DDOwiki needs feedback from you, the readers!

[Shoemaker]

As I posted on the DDOstream account while doing DDOwiki Talk on Twitch this morning over in the general discussion area:

We're having a discussion on the DDOwiki about the Table style of the _Monsters_ section of quest pages, and we'd like your feedback, comments, and opinions!!! Feel free to comment in this thread, on the wiki talk page with the discussion itself, on the DDOwiki Discord server or in chat during an episode of DDOwiki Talk live almost every Tuesday morning at 8AM Eastern!

Look forward to your comments, thanks!

???? ShoeMaker

What's most important to me in deciding if it is collapsed or expanded by default is what the readers of the site who don't have and don't want to make an account would rather see. It'll be fairly easy for me to modify it for people with an account to see the opposite, so I need feedback from you if you don't have an account to figure out what the default should be. If you do have an account, I want your opinion as well - it'll help me decide whether it should be an opt-in or opt-out gadget to change the behavior.

Thanks, ???? ShoeMaker

[YUTANG75]

Well, this is embarrassing. For a while, I thought the pages were being updated at that the monster info was temporarily unavailable, turns out the expand button is wayy over on the right.
I like the new layout.
To be honest, I don't know when I would actually want to collapse it. The lists are normally pretty short and even on devils assault (which was the best I could quickly think of), the list isn't that long and not a problem to skip over to get to the links at the bottom.

Edit: I do have an account but I'm not always logged in and rarely contribute.

[CThruTheEgo]

All ergonomic designs should be approved by EllisDee37. I'd put full trust in his ability to make anything user-friendly. That is all.

[Captain_Wizbang]

Have an account. I can't think of anything I'd change.
When I use wiki, I rarely go back the previous page. But that would be my only consideration.

If players don't have wiki bookmarked they should, It's the single most valuable tool we have for DDO.

THANK YOU

[LrdSlvrhnd]

Well, this is embarrassing. For a while, I thought the pages were being updated at that the monster info was temporarily unavailable, turns out the expand button is wayy over on the right.

Yeah, I found that out completely by accident last week while editing a page... asking if the button could be moved (no) or auto-expanded is what triggered this *g* I figured that things were being updated and just hadn't been finished yet for the past month or so.

[cru121]

it looks like i am the only person who doesn't care about monster list in quests. it was me who proposed to hide it in the first place. out of curiosity, what do you guys need the monster list for, anyway? when I visit a quest page, I either want to know about named loot or a puzzle solution. who cares about mobs? (I guess everyone does except me duh)

[EllisDee37]

it looks like i am the only person who doesn't care about monster list in quests. it was me who proposed to hide it in the first place. out of curiosity, what do you guys need the monster list for, anyway? when I visit a quest page, I either want to know about named loot or a puzzle solution. who cares about mobs? (I guess everyone does except me duh)

I have often used the monster list links for various reasons. To check DR requirements, vulnerabilities, special attacks, and also to check named monster differences compared to general monsters of that type.

Having the monster list visible worked fine for years and years; I see no reason to hide them.

EDIT: One recent-ish example is when I was re-doing my weapon recipes thread linked in signature. I wanted to know the best damage prefix for the named ooze in The Pit. So I went to the wiki, searched for The Pit, then clicked the Avatar of Jubilex link at the bottom of the quest page since I didn't at the time remember its name.

I will say that I prefer the old-style monster lists that only included the monster names. The full tables feel quite "busy."

[Shoemaker]

...snip...
I will say that I prefer the old-style monster lists that only included the monster names. The full tables feel quite "busy."

The lists were wrong; they never had all the monsters in the quests, had monsters that weren't in the quests, and many of them included all of the information currently in the table - in a spaghetti mess of blah. I'd be happy to have another discussion about formatting once the collapsed/expanded thing is figured out. If you want it as a list, I'm okay with that as long as all of the correct and consistent information is there and it's not an ugly mess like it used to be.

vs.

and

vs.

for a couple quick examples.
In the first example, you have a bunch of extra text saying the color of the monster, if it's optional/rare, what spells it casts, etc in the list that appears much more busy than representing the monster color with the background for the name and clearing out all of the detail that you should really visit the monster page to get. You can see in the second example all of the CR values types and races that are in the table, but it's more busy looking because it is not a nice clean template which has less wording and clutter.

You can see in both examples that the monster lists don't match. There are monsters listed which don't exist (we don't have pages on the wiki for them, if someone has information for that monster, create a monster page and add it - improve the wiki overall instead of creating a redlink to what you "think" the name "might" have been (I've had to clean up dozens of these, some I put in myself, by going through the quest and seeing what the real monster name was). You can also see multiple cases where the color listed on the quest page doesn't match the actual monster color as indicated on the monster page, for whatever reason. Either the color of the monster changed at some point or someone mis-remembered when adding to the quest page.

In order to redo, HoX for example, as a list that would be consistent; it'd have to look something like this:

or

I personally don't think that looks as good as the table.

[Enoach]

When dealing with User Interfaces one question to ask is "is it useful the majority of the time". Often referred to as the 51% rule.

In this case what is useful about being able to collapse the Monster List? Would it being collapsed be useful to the user?

Based only on how I use the monster list I can say that collapsing the list or being able to collapse the list would be of little use. This is because the list usually falls at the bottom of the page.

Now if the thought was to collapse each section of a quest guide then maybe being able to collapse each section might be useful for those that want to avoid scrolling.

As for the Table vs List format I like the table format better

The above is just my opinion.

- As for your point "List being wrong" you don't need to change how they function to make them "right". Data and Format are two different operations.

[EllisDee37]

For me personally, I prefer this format, though I would remove the spell list for the Twilight Mother:

Of the samples you put together, my favorite would be this one but without any CR information: (Click the links to see the CR data.)

Again, that's just my personal preference. I'm not claiming any given format is inherently better than another.

In the first example, you have a bunch of extra text saying the color of the monster, if it's optional/rare, what spells it casts, etc in the list that appears much more busy than representing the monster color with the background for the name and clearing out all of the detail that you should really visit the monster page to get. You can see in the second example all of the CR values types and races that are in the table, but it's more busy looking because it is not a nice clean template which has less wording and clutter.

Just my two cents, I think background colors look way busier than text colors, and I think CR info is part of the detail you should really visit the monster page to get. (Especially for quests with both heroic and epic versions, the CR data will get long and cluttered.)

But I don't particularly have strong feelings about it either way.

[JonD]

Given that the monster list appears at the bottom of each quest page, nobody will ever have to scroll past it to get to other information they want to see. On that basis, I think it should default to expanded. The corollary, of course, being that if the monster list gets moved higher up the page at any point, then it should default to collapsed.

[Ulfo]

All ergonomic designs should be approved by EllisDee37. I'd put full trust in his ability to make anything user-friendly. That is all.

^^^
This.

[Gargoyle69]

As I posted on the DDOstream account while doing DDOwiki Talk on Twitch this morning over in the general discussion area:



What's most important to me in deciding if it is collapsed or expanded by default is what the readers of the site who don't have and don't want to make an account would rather see. It'll be fairly easy for me to modify it for people with an account to see the opposite, so I need feedback from you if you don't have an account to figure out what the default should be. If you do have an account, I want your opinion as well - it'll help me decide whether it should be an opt-in or opt-out gadget to change the behavior.

Thanks, ???? ShoeMaker

For me personally, I would rather it was collapsed by default.

I do sometimes look at a quest to see the monsters, but it would be rare. The vast majority of the time (>95%) it's not the monsters I'm concerned with.

I'm a firm believer in keeping what I class as "occasional use" things hidden until required. But it sounds like others use it more often, so I'm ok with it being visible by default if that's what most others would prefer.

Thanks for this Shoemaker.

[LrdSlvrhnd]

it looks like i am the only person who doesn't care about monster list in quests. it was me who proposed to hide it in the first place. out of curiosity, what do you guys need the monster list for, anyway? when I visit a quest page, I either want to know about named loot or a puzzle solution. who cares about mobs? (I guess everyone does except me duh)

I have often used the monster list links for various reasons. To check DR requirements, vulnerabilities, special attacks, and also to check named monster differences compared to general monsters of that type.

I second what Ellis says here. And also, they're at the bottom of the list... it loads either way so you're not increasing performance (AFAIK, which admittedly isn't all that much and may well be wrong *g*) and you don't have to scroll through them. As a corollary to your question... named loot and puzzle solutions are above the monster list, so why do you care if it's collapsed or not? *g*

I don't mind the table; I don't particularly tend to care about CR (either I'm gonna hit it, or I'm not; either it's gonna hit me, or it's not; and knowing the CR in advance isn't gonna help in any appreciable way lol) but I know I added CRs to a lot of mobs over the years, simply because others had them and I figured SOMEBODY must've wanted it over the years. (And also, CRs can vary widely on the same monsters between quests and wildies (look at Brown Spiders, appearing from the L2 Garrison's Missing Pack to the L7 Yarkuch's Last Stand).

I don't mind either way between tabled and non-tabled... I prefer the latter, but not enough to push for it, especially since I'm never the one creating them *g* But I also agree with Ellis about background colors; I'd rather just have another "Boss" column with "No" "Orange-named" & "Red-named".

[C-Dog]

If the info is there already, and the table is at the bottom of the page, I can see no compelling reason to have it compressed by default. Even if "you" don't see it as useful, someone might, and if "you" don't scroll down it's not an issue.

Besides DR, there's the occasional need to fulfill Monster Manual requirements, or just plain curiosity as to exactly what you are/were facing.

Personally, I've long felt that the monster lists are under-utilized, that a page showing "when" monster types show up, and in what quests, would be especially helpful for both choosing Slayer-types for weapons and also for favored enemies Rangers. But, by hand, that's a long, hard haul, and I just don't have the wiki-fu to code it. :/

[Shoemaker]

I wasn't the one that introduced CRs into the pages/lists/tables, but I maintained them figuring someone must've wanted them... If consensus has changed on the topic, and they're not important to the majority of people, I'd love to get rid of them from the quest pages and lighten the code for the tables. I'm pretty set on liking the table with the name only having a background color and adding a mouse-over link indicating if there's an image or not and allowing quick viewing. I also like the idea of MM type, although regular race/type isn't important to me. I would like to add whatever hnote might exist, but I haven't spent the time to figure out the how on making that happen, and with all the huge projects I'm trying to work on at once, it may be a bit before I worry about it at all.

However, instead of derailing this discussion further with table vs. list and what columns/information should be included, we should have a new discussion on wiki or Discord about it sometime (I actually prefer when others start these discussions, I feel they "move" better). Thanks! -- ShoeMaker