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Mister Phes

⚠️ [NEW FEATURE] MOC Sidebar - for Desktop Users ONLY! ⚠️

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Desktop forum users may have noticed a new sidebar featuring MOCs has appeared in the recent times.image.png

Basically, this is a selection of recent MOCs blogged on Classic-Pirates.com which appear in random order each time the webpage loads.

It was added to inject more colour and visual interest into the forum... plus each MOC has a Short Cut menu so you can easily navigate to webpages where more information can be found.

And yes, like all new features it may have some bugs, some I've noticed are:

  • Sometimes the sidebar is a little slow to load. But this is due to it pulling in data from another website.  Perhaps a more efficient (and time consuming) solution could be implemented in the future, but the current solution was the quickest to implement.
     
  • Sometimes the Short Cut menu for the LEGO Ideas submission (at the bottom of the sidebar) is "cut off".  This because the combined height of the MOC images is exceeding the maximum height of the sidebar.  One possible solution is to reverse the direction of the menu so it drops up instead of down.
     
  • If Classic-Pirates.com is down then the sidebar won't load and there may be an error message.

 

That aside...

What are your thoughts? Any feedback? Is this feature useful? How could it be improved?

 

 

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Well... I like it!  I don't know if it's particularly "useful" but it adds some visual interest to the forum and it's nice to see builds that might have been missed... or just to get into the pirate mood before even clicking into a thread.  :pir-classic:

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Thank you for the feedback! :thumbup:

49 minutes ago, deraven said:

I don't know if it's particularly "useful"

Depends if you want to recreate the MOC yourself.  In the Facebook Group we get regular requests for building instructions, so with this sidebar you can now easily access third-party instructions from the Drop Down menu.

Same with LEGO Ideas.  If you want to support the MOC, you can now access the LEGO Ideas page in a couple of clicks.

49 minutes ago, deraven said:

it's nice to see builds that might have been missed... or just to get into the pirate mood before even clicking into a thread

Yeah, that's the problem with a forum - they're very text based.  So the topics don't have thumbs or preview images to draw people in.

When new members arrive at the forum, we want to draw them towards the highlights as quickly as possible.

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Very nice addition. :pir-thumb:

Makes the Pirates Subforum even more interesting.

Personally, I haven't noticed any problems yet. It's working flawlessly in my browser.

Edited by Brickander Brickumnus

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I love it.
Makes the page more colorful and interesting.
The only 'drawback' might be one could get distracted from what they were going to do on the page in the first place. :pir-huzzah1:

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Great new feature!

Really appreciate the link to the blog post. :wink:

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I like the extra visual splash that it gives the sub-forum! I agree that with forums being so heavily text-based, that this adds in some much needed graphical spice to the view.

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@Mister Phes, I think the expired projects should be under the "LEGO Ideas" column as well, just without a support button.

Thanks in advance!

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13 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

@Mister Phes, I think the expired projects should be under the "LEGO Ideas" column as well, just without a support button.

There is only room for one LEGO Idea project so it's not beneficial to display expired projects because that robs current projects of exposure.

However, expired LEGO Idea Projects should still display in the "Featured MOCs" section.

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Hi @Mister Phes, I know I am supposed to post in the topic, but I will post here since I don't want to make them public yet.

Here are some quick suggestions:

  • Sometimes the same MOC will be shown twice on the same page. For example this project has been shown on both the "Pirate MOCs" sidebar and the "LEGO Ideas" sidebar at the same time, if possible I think it should be prevented.native
  • Is it possible to implement the feature in other forums? The only issue is that it might make the Pirates Forum stand out less... :pir_tong2:

Thanks in advance!

Edited by JintaiZ

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I like it, I've just seen this way some MOCes that I may have missed otherwise.

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9 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

Hi @Mister Phes, I know I am supposed to post in the topic, but I will post here since I don't want to make them public yet.

Was there a particular date you were going to make these ideas public?

I'm not answering twice so they'll need to be public now.

9 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

Sometimes the same MOC will be shown twice on the same page. For example this project has been shown on both the "Pirate MOCs" sidebar and the "LEGO Ideas" sidebar at the same time, if possible I think it should be prevented.native

It seems the current LEGO Ideas Projects are displaying in both sections.  I intend to fix this in a future update.

9 hours ago, JintaiZ said:
  • Is it possible to implement the feature in other forums? The only issue is that it might make the Pirates Forum stand out less... :pir_tong2:

No, it's not possible.

Each forum would need it's own blog and a developer to integrate the blog into the forum... and I certainly don't have time to do this other forums.

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10 hours ago, Mister Phes said:

Each forum would need it's own blog and a developer to integrate the blog into the forum... and I certainly don't have time to do this other forums.

What I meant was that staff can feature topics themselves, so there shouldn't be any blog posts required.

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23 minutes ago, JintaiZ said:

What I meant was that staff can feature topics themselves, so there shouldn't be any blog posts required. 

That is entirely different  functionality - it creates a post on the Frontpage of Eurobricks.

There is no way to feature a topic and make it appear in the MOC Sidebar.

 

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12 hours ago, Mister Phes said:

It seems the current LEGO Ideas Projects are displaying in both sections.  I intend to fix this in a future update.

It also looks like the same thing is happening with BOBS builds.

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