Fantasy Ground Software Good but Getting a Game UP and Running is Horrible

[ddavison]

I made a few slight changes to the calendar to show the description, genre and ruleset on the main page along with the avatar for the GM hosting the game. What are some other items that you believe would make it more useful? Are those changes an improvement or a step backwards?

[darrenan]

I would prefer to see better sorting and organizing of entries, rather than more information per item.
The new layout results in more scrolling because there are less items visible at once.
I think the default sort order should be "Last GM Activity", that's almost always the first thing I click when I go to the calendar page.
Would a ruleset dropdown at the top of the page be useful? In other words, I only want to see Savage Worlds games for instance. That probably wouldn't work so well in it's current form because ruleset is free-form entry when creating a campaign, not pick-from-a-list.
Adding the avatar image certainly makes the page look spiffier, but I don't know how much end-user value it is really adding for the vertical real-estate that it takes up.

Those are my initial impressions.

[ddavison]

Did you know that you can click on the column headers to sort it and click on them again to sort descending by that column?

[darrenan]

Yes, that's why I said that's the first thing I do when I go to calendar. And it's not a big deal, since it's just one mouse click. It would just be a small optimization and I might be the only one who uses the page that way anyway. But in general, I *think* it's almost always the right decision to display more recent items first by default. Once you've found the item you're looking for, and particularly after you've joined a campaign, there are other controls on the page to make it easy to go right there. It looks like the default sort order right now is the campaign name? I guess I feel that that isn't the best default sort order. It's only helpful if you already know the name of the campaign, and chances are, if you already know the campaign name then you've probably already joined it as well, in which case you just click the link in the "Campaigns I'm playing in" box.

Sorting by ruleset works ok, but depending on what you're looking for it could result in the entries you care about being somewhere down in the middle of the list. Being able to just filter to the specific ruleset you care about would give a cleaner view. And also, the whole free-form entry thing means that games using the same ruleset might not be sorted together anyway. Adding a list of common rulesets to pick from, while still allowing custom entries *might* be an improvement, but it's probably more complicated than it sounds.

[JohnD]

I would sort by last activity as the default when you open the page. Now you have people putting *s and other symbols at the start of their game names simply to be at the top of the list.