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OverClocked ReMix Design ?'s and Issues


Liontamer
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There might be some more impressive things that happen behind the scenes that I don't know about, but this is easily the coolest addition I've seen to OCRemix in a long long time.

Nice work djp.

I'm working on plenty of stuff that should trump this handily, but thanks :-o

I've been breaking my back lately trying to improve the site while still posting mixes AND working on a State of the ReMix AND trying to give my girlfriend the anniversary/valentine's she deserves. It's rough.

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I like it. Lots of information there. Just out of curiousity, how much of a pain in the ass code-wise would it be to make these 'modules' for lack of a better word drag-and-droppable? Then people could organize the homepage any which way they wanted (yes, sidebar included) and you may potentially be spared from ever having people bitch about the layout again. I have no idea how you would go about coding that, but I imagine it would be a pain in the ass.

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I'm working on plenty of stuff that should trump this handily, but thanks :-o

I've been breaking my back lately trying to improve the site while still posting mixes AND working on a State of the ReMix AND trying to give my girlfriend the anniversary/valentine's she deserves. It's rough.

Not suggesting you'd want it at all, but how much advertising would you need on this site to be able to work on it full-time and make a living off of it? :-P

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There's even extra space for a sixth module next to the ReMix Roulette! :razz:
Except in cases where the remix title is too long, and the Roulette module's width is extended to compensate.

By the way, it looks kind of odd when that happens. Maybe set the width of the R.R.R. module to 2x the width of the other modules. All that's (currently) there is white space, so unless you have other plans, there'd be no loss.

edit: Then again, maybe that's not a good idea... especially given what the page looks like on lower resolutions.

I'm just being nit-picky now :razz:: give the Russian ReMix Roulette an icon like the rest of the sections, too. An extremely small version of this, perhaps:

roulettebulletsjz3.jpg

edit: mockup with crappy icon:

mockupfo2.jpg

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Chiming in that I like the 4 image limit. :lol:

I approve very much of some of the changes on the site, but that one I could never quite understand and it's always bugged me a bit (especially more now than before). I think you guys have certainly been strict enough with the forums now that at this point you don't have to worry anymore about people making "__ bombs" or anything - now it's just kind of a hindrance to normal posting. It's not THAT big a deal, but I don't really see a point other than unnecessary caution for it existing anymore.

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torrents????

Aye.

Yeah, when I noticed they were gone, I was decidedly against it. To me, those are our bread and butter. If torrent DLs drop off, it certainly hurts the spread of the music. To be fair, so far torrent DLs don't seem to have slowed down, but I'm a big proponent of people being able to find the torrents with minimal effort. djp'll give his point of view, I'm sure.

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Yeah, but honestly, what are they doing there? It's a nice cross reference tool, but I don't think that should be the only place people are able to find them. I mean, VotL has pushed 80 TERAbytes of torrent since it came out, which is saving the site ungodly amounts of hosting costs due to the seed sharing. So I really think those kinds of things should be front page.

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Yeah, but honestly, what are they doing there?

You can't be serious. BitTorrent is a way to download remixes. Why wouldn't they be there? It's not a cross-reference tool, it's a download option!

I mean, VotL has pushed 80 TERAbytes of torrent since it came out, which is saving the site ungodly amounts of hosting costs due to the seed sharing. So I really think those kinds of things should be front page.
'Cause you know, the torrents aren't mentioned on VotL's own frontpage, or VotL's album page, or on every single download page, including mixes from VotL. Oh wait, they are.

The torrents took up a lot of vertical space on the homepage, and in the interest of promoting other important areas of the site that were not getting enough exposure, like the WIP forum, torrent links were removed from the homepage.

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Well, this is an interesting discussion.

Hands-down, they need to be featured/linked more prominently if they're not going to literally be listed right on the homepage.

Honestly, though, wouldn't a link or graphic of some kind to a separate page listing them suffice? There are sites far more dependent on torrents than us that still reserve the homepage for news and stuff... I felt having the entire list was rather clunky, plus it could easily grow, and eventually it'd start to look REAL ridiculous.

Thoughts?

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Well, this is an interesting discussion.

Hands-down, they need to be featured/linked more prominently if they're not going to literally be listed right on the homepage.

Honestly, though, wouldn't a link or graphic of some kind to a separate page listing them suffice? There are sites far more dependent on torrents than us that still reserve the homepage for news and stuff... I felt having the entire list was rather clunky, plus it could easily grow, and eventually it'd start to look REAL ridiculous.

Thoughts?

If you somehow come up with a graphic that makes people understand that they can download a batch of torrents :/ hard work there

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My point is that torrents only become really useful when they're being used to download huge files, spreading huge amounts of bandwidth across huge amounts of users. Thus, they are a REALLY stupid way to download single mixes, so why are they only featured on the download page for single mixes? I called them a cross reference tool because if I was downloading a single mix and decided I wanted a huge number of them, it would be like "Hey cool! There's how I do it!" Furthermore, projects aren't featured prominently on our frontpage for more than a couple months at best, so once again newbies would usually have to stumble across all our site projects before they found the torrents for them.

Dave's right though, the whole list was very clunky. I think a simple frontpage graphic saying something to the effect of "Torrentz R Here" would be fine, but we absolutely positively need to let new folks know they exist before they've ever made their second click on this site.

It's important that we as longtime users step back and objectively say that if someone just tripped over our front page, do we have all our goods on display so they can find them? Yes, I can find it, DarkeSword and Dave can find it, but would someone who's never been here before be able to find it, or would they give up in frustration and leave? Or worse yet, register a forum account and bug us with questions that seem obvious to us and could have easily been avoided.

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Back when the torrents were on the front page, the amount of leechers for Voices of the Lifestream was always in the middle-to-high 70s. For months since the release, that number has been very steady including the day of the removals of the torrents from the front page. If aubrey has those kind of stats available to him, I'm sure he'd verify that.

Days later, now the amount of leechers is at 51. And I think it'll keep going down at least a bit more. Let that play out over time, and the amount of people that would have been downloading the album via the torrents but now won't will get bigger. Potentially losing 20 album downloads every few days is just a bad tradeoff.

I'm of the conviction that once something is not directly available on a website's main page the relative visibility markedly decreases. No matter what is it, if it's not directly accessible from the main page, it will be more difficult for the average user to discover. Even a big link to the torrents page is markedly less effective than putting the full list right there in plain sight.

I thought the torrent listing looked impressive rather than clunky, as it pretty much encapsulates all of OCR's music in one comparatively small block, and also broke up the relative monotony of orange links.

It's tough. I understand we want to give more visibility to the Compo and WIP threads, and it's difficult to not feel like there's too much going on with what's being displayed. I'm not even saying let's get rid of those additions to the front page. But we've got a lot of content delivered with those torrents at a lower cost with better ease of use, and I think it would be unfortunate to inadvertently diminish their positive impact.

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