: So, as many of you know most of the day to day stuff for HBO is done by
: MacGyver with Wu occasionally popping on to flip(or not flip) the switches
: needed to keep things running. As a newer arrival to the page(circa Halo
: 3) I don't have as much rose tint in my glasses as others. And so one day
: I'm playing Halo with MacGyver and we get on the subject of HBO and
: attracting new users. We mostly focused on the forum side of things and
: talked about bringing it into a more modern and accessible format. The
: entire conversation boiled down to one looming issue. This site is built
: off heavily customized and unique code that is now well over a decade old
: and has had numerous patches tweaks and redundancies built atop it and
: each other, and to completely overhaul the site could open a can of worms
: far deeper than we can imagine. However, this redesign although minor is a
: nice step. But I think the site, especially the forum needs a complete
: redo, but we can't scrap or get rid of what's already here because by this
: point some of the stuff on here is so old that this place might as well be
: considered a national heritage site. I'd like to open up a conversation
: between us about the possibility of giving the forum a modern and more
: accessible format while still keeping the old style and all the old info.
: Chat, discuss, argue, tell me and each other what guys think and you more
: savvy individuals start working your little coding magic and see if it can
: be done. In conclusion, nice update Fuchs and I'd like to see more changes
: to help make the site relevant in this day and age without losing any of
: that old school charm.
Cleaning the forum up in terms of basic stuff (responsive design that utilizes more real estate, is a bit easier to read on mobile) should be fairly easy, like dealing with the front page—it's so old that it's pretty basic to spruce things up. Beyond that, though, it gets beyond my ken—besides deploying a few packaged forums on FUD and the like I have no real ability with it.
Destiny.Bungie.org has overall a fairly similar forum setup to HBO—a view based on threaded conversations, which personally I find a lot easier to scan and enjoy than the usual forums. Not sure how different that is compared to what we've got now, though. I'm sure there's a lot beyond the cosmetics.
(On that note, even DBO isn't particularly great to surf on mobile, though.)
