to search again. Scrolling always remains easier to clicking. Also, I find myself saying the alphabet in my head because I'm generally pretty stupid and can't remember where "O" should be (lol) xD

Grouping by Activity: Someone mentioned before (I forget who), that grouping by activity makes a reader totally unsure which section to check if they have a series in mind that they want to read. It's definitely even worse than grouping by alphabet.


DarkoNeko wanted to remove all titles from the sidebar, and leave only links to the categories.

I can't really object to it, but I'm sure that it'd take a lot getting used to. It'd just feel strange to have a stark and empty sidebar. XD

I personally think we should only highlight a handful of series on the sidebar.

I don't like the ideas of making multiple subsections that split up the sidebar. I'd rather have one section that only highlights a dozen or so projects.

What could this "highlight" section be? Barring the fact we have no metrics anymore, "most popular projects" is very helpful for readers searching for something to read. We could alternatively have "complete projects" or "complete projects + caught up projects". We could even have "updated-in-past-month" projects. (probably monthly updates to the latter two ideas)

xD In either case, I'm not too worried about administration responding too slowly now that Teh Ping and KH are both custodians. I volunteer that we abuse them and make a more interesting sidebar. xD Altogether, I support removing all titles from the sidebar, or removing most but leaving a handful.
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by KuroiHikari »

I hope to work towards a "Full Project" page.
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Re: Update on the translations

Post by Teh_ping »

Btw, this is the transcript of the irc chat between Kira, Hayashi and me:
Spoiler! :
22:54 Teh_ping well, the main aim of doing it is to drive for action
22:54 Mystes ?
22:55 Teh_ping the sidebar thing
22:55 Mystes IMO, we should have a projects page
22:55 Teh_ping How are we going to categorize them?
22:55 Mystes and maybe configure sidebar to have our favorite LNs?
22:55 hayashi alphabetical order
22:55 Teh_ping The top 10 LNs and such?
22:55 Mystes oh yeah, reminds me
22:56 Mystes Darko had this idea to have the sidebar done through categories
22:56 Mystes it's useful because any mod can pin a project active/inactive
22:56 Teh_ping I know, but I tried to discuss with him, only that he never replied
22:56 Mystes lol
22:56 Mystes why
22:56 Teh_ping no idea
22:57 Teh_ping and I've been going on irc more often this week than I ever did the past 3 years
22:57 hayashi maybe he's just not there
22:57 Teh_ping just to look for him
22:57 Teh_ping mod can pin and such, but I don't want the fallacy of thinking that the mods will be active all the time
22:57 Teh_ping it's because of this that the sidebar was once bloated from 29 to 187
22:58 Teh_ping unfortunately, the wiki isn't very reactive to changes and such
22:58 Mystes categories can be added by editors, not just admins
22:58 Mystes so we basically have more staff to take care of that
22:58 Teh_ping I think that will be better too
22:59 Mystes also
22:59 Teh_ping Actually, my real idea was a top ten project page, and then a separate content page
22:59 Teh_ping top ten projects on sidebar
22:59 Mystes oh
22:59 Mystes take the top 20-30 instead
22:59 Mystes 10 is way too short imo
22:59 Teh_ping so i was pleased when zzhk provided the English LN page
23:00 Teh_ping but that would be too much change
23:00 Mystes first
23:00 Mystes how about we have a "completed" project section?
23:00 Mystes def would help
23:01 Teh_ping how complete is complete though?
23:01 Teh_ping Only a few series can be considered such
23:01 Teh_ping Gekkou can be considered
23:01 Mystes Gekkou is
23:02 Mystes Oreimo is
23:02 hayashi I think it's better if you have a caught up category
23:02 Mystes F/Z is
23:02 Mystes etc
23:02 Teh_ping I considered a caught up category
23:03 Mystes viewforum.php?f=60
23:03 Mystes look at this
23:03 Mystes it's 6-8 projects off the sidebar
23:03 Teh_ping but that will mean changes if new volumes come out
23:03 Mystes these are definitely completed ones
23:03 Teh_ping that I'll have to move them from the caught up section
23:03 Teh_ping and then move them back when they're done
23:03 Mystes Iris on Rainy Days, Gekkou, etc
23:04 hayashi I think if you have a series that's caught up and with active translators
23:04 Teh_ping like Index, sure
23:04 hayashi you shouldn't have to move the series in and out of the category
23:04 Teh_ping but that'll be the only one lol
23:04 hayashi because it's unrealistic to expect the jp ln to come out and the eng tl to be out the following day
23:04 hayashi yeah js06 is inhuman
23:05 hayashi but stuff like mahouka and blade dance are pretty fast too
23:05 Teh_ping sometimes I wonder if he's sentinent
23:05 hayashi as far as fast can be
23:05 Teh_ping which will probably be a month later
23:05 Teh_ping but I prefer them to be in the 'popular projects' series instead
23:06 Teh_ping I do need more discussion on this
23:06 hayashi popular based on?
23:06 hayashi pageviews?
23:07 Teh_ping what used to be, yeah
23:08 hayashi I thought it was frozen because of the load on the servers
23:08 Teh_ping yep
23:08 Teh_ping but they do give a rough idea.
23:08 Teh_ping it's not like we have many projects more popular than them
23:08 hayashi that is true
23:09 Teh_ping another way is to look at number of likes on the BT announcement page
23:09 Mystes reminds me haya, what did you do with the feed of your blog
23:09 hayashi how about a random LN feature
23:09 hayashi what feed
23:09 hayashi I don't use rss feed
23:09 Mystes can you enable it?
23:09 hayashi I haven't even posted a single post
23:09 Teh_ping I don't know how to do that thing
23:09 hayashi I only use pages
23:09 hayashi so even if there were rss feeds
23:09 hayashi you wouldn't see a thing
23:09 Mystes when i try to link to yours, my blogroll acts strange lol
23:09 Teh_ping I do like the random LN feature, but I need to know the code
23:10 hayashi you should ask darko for that
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by Hiyono »

To be honest, I really think there needs to be some pruning of dead branches. There are a lot of dead projects that clutter the sidebar that no one reads because 1) there are no translators for said projects and 2) they only satisfied the previous requirements of one chapter - not one volume - for full project status. At the very least, we ought to cut any project from the sidebar that doesn't meet current full project requirements.

Also, whether or not a project shows up on the sidebar can't simply be a function of popularity; there are new projects which have yet to become popular and there are fully active projects which are less popular. It should really simply be based on translation status: i.e. I'd prefer to see primarily (only?) complete/caught-up + ongoing projects in the sidebar, and not all the "junk."
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by chancs »

Hiyono wrote:To be honest, I really think there needs to be some pruning of dead branches. There are a lot of dead projects that clutter the sidebar that no one reads because 1) there are no translators for said projects and 2) they only satisfied the previous requirements of one chapter - not one volume - for full project status. At the very least, we ought to cut any project from the sidebar that doesn't meet current full project requirements.
I agree with Hiyono's point of the inactive translation project(s) showing on the sidebar. Though for the second point all the projects are fulfilling the one complete volume requirement (except max. 1-2 special approvals). Rest all have been moved to Teasers. I haven't checked for the same for the Alternate Languages Projects.
Also, whether or not a project shows up on the sidebar can't simply be a function of popularity; there are new projects which have yet to become popular and there are fully active projects which are less popular. It should really simply be based on translation status: i.e. I'd prefer to see primarily (only?) complete/caught-up + ongoing projects in the sidebar, and not all the "junk."
As pointed out by Teh_ping in one of his posts above, popularity is in concurrence with the Anime releases of the LN series. More specifically, increase in popularity is because of the animes.

As for the sidebar, I think if we can have hits count, we can display some minimum number of projects based on the no. of hits per day/week/month.

I am suggesting for this because the list can be automatically varied from the hits counts, and so the popular projects are taken care of here. If the readers want to switch over to other projects, we already have the 'Full projects' link on the main page. The 'Teaser Projects' link is there on the sidebar itself.

For now, the only negative point that I can think of is that the hits are counted iff the main project link is clicked. I don't know how to consider the hits on the direct-chapter links (which can be navigated to through the 'recent changes' and 'search'), or whether they are already counted.

As a side note, project SAO is shown as both a 'Abandoned Project' and 'Full Project'. Also a minor change as noted by zzhk, on the sidebar talk page.
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by Cthaeh »

My general preference is that scrolling is better than clicking, and I typically look for a series with Ctrl-F not remembering its exact spelling, so the breaking it into multiple clickable sections is less useful for me personally. The old system of one giant list allowed me to do that on my current tab; now I would open a new tab to the Light_novel_(English) category page, which isn’t all that hard, just a couple more clicks.

If we don’t want the side-bar to be bloated (I personally don’t mind it), then I think the best way is to just give up and have all the series reachable from a separate page. Using the sidebar for special categories such as “most popular” or “completed” is interesting. Another could be “new projects”, listing the X newest projects to reach “full project” status to give them more exposure.

Also, the popular pages idea is going to be hard to do accurately, since the total views popularity doesn’t reflect what’s the exact current popularity, and since page counts are now disabled. I used to keep track of page view statistics, so as an example, I’ll include the top 30 (in average views per day) for the two months before the page counter was disabled (most of Nov 13, Dec 13, and a little of Jan 14). You can see some differences from the popularity based on total page views, though of course some of it does match.
Spoiler! :
rank - Series (# average views per day)
1 - Toaru Majutsu no Index (7431)
2 - Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei (6876)
3 - Campione! (5637)
4 - High School DxD (5055)
5 - Sword Art Online (4947)
6 - Date A Live (4775)
7 - Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance (4169)
8 - Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai (3881)
9 - Log Horizon (3206)
10 - Infinite Stratos (3184)
11 - Accel World (2815)
12 - Chrome Shelled Regios (2658)
13 - Gakusen Toshi Asterisk (2608)
14 - Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu (2590)
15 - Monogatari Series (2234)
16 - Madan no Ou to Vanadis (2103)
17 - Absolute Duo (2061)
18 - Mondaiji-tachi ga isekai kara kuru soudesu yo (2034)
19 - Silver Cross and Draculea (1975)
20 - Maou na Ore to Fushihime no Yubiwa (1940)
21 - Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou (1879)
22 - CubexCursedxCurious (1797)
23 - Oda Nobuna no Yabou (1760)
24 - Ore no Imoto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai (1718)
25 - Golden Time (1714)
26 - Zero no Tsukaima (1675)
27 - Kaze no Stigma (1604)
28 - My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected (1471)
29 - Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru (1388)
30 - Kikou Shoujo wa Kizutsukanai (1371)
Edit: Actually, I'm just realizing that a likelier issue is that listing only popular projects on the sidebar would create a static system, keeping the already popular series high in the rankings, since it gives those series more exposure.

Also, I don’t understand website hosting to any significant degree, but one thing I wondered is if the increased use of Category pages could add strain to the server? The thought process behind that being that the server might have to spend more computational power to generate the category list than it does to bring up a static text page. However, I think the page caching process the wiki uses means that the server is really bringing up that static cache of the category page, meaning my hypothetical concern is null. I’m speaking from a well of ignorance, so I’m mainly just curious.
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by cloudii »

I'll just point out that I have access to a ridiculous amount of data, since Himecchi and I do most of the facebook updates. I've been working on recruiting people (especially enthusiastic readers) into doing this kind stuff, so hopefully we'll have a long-lasting system that will outlive however long I stay on Baka-Tsuki.

Off-topic side note:
Spoiler! :
I really hope Simon gets blog access soon. It's so much easier to recruit readers for this kind of Administrative stuff because it doesn't take any sort of skill to do update tracking.
Anyways, here some activity information. I update it monthly. By the way, if we were to list all super-active projects (update within 1 month), there'd be 52 projects. That's already a lot. If we extend this to 3 months, you end up with 92 projects that are "active". However, this is including teasers.

I also have data from Facebook. Like, number of views per announcement. Number of clicks per announcement... etc. I'll share it if anyone wants it.
Twitter: @cloudiirain | BT Userpage | OreShura Translator | Biblia Editor (@HereticLNT) | Clockwork Editor (@HereticLNT)
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cloudii
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by cloudii »

theoretical question:

Is it possible to add a script into the sidebar links so that it pings an external place that counts clicks?

If we can do something like that, it could be a metric for popularity now that page views are disabled?
Twitter: @cloudiirain | BT Userpage | OreShura Translator | Biblia Editor (@HereticLNT) | Clockwork Editor (@HereticLNT)
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by KuroiHikari »

I'll like a full project page, then in the same sense, we can have it for each of the other languages managed by respective language supervisors or something.
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zzhk
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Re: Sidebar Changes

Post by zzhk »

Definitely, we don't need to list everything (or almost everything) on the sidebar.

The "All English Projects" category page already serves as an automated alphabetical listing.

Thoughts on possible groups and categories on the sidebar:

Groups (i.e. collapsible sections):
Current Anime Season: self-explanatory, lists the projects whose anime adaptation is currently airing

Popular Series: I agree with Ping that caught-up series tend to be popular, hence, there's no need to lump them together with Completed Series as "Completed/Caught-up" and move them out again whenever a new volumes is published.

Completed Series: definitely useful since readers like reading finished, completed stories

Categories (these would be links to category pages):
All Projects: we've already mentioned the benefits of a full listing of English projects in replacing part of the sidebar's functions

Numerical Categories: this would categorize projects based on the number of translated volumes, perhaps 3-5, 6-8, 9-11, 12 or more (the actual divisions are probably easier to decide based on statistics). I don't know about 2, but there's definitely no need to have a category for projects with 1 volume or less.
Readers often pick series based on how much there is to read. Some won't even start a series until there are several volumes available.
Hiyono wrote:To be honest, I really think there needs to be some pruning of dead branches. There are a lot of dead projects that clutter the sidebar that no one reads because 1) there are no translators for said projects and 2) they only satisfied the previous requirements of one chapter - not one volume - for full project status. At the very least, we ought to cut any project from the sidebar that doesn't meet current full project requirements.
Actually, the projects with less than 1 completed volume have already been removed, but the difference isn't significant.
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