I'd like to invite admins and regulars here to this place:

[www.ludd.luth.se]

More specifically, have a go at coming into the ascii art chat. (Just pop in, say you're from plus613 and then leave again, no need to stay, I'm not trying to promote my site so much as demonstrate how my little quiz works).

Way too much reading involved. Nice idea tho to force people to read the AUP. I got upto question 6 by guessing answers without reading anything. How far did others get before loosing interest?

I know there's too much reading, but the point of a chat is to spend (waste!) time, so a little reading doesn't seem like a problem. :-)

Quite a few get stuck on the first question ("Which characters are allowed?". You got stuck on the last question (you're "Fred", right?). Still, the point is to get them to *read* or leave, and it has worked quite well.

People who don't read get stuck on the same question as you because some of the answers are not intuitive (at least, not to some people who have read similar "chat rule" texts before).

I mean, why shouldn't I have some demands on the "quality" of the people I allow to write things on my site...

Sorry, but I think your quiz is defeating it's own purpose. The only people I see not passing it are those that find it boring and tedious and just leave such as DarkKlown. I believe (just guessing, because I am a dumbass) that the "quality" users that you are after will do the same and those that believe that they actually accomplished something by passing your test will become your members (perhaps not the intellectual conversationalists that you are after).

Veronica: yah fred was me, quality users are overrated, just take a look around here. We have only like 2-3 'quality' users, and most of those are hated by the rest of the site (i love you stussy). It really depends on how you classify people and who the site is ran for. If it's for yourself feel free to demand anything you want, just don't be surprised if you find yourself sitting on your chatboard talking to yourself.

I do like the whole questions/answers thing tho, much better than a user registration/survey with the data going into a db never to be looked at again.

I think your biggest problem is that most people are lazy, and filling in a survey to access something they have no idea about is kinda silly. Maybe they should be able to view the posts/chats but are unable to speak/post. If they want to join in then make then do the q/a thing. Problem with that tho is until you have a archive of useful/insightful posts/comments/whatever your not going to get that many users registering, that said once people do register if they can't find any interesting comments they are gonna click onto the next site. It's all a nasty circle.

Anyway that's my rant for the day. Good luck.

dumbassamerican >> It's taken me a lot of work to get it to let through the right people. It's originally designed for people from a specific newsgroup, and most of the people who come from there already know all the technical stuff, and they know what I'm like, and have no problem with the quiz. Most of the regulars either come from that newsgroup, or end up reading that newsgroup.

DarkKlown >> The word "quality" can mean different things to different pepole. In your case it looks to me like you want to draw a line between people who post funny or interesting pictures (high quality) and people who only post porn (low quality), so finding what turns that last group off seems like a good thing to start with.

The argument that I will end up talking to myself or to boring people just does not match the practical experience I've had with my chat. I have two chat rooms, the one with the quiz is *very popular*, the other one is completely "open", it is also completely *empty* (they are technically very similar, and I keep an eye on both of them and reply to people who enter).

As for getting an idea of what is going on in there:

[www.ludd.luth.se]
[www.ludd.luth.se]

(yes, I'm hopelessly behind with the archive, but that's because there's just too much to read in the newer logs...)

Also, note that this particular chat was set up for people who already knew each other from another forum, so they already do have an idea of what they'll find.

Somebody mentioned slow scrolling, which inspired me to play with one of your pages:

[www.ludd.luth.se]
[www.ludd.luth.se]

Apparently the slowness is in the transparent background, so not helped by this, but it was fun to "play designer" on other people's pages anyway.

veronica post a nude photo of youself. we all would love to see it right fellas? nothing sleezy just a good nude picture so when we read your forum we all can picture an Image of you.

Hmm, I wonder why such a system was suggested in the first place....

Funniest thing you've said allan. LMAO!

Why post them here when I have my own homepage?

This page is TOO MUCH to read all of.

whats with numbers after peoples names????

I didn't put that in. Must be some kind of ID tag (?)

*Stussy* check out : [www.plus613.com] for a brief explaination of of the numbers after some peoples names.

*Veronica* I like your second design for plus613.com and hopefully one day we will design version 3 of plus613

revert >> I just didn't see any need for so much navigation on those content pages...

At some point at school we did tree structure diagram thingies to describe what goes on in a program, and I have found that thinking that way about web pages works too. I see a site as consisting of two types of pages, navigation pages and content pages, where navigation pages are like the "branches" of those tree structures (or like the directories/folders on a computer, or your thumbnail pages, or your forum subject list...) and the content pages are "leaves" (files in computers, your image and discussion pages).

The two types of pages have different "needs". A content page with lots of text (like this discussion page) needs to be easy to read (so that people will want to stick around long enough to read all of it). A content page like those picture pages needs to be fast (because visitors are going to look at very many, very similar pages). It also needs to not have too much fluff at the top, but also to have *necessary*, minimal navigation at the top (because scrolling sucks, unless it's scrolling to view a *good* large picture).

(on my own homepage I have made the navigation pages blue and the content pages grey)

The voting buttons are nice and small, and plain prev/next buttons would also be useful (e.g. one might not want to vote at all about some pictures, e.g. I have no opinions, good or bad, about most celebrity pictures, or sports pictures, or ...) Maybe such links could be "buttons" in the same "series" as the little stars?

*All* pages need to have home links that lead to the homepage of the site and/or sub-site. In this case maybe there should be "home" as in home to [www.plus613.com] as well as "up" as in "home to the gallery page that has this picture on it". Also, all pages should have a little something that marks the end of the page (if you used Netscape in the 90's you understand why... that particular browser may not be the latest and greatest now, but the need for a feeling of "completeness" will probably always exist). The "post your own comment" line could be such an end. A feedback email address on each page is also a good idea... (but these are just my opinions about what is good web design)

(and now I've made yet another looooooooong post, sorry Dub_Kingdom!) :-)

Thanks for the suggestions *Veronica* and for the most part I agree with your design methodology and for any small website I agree 100%. However I guess we're trying to create some sort of community where people can keep unto to date with the site where ever they are. Scaling back the design on plus613 has been thrown about since day one but once people get use it they want to keep it. =) I’ll bring it up again showing your designs.

How about the forum you never made a sample design for that, have any design / feature suggestions?

how do I get your website veronica?