Talk:Diablo III Wiki

Featured Article Rotation

Ok, I think we need to come up with a plan to rotate articles in the Featured article section of the main page. I think concentrating on things that are new and/or different in Diablo III is a good place to start. The Auction House was a perfect place for it to start btw. :D How about Crafting next? The Crafting system in Diablo III is completely different than it was in Diablo II, so getting that front and center might be a good idea? It's also an area that we have a relatively good article for. -- Wynthyst talk 18:58, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Additional items deserving main page consideration

We should have a more extensive News section, while the Wiki news is great, it's also pretty standard/typical to provide game news on the mainpage as well. These could be as simple as direct links to news items on the forum (creating cross traffic links which is always good) to links directly to the Current Patch notes (here on the wiki), as well as confirmed future features. There has been a lot of activity on the wiki, but there is also stuff happening in the game. We should also have a BlizzCon page to highlight each BlizzCon's Diablo III news. -- Wynthyst talk 04:52, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I like those ideas. Where would we best include such links? Diablofans news could be placed under the wiki news, although it does place it very far down on the page. Patch notes are already linked but could perhaps be a given a more highlighted spot, though I don't think that will be necesasry until game launch. A Blizzcon page would be nice, just like a lot of other pages would also be nice to have right now :)--PhrozenDragon 08:30, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, maybe adding 2 additional portal boxes.. make the featured article and wiki news half the size they are now vertically, and add Game News and Updates.... (game news should probably be placed above the wiki news.. -- Wynthyst talk 15:05, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

I could only see one new portalbox in your suggestions. What would the other one be? Game news above wiki news I guess that's fine. On the one hand people might be more interested in that, but on the other seeing the wiki getting updates is pretty useful too, so people know stuff is happening.--PhrozenDragon 15:20, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

How important is it to keep the Featured Article on top? I realize it's neat to have and kind of a standard, but it's not necessarily that important IMO and probably won't be as interesting to most users as news - either general game news or wiki-specific. --Kickin It 22:46, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

As I see it, the purpose of the featured article is to highlight something that might be of interest to the user which they might not have come to the wiki for originally. It's a powerful way to give users a taste of something other than what the best item might be be or what skill does what.

Is that more important that showing game news? I don't know, perhaps you have a point in that showing news might be of higher interest on the main page. Perhaps we could have game news top left, wiki news top right, featured article bottom left and wiki links (help, community portal, style guide, getting started guide etc) in the bottom right? Or some other combination, but those four at least. --PhrozenDragon 13:02, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I just feel like the wiki news kind of accomplishes the same purpose as the Featured Article. Obviously there's a little less choice on our end of what goes in there, but there's still a lot of links to pages that people might not otherwise have much inclination to visit. For example, right now everything in the news is Lore (including Anu, the Featured Article as well) except the two D3 quests (which we've talked about being the next FA). It seems the FA is almost always a new page anyway... --Kickin It 16:38, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

My suggestion for 2 new portals was more about keeping the page balanced. I had no specifics in mind. I might suggest you visit some of the other wikis on the network an see what sorts of things are typical on a main page. I just feel that the main page here is getting a bit out of balance, and doesn't necessarily present first time visitors with the best experience the way it is now. Keep in mind, it doesn't hurt to duplicate stuff that can be found on the forum, as a lot of first time visitors (40+%) are coming from direct google referrals and may or may not be also visiting Dfans. -- Wynthyst talk 19:21, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I made sandbox of what it might look like. Tried slimming down the link box by moving some links, but after adding some that were missing we're basically back to where we are now. Then again linking to all item lists from the main page shouldn't be a long term aim.

The three boxes work quite well for wide resolutions, but for smaller resolutions under about 1200 width it starts to get real funky with the images floating in hte text in the boxes. Placed the featured article at the bottom, but I don't know if it's even seen when placed there. Thoughts? --PhrozenDragon 23:56, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

New version has another portal box added and the news images removed. The front page can still be viewed in 1152 width without having to side-scroll. One more portal image could likely be added if we want the minimum width to be 1280px.--PhrozenDragon 11:59, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

This works, but if we're concerned about the exposure of the sections below the links, I really think we need to adopt a two-column layout from the top. The portals section takes up a lot of space and could be reworked as the titles of the link sections just below it. Aesthetically it looks pretty now, but I'm suspicious about the actual usage of those portal links - is there still no way we can gather click rate statistics on those? --Apoc 15:05, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

So essentially splitting the Portal Box and the Link box into six boxes, one for each category (classes, items, bestiary, areas, lore, mechanics) and having one box like teh news box for each of those categories? I'll throw up an example of that as well and we can see how it looks. --PhrozenDragon 17:13, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

New sandbox version compared to the above one with all portals reworked into three-column boxes. This adds a shit-ton of more links to the front page, and I feel it does so without sacrificing visuals. I included the portal images at 1/4th size to keep the visual cues and add something besides text to the page. The headers, images and bottom texts all link to the relevant portals. The "More Information" box is currently rather empty, but that can be filled out later.

The design only really allows us to display five portals, since the sixth has to be there to link to useful leftover information, and adding three more content portals bumps down the news and wiki information so far as to be useless. If Portal:Zones is condensed into a new Portal:World that also includes NPCs and quests (which admittedly makes a lot of sense) this should work rather well after release as well. I can't think of any other topics that would require an entire portal: PvP, achievments, crafting, builds, etc can all be worked into these five principal categories or do not merit more than a link in the More Information box. Alterantively there's also the sidebar to supplement further link needs. --PhrozenDragon 15:35, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I like it alot Phrozen! I think it will serve the wiki much better, make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. -- Wynthyst talk 16:26, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

A third example is now up as well. It's a more clean look that mashes together the portal links and page links of the current layout while also giving the news a more prominent place. It still has some black space on the right that needs to be filled and features less robust links, but it does have the featured article intact and is less cluttered. However the second sandbox example above could use some tweaking, I'll try to make it less cluttered as well. --PhrozenDragon 00:22, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

The overwhelming support seems to have been in favor of Sandbox3 so at this point I think it would be the prudent choice to go with. --PhrozenDragon 17:45, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Overhelming support? I don't see overwhelming support, I don't see anyone saying anything, except me... and I voted for #2. -- Wynthyst talk 19:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Wyn, check the forums. I definitely think 3 looks better as well; there's just too much scrolling on 2. I might like to see a little more padding on the top/bottom of the portal images, and I wonder if there's some way to arrange the links underneath without using so many bullets...they're a little distracting I think. Otherwise, I think it looks great!--Kickin It 00:44, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

So far I've counted Apoc, Kickin, Sinate and Bibi in favor of the 3rd design. I can't say that I like either unequivocally, and based on that the support so far does seem to lean in favor of nr 3. --PhrozenDragon 00:58, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Once again, I need to stress the importance of wiki related discussions and decisions being made ON the wiki, not the forums. Wikiers are not going to be looking for discussions on the forums, I'm not going to be looking for discussions on the forums.... I'm sorry that's not something you are used to, but I think it's definitely something you need to get used to. -- Wynthyst talk 03:06, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Here is a slightly reworked version of Phrozen's 2nd version, I've removed all the blue bullets, and rearranged some of the boxes. -- Wynthyst talk 04:37, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Deciding on a new main page

Right now we have two suggestions:

• Box Layout (based on Wynthyst's example but with the featured article shrunk to 1/3 and news moved)
• List Layout (removed the bullets here too, let me know if that works for the page or not).

We need to settle on one of these and implement it. Look at these two pages at viewlike.us in different resolutions (1280-1920).

	Box Layout	List Layout
Pros	Displays many links, makes it easier for viewers to find what they want. Flexible design, allows us to link to a wide variety of topics without skewing the page.	More asethetically pleasing layout (better on higher resolutions) Easier to read links
Cons	Looks crammed Bottom three boxes aren't visible without scrolling down (depends on screen size)	Doesn't allow for many links Leaves more empty space (worse on lower resolutions)

I'd say that the List looks better the higher the resolution, while the opposite is true for the Box.

The question is this:

• Do the added links create more value in the box layout than the visuals that are lost with the list layout?

From a pure looks perspective I favor the list layout, and since we're only in beta I think its currently the strongest. But once the game is released my question is whether it will work further down the road, as we will then have a lot of articles we will want to link to from the main page. --PhrozenDragon 20:48, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

I did some looking at the Google Analytics for Diablo Wiki in terms of the resolutions people view the wiki at, since much of the main page design aesthetic is linked to resolution:

Width	Percentage
Under 640	2.59%
768 to 1023	1.67%
1024 to 1440	52.44%
1441 to 5760	42.12%

• 98% of Resolutions reported

I hope that helps. -- Wynthyst talk 22:00, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Tomorrow I will be rolling out the new main page design based on the List Layout. There has been no new opinions on this, but the large screen resolutions speak in favor of the list. It also provides a good amount of links, if not as many, and so the aesthetics fell in it's favor.

So far the featured article and wiki news templates have been adapted to the change. Template:PortalLinks, Template:Diablo News and Template:Editing Diablo Wiki have been created for the change as well. --PhrozenDragon 00:52, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

If that is your decision, I would recommend that you do it in a table format so that you don't have the wierd box heights (see the minecraft wiki mainpage). It will give it a much cleaner, put together look, than having the willy nilly box hieghts. -- Wynthyst talk 07:34, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Final design here: User:PhrozenDragon/Sandbox3. The news template doesn't show news until it's moved to the main page, but that's easily changed one minute after the switch is done. I'm going to go through the links in the articles before implementing it on the main page now. --PhrozenDragon 20:03, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

Some display errors that did not show up in Firefox have been resolved, and the final design should now look as intended on other web browsers as well. --PhrozenDragon 01:19, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Looks great now PhD :D -- Wynthyst talk 04:12, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Category:Browse visibility

It came to my attention today that it's very hard to see, or even knowm that we have a root category at Category:Browse. Right now there's only a small link to it in the left sdiebar, and I added another one to the More Information box on the front page, but that's also a mnor thing.

The category is very useful for navigating the wiki and finding information when you don't have a name to search for, but could we showcase it better somehow? --PhrozenDragon 15:06, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

diablo 2 player tiad

if you install plug y can you still play on battle .net ? kind of missleading there. thank you for an answer would like the feature but i play on battle.net mainly