We may need a standard portable infobox for our profile pages

[Antvasima]

Hello.

We seem to have a rather serious problem.

Given the upcoming forum move, it is not something that we can do anything about within the near future, but I still want to make our community aware of the issue for the sake of long-term preparation.

Basically, our standard profile code is so focused on the desktop layout format that it doesn't work well in terms of mobile compatibility.

This means that many of our pages, particularly those with several header pictures featuring the characters (placed in tabbers) and/or image galleries, look very bad when somebody views them with a mobile phone. Almost half of our visitors do so according to our internal wiki analytics page, so that alone is a serious problem.

In addition, I have been told that Google automatically scrapes the mobile view now, not the desktop, and likely punishes pages with low compatibility for this format.

Meaning, this seems to be the reason why our profiles usually do not show up high in Google's search results, to the point that I have noticed that even wikis that have 1/70th of our visitor numbers, such as "Fictional Battle Omniverse", have been listed higher for various key search terms.

Basically, despite how hard we work with improving the quality of our content, we seem to need to work on our overall mobile layout compatibility in the long term if we want to gain considerably greater mainstream casual visitor popularity.

One suggestion that I received for this was a standardised portable infobox format for all of our character pages, as long as it is well-structured and very compatible with a mobile view, but this obviously wouldn't solve any potential problems with image galleries.

In addition, we often have to use very different sizes for different header images placed in tabbers, which likely doesn't work well at all with an infobox format.

Again, this would be a massive project, given our around 25,000 profile pages, so it is definitely not something that we would be able to apply in the near future. I am just looking for input, suggestions, and to check if any other staff members have experience with creating portable infoboxes. This is also not my area, so I may very well have misunderstood something.

 

[KLOL506]

Well, shit.

 

[DarkGrath]

Hmm...

Well, any changes made to a page would both affect the desktop and mobile version of the page. So options here would be limited; there wouldn't be much we could do to make the mobile pages more user friendly without compromising the desktop pages.

 

[Damage3245]

I'm definitely a big fan of infoboxes and would like to design them alongside other users.

Though I don't think we necessarily need to say that an infobox is a requirement for profiles; as you say trying to update nearly 25,000 profiles with infoboxes is a near-impossible task.

We should just encourage users to add infoboxes where they can and gradually the change will happen as more users add the feature to profiles they're fans of.

If I remember correctly somebody did a demonstration of what Son Goku's profile would look like with an infobox, didn't they?

 

[DarkGrath]

If it's available, a link of that Son Goku profile would be pretty helpful.

 

[WeeklyBattles]

Someone did one of superman too

 

[KLOL506]

I can get working on the verses I am familiar with since this doesn't do much to change tiers and stuff.

 

[KLOL506]

FOUND THE GOKU ONE HERE

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I'm honestly not a big fan of infoboxes as they're a bit more difficult to create and makes the page look less organized, and pretty much everything looks like crap on mobile no matter what we do. Plus as others said, it's not worth looking over 25000 pages just to update all this stuff.

 

[The_Wright_Way]

As a guy who uses this website primarily with mobile, I agree with Dark.

 

[Damage3245]

I would say that infoboxes add a lot more organization to profiles, even if they are difficult to create.

As for what kind of information belongs in an infobox, I have some ideas for that I can draft up.

 

[Antvasima]

FOUND THE GOKU ONE HERE

Thank you, although I think that we should keep the infobox nearly as simple as possible. The versus thread results are not necessary to include for example.

 

[Antvasima]

I'm honestly not a big fan of infoboxes as they're a bit more difficult to create and makes the page look less organized, and pretty much everything looks like crap on mobile no matter what we do. Plus as others said, it's not worth looking over 25000 pages just to update all this stuff.

This is a good point. I am open to if anybody has other ideas for better mobile and Google compatibility than infoboxes.

 

[Antvasima]

I did try to make our wiki navigation bar easier to understand for casual visitors a while back at least. I hope that helps our page view numbers in the long run.

 

[Wokistan]

Mobile has desktop mode, but apparently a lot of people aren't aware of that.

 

[The_Wright_Way]

Mobile has desktop mode, but apparently a lot of people aren't aware of that.

As someone who wasn't aware of that, I can verify that this is true.

 

[Damage3245]

Thank you, although I think that we should keep the infobox nearly as simple as possible. The versus thread results are not necessary to include for example.

I agree. Infoboxes should just contain relevant information about the characters themselves.

Things like versus thread results just belong on the pages themselves.

 

[Antvasima]

So what should be included? Are name, age, and series of origin enough?

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

I think name, age and series of origin is fine to include.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay. That should be enough then.

 

[Damage3245]

Well, that is the bare minimum. I think we could add a bit more than that without going over the top.

Taking a look at the Goku draft for example, we could add include the character's aliases, their gender, their species, etc. All basic info that could easily fit into an infobox.

 

[Damage3245]

Since there doesn't need to be any immediate work done and we're just discussing suggestions, I'll make a couple of test infoboxes to put on a sandbox and put them up for discussion later.

 

[Promestein]

Infoboxes are super easy to make and can be added to pages slowly rather than making it a huge instant project.

 

[KLOL506]

Name, Origin, Gender, Age and Classification for the characters is more than enough IMHO

For weapons, Name, Origin, Classification, Wielders and Age should work.

Also I'd suggest going through a sandbox before applying the changes on the profiles.

 

[Sera_EX]

What does the forum move have to do with how our articles look on mobile? Especially when our mobile files always looked bad mostly due to how our pages are loosely formatted.

Anyway, if we need a new standard format, there's a couple of ways to go about it. I suggest an info box for Name, Origin, Gender, Age, and Classification as KLOL506 suggested. The infobox would of course include pictures of the characters and be situated to the right of the page classic wikia style.

Following this would be the following sections:

1. Summary

2. Powers and Stats

3. Notable Attacks/Techniques (really needs to be its own section)

4. Versus Match Results

Possibly the most aesthetically pleasing and neat our articles could look on mobile imo (and this is coming from possibly the only mobile-only staff member).

 

[Damage3245]

I agree with Notable Attacks/Techniques and Versus Match Results being their own headings on profiles.

As for Classification, I think is a bit too broad of a row for an infobox and it could be broken down into "Species" and "Affiliation".

The former being self-explanatory, and the latter to list any teams/organizations that the character is a part of.

Also, another row underneath name for "Alias" since we already list that information.

 

[Promestein]

Fine by me. I can make an infobox with this stuff.

 

[Sera_EX]

Yeah, I'm alright with Damage's suggestions as well.

 

[KLOL506]

I'm game

 

[Celestial_Pegasus]

Seems fine.

 

[Crazylatin77]

That Goku example looks pretty slick, and as Promestein said, it can be a gradual process rather than instantaneous. I'm in

 

[Antvasima]

To explain what I meant, since Sera asked about it: Given that the current forum will likely be shut down in 2-2.5 months, that makes this a very bad time to start with any major revision projects.

This is since we have to transfer most of our members and also won't have instant access to copies of our then ongoing discussion threads. If everything goes as intended, they will be converted and transferred later, but not instantly. So there will be a long bump in our ongoing progress.

As such, I think that it seems best to mostly wrap up our current major projects until then, rather than start new ones, unless they are extremely important.

A slow gradual change starting with our most popular pages might work though, but there are two problems with this as well:

One is that it won't do anything about the image galleries also likely looking bad on mobile phones.

The second is that we currently format the character images at the top of the profile pages with very different widths, and many of the current ones would turn far too small in infoboxes.

 

[Promestein]

"One is that it won't do anything about the image galleries also likely looking bad on mobile phones."

So? We can't do anything about that either way. That is not a problem we can solve. Not our fault mobile sucks.

I think you're overestimating how many would turn out too small. Most of them would be fine, things are adjusted for the infobox.

 

[Damage3245]

In that case for profiles with incorrectly sized images, those images might just need to be replaced with more suitable ones if an infobox is added to that profile. But the majority of them should be fine.

As for the image galleries issue, that's a separate problem altogether.

 

[Skalt711]

Can't help with the mobile stuff because I always use the desktop mode on my phone. I have no ideas how to adapt our pages to look robust on mobile

 

[Antvasima]

I am mostly concerned about images that currently need 500px width or so being compressed to 200px. It will make it very hard to discern the details in a proper manner.

We should probably start with converting the character profiles for which the images fit in this format, and then slowly find better suited replacement images for the others.

 

[Promestein]

We don't need to discern the details, we just need a picture that doesn't look like shit.

 

[Antvasima]

@Skalt711

All competent help is appreciated. We also need to eventually rewrite the Standard Format for Character Profiles page.

 

[Damage3245]

Standard infobox width is 300px anyway, I'm pretty sure.

 

[Antvasima]

@Promestein

That is the same thing if an almost landscape-formatted image is compressed to 200px. Please take a look around in many profile pages in this wiki, so you get easily visualised examples.