March 3, 2015 by warzan
It's time for a bit of early Spring cleaning for us here at Beasts of War. We've got a wealth of content on the website and sometimes it can get a bit hard to find it all so we're vowing to use this week to help make that process easier.
We want your help so comment below with what you have the most problems finding. Is it videos, themed weeks, articles or maybe even your favourite forum posts?
Help us do a bit of rejigging!
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At the start of this I was on board, tidying up the masses of content you guys have generated is a pretty solid use of time.
Then at the end you mention its about creating work for your younger brother. As an Elder brother, I believe this idea to be nothing short of vile, petty, evil certifiable genius!
As a start, I’d suggest a way to go straight to all the unboxings, and then from there to the unboxings for a particular range or theme and/or a mix of both.
Maybe when you click on a certain game you could have links such as getting started, unboxing, painting tutorials and battle reports so you can just see the specific criteria of a game. Just an idea
Also on the forums page at the very bottom of it you have a list of games if you could just and a couple more recent games e.g. WWX and BMG.
I’d love an easy way to find hobby labs, and anything related to making terrain and such.
I’ve been looking for those and haven’t had much success tbh.
also a separate tag for tutorials in general.
for when you feel like learning something new but don’t know what specifically.
Hobby lab’s are a pain to find if you could sort that out for me
Think i all honesty would like to see all old Vids on Youtube, and the just clear boards to all but recent posts.
Sort of refresh and update, allow new topics and ideas to spread. Move things around a little.
Would it be plausible to sub-divide categories into factions?
For example, I play primarily with Soviets. I have Soviet forces for Flames, Bolt Action and Dust to name a few. As a ‘Soviet’ player I’m interested in almost any Battle Report, Unboxing, painting guide, release news etc which relates to Soviet forces.
I’d imagine there may well be others out there just looking for news on Eldar or Cygnar for example.
I have problem with finding unboxing, Hobby lab, dividing it to factions as @stusidle would help, for me as Khador player. games review. Company/manufacture.
Just being able to remained logged on while I go between pages would be good
when ever that happens just click refresh and let me know if that works.
Is it possible to do something to rationalise the main feed on the front page? It moves very quickly and has an eclectic mix of items. Currently there’s this Vlog, the Bolt Action bootcamp vid, an article, news on Salute’s future, both Weekenders, a review, a news item on Leonard Nimoy’s passing, a couple of DreadBall videos, an interview with Burning Games, and a bunch of WWX content. The latest of these is five days ago.
Could each new item be tagged, and feed offer the option of only seeing items with a each tag? So there could be tags for news items, for articles & reviews, and for videos. When someone comes onto the site they would initially see the feed “as is”, and then have the ability filter it with one of those tags. That way they could digest all the articles, or all the main news items at one sitting. It wouldn’t be something that would need to be done retrospectively so no need to hunt through thousands and thousands of old items to start tagging them.
I do know that there are genre tags at the moment, but these filter in the sidebar items and don’t break the feed down by content type. At least as far as I can tell that’s what they do.
Just a separate page that is marked as videos, and then on that page are all the different folders types of all ur vids, so people can also see other subject that might fancy looking at
My main use of BoW is to watch videos whil I paint. Categorising old video content so it is accessible as possible is no. 1 for me. By game system is minimum. Old hobby stuff is essential too as it is timeless and i may actually not need it for years, but when i do, i don’t want to have to rely on a search function.
For me id like more organization in the site such as categorizing your content so that all INFINITY has a section, all W40K has a section and so forth,
If you click on sci fi at the very top of the page then you can choose which game and all the content will come up, that might be what you mean
I have a mop and bucket if that helps
I am an information manager by profession. The biggest issue you have is everyone will want something different as has been demonstrated here by the posts.
I think that organisation of content needs to be done in a way that looks at its primary function.
on a site like this you have various different content types and many different topics.
the best way imho is improve the search functionality and ensure that each item of content is correctly tagged using a standard metadata schema.
Trello It! It will be great to have a Flexible Roadmap where we will be able to comment, add suggestions and see will be next. Obviosly all the disclaimers apply ( subject to change, content may vary, etc ), but is non the less a good way for you to organize the develoment priorities, get feedback and new content. Trello is 100% free and i’ll use it in so many projects that is first nature me to use that rather than stick paper to walls ( well never did that… i’m not that retro 😛 )
would be good if one of the tags was the year the content was made.
This might not help with the organization of the site much but as someone who came to the site fairly recently it might help new people settle in if you had an intro video. And have it be prominent and accessible all year (with a new one made each year). It could cover a lot of not obvious information that people might wonder about.
1. Who are the staff and what are their hobby is etc. I watched probably a dozen weekenders before I realized that Warren calling him Brother Lloyd wasn’t an inside joke, that they are actually brothers. I thought it had to do with Llyods love of monks or something.
2. Mention where you are based out of. Again, no idea you were in Northern Ireland for quite a few videos. Some older videos I watched mentioned an office in Nottingham. Not this matters a lot but it just seems like info worth sharing.
3. The weird relationship with GW could be explained and how that impacts your coverage. Also mentioning that Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing isn’t available where you are so you don’t cover it as much or any similar sort of thing that affects what you cover and have available to you. Since there is such a large community, maybe word could get out to some of these companies that it would be worth their time to put in the effort the WWX guys did and form a relationship with Beasts of War.
4. A summary of the older content that is on there. You should put out there all the great interviews with designers that you have in the backstage. Especially after updating tags on all the old content, this would be like a commercial for people to go out and seek the stuff.
5. The usual explanation of what backstage is and how it helps site and what we get for it.
Please make Hobby-lab and painting tutorials easier to find.
And I’d also like to see more episodes of Hobby-lab, the tips and tricks there are excellant!
Hobby labs for me. It always takes me a while to find them 🙂
I agree with Hobby Lab
Married?!? Shouldn’t you guys be there?
I find it hard to find Hobby-Lab and/or the Painting videos.
Logged in wiv me backstage profile where I should be accessing video using html5, but vlog video unavailable as shows that plugin is unsupported, have you gone flash only?
Just coming onto the site I think the content is astrounding. Perhaps oragnisation along the lines of topics within each game / subject so for example GW – modelling – painting videos. So essentially a person looks at a topic lets say WH40K and can go a topic of interest be it demonstration games, hobby discussions, new releases, AAR
grouping episodes of painting tutorials, or a watch all button would be useful :o)
Thank you BoW. I was searching for all the FoW FtW the other day and thought a streamlining system would be handy. Lucky enough Warren has the powers of the warp behind him and he read my mind! Couple this with what sounds like more X-wing coverage and I am a happy Backstager
Could you assist with navigating spaghetti junction?
Could a tag be for time line or period in Historical? And 30k, 40k?
I don’t think the horse is dead yet, but this may kill it. Make hobby-labs easier to find; and terrain tutorials in general (the size may change, but a lot of terrain advice goes across the size ranges, so you don’t need to separate by system).
If you could add a tag in each game system hub that would automatically pop up for getting started that would probably be help full.
A “Week” Hub, where you can find all the X Week coverage you’ve done.
I’d really like to see all the Tutorial videos in one post, yes I know this is beyond what you were looking at, but it would save time.
Would it be possible to search multiple tags, say I wanted to look at a painting tutorial for a particular game, bolt action for example.
I know I commented in my letter about the every popular but very well buried wet pallette video, it would be nice to have a beginners painting tag with some basics, like the wet pallette, undercoating, pre-shading etc in.
Air brushing would be another good tag.
That’s good news Warren. I’ve frequently had issues discovering the great stuff on the site.
Here are some things I would be interested in having tagged:-
Presenter(s)
Beginner/intermediate/advanced
Video or text
Length of show
Historical
Hobby
Review – I think you used to do more of this? In any event I’d like to see reviews.
What about an auto-generated site-map? Something we could Ctrl/Cmd F search in our browsers.
Less seriously…
Not-40k – Ok, that’s very personal but makes me think. Inverse tag search? i.e. Everything but?
Special X-Wing mega week – A man can dream…
And now since I’m getting out of control here’s a content beg – some boardgames. Just sometimes, doesn’t have to be too often. I play Libertalia and Firefly because of you lot. Make me buy something else.
Good luck with the boot camps. They are sounding great even to a non-mini player like me.
One day maybe. 😎
It would be good to have tag for demo games / battle reports. I often have these playing while painting.
Given the articles down the side mainly relate to new releases, could you have a tag for that, but date stamp it and enable searches to be made using date ranges?
How about a page containing prizes and winners that you just keep adding to, so you can see all the prizes given away over time. You could categorise this as front and back stagers depending on who the competition was open to. Might encourage a few more back stagers?
Also tags on whether it is an article or a video feature.
Amen finding stuff here is really bad, my greatest gripe (only?).
I would like to see the option to multi tag search and probably a tag cloud to chose from, probably as a pop up, these things are handy specially those that indicate how proportionally big the tag is in comparison to the other tags, but they look awful on the page.
I think the videos definitely need some moretagging, so that the tags could be used to easily look for some specific content. For example there could be a tag for game type (of course where it is available, like 40k, Infinity), genre (scifi, fantasy, pulp, etc), then another tag group for the specific content family (hobby for painting, modelling, etc, show for weekenders, faction specific talk shows, etc) and another for the type of content (hobby lab, unboxing, weekender, etc).
Then the user could use dropdown/check lists or something to find content by filtering the various tag types.
I’m going add my voice to the hobby lab focus, but tags and subtags throughout the rest sounds like a great start for organisation and ease of use
Also, it might not be an easy task, but how about giving the option for the members (or for backstagers only) to add private tags for videos and the option to use private tag search. It won’t help much to solve the current situation but in the future it could help for some users to mark and organize the videos for themselves.
Well, it certainly seems that people love those Hobby Labs. I have indeed learned a few very handy tricks (@lloyd ‘s new name should be “Lord of the Hedges”).
As you guys reorganize the site, just please please bear in mind there are some of us who don’t necessarily play the popular games-du-jour that fit into these neat categories. Certainly DO HAVE those categories, but . . . maybe also include a few catch-alls so these “oddballs” don’t wind up in the dustbins of BoW history?
Series:
Weekender, WeekenderXLBS. HobbyLab, Three Colours and Up, Unboxings, Tank Tips (John’s old tank-specialized painting videos), VLOGs . . . series that have to do with SPECIFIC games (FoW FTW, Infinity IceStorm, Dust Babylon, WWX) could be tagged in their specific games, below.
Games and Hubs:
The usual suspects (40K, Infinity, BA, FoW, WWX, etc etc)
Articles?
Some of these are easy to stick into a category, like @redben‘s “Ancient Battles that Changed the World”, Ben’s articles on Descent, or my old Bulge stuff. My only worry is that some others (Four Levels of Wargaming, Sam’s article on “Trying Something New,” all the “Gurn of the every other week” material, etc . . .) doesn’t fit into Fantasy, Sci Fi, History, etc.
Maybe just make one extra tag called “Gaming Commentary” – “Out of the Box” – “Spotlight” – anything but “Miscellaneous.” First rule of UX / UI . . . (yes, I used to do this for a living) . . . no one clicks on Miscellaneous unless they are specifically searching for something and they’ve already clicked on everything else.
Part of what makes BoW great is its inclusive, wide-ranging, eclectic range of content. And while I certainly understand the need for categorization and organization, just please don’t forget us weirdos who may not do the easily genre-ized, shiny, new, just-had-a-huge-kickstarter thing. 😀 Yes, we have our forum town halls, but if this kind of stuff never makes it on the front screen (either BoW team or external contributors), who will see it if you’re not already “into” that forum? And if no one sees it, who’s gonna want to produce it?
This has surely been posted before (yes, actually I`m way too lazy reading through all that comments 🙂 ) but it’s kinda hard to find an overview over the themed weeks, as well as a lot of scenery and painting tutorials. Furthermore a tag for all rules reviews would be great.
I’m really looking forward to the overhaul.
So just the other day i was trying to look up the Drop Tactics videos and i had to scroll through everything in the dropzone hub. Maybe having links to all your different series.
I like the categories/tags like they are.
If I want all the Hobby Labs, I look at:
http://www.beastsofwar.com/hobby-lab/
If you want to improve it:
It would be nice to mix categories/tags and narrow down what I’m looking for.
e.g.
http://www.beastsofwar.com/bolt-action/terrain-tips/
So I only get terrain tips for Bolt Action.
Content cleanup? Let me guess – you removed the videos that don’t play in my RSS reader, my Android device and my Linux laptop and now the site is empty? In all seriousness, I love the miniatures news on this site but it’s very frustrating having to find and boot a Mac or exit the RSS reader each time I click on a new article. If you need any logs, screencaps or error messages from me, just let me know.
Also there doesn’t seem to be a mobile version of the site so the buttons are WELL TINY on my Android device. Or at least if there is, it’s still serving me the desktop version instead …
Bravo!, making it easier to find content will be great. I can’t tell you how many times you guys talk about something on the weekender that gets me excited enough that i want to go get more detail from your in depth coverage, unboxings, demo games etc only to give up in frustration after a few minutes.
Can I suggest a community based system instead?
Allow anyone to find an article and suggest a tag for it. That tag then awaits an admin approval from you guys and only gets applied when it is approved.
If you do the above system you can ask (nicely) for the community to dig in and go through all the old content and apply tags to it (like 15mm, WW2, Funny, Rambling…etc). It also works nicely in that any future content can be community tagged for you. If you are worried about too much spam then possibly restrict the tagging stuff to backstagers only.
Finally (not sure how feasible this is) I would like to see a tag system that allows for multiple tag searches. Too many times I have been on a big website wanting to see something like Eldar, getting started, only to find that I can only search for Eldar or getting started and have to sift through tonnes of articles.
This is a great idea. Allowing users to propose tags for things will mean less work for the BoW team and as the community comes up with new/better ideas they can be added organically. I suggest having a way to propose a tag. Having a way for other users to vote a tag up or down. Having moderators or staff do the final approvals, made easier by the community being able to flag the best tag proposals.
I’d like to add that I don’t like the recent changes to the breaking news section. That is my primary way of keeping up with new content and it seems like things are no longer always in chronological order. I also would like an option to expand the listing so I can see up to several days of news stories there. (If you can already do this somehow please someone tell me!)
I also would like tutorials in general, and terrain building in particular easier to find. As has been said, I often watch tutorials and don’t need the info until much later, or come looking for techniques and ideas relating to a project I’m working on, or even just something new to make (terrain making has become my ‘I’m bored and feel like making something’ past time).
For me I just want to see some continuity. So many times I’ve watched videos of different projects that seem to be going somewhere then they die off… Or I never find the conclusion. For example, the video about the 40k map as an oil rig. I thought that was going to be a campaign or story, but I never heard it mentioned again. I would like a grouping of gaming systems and current running projects… On those systems…
Ocean platform is actually being worked on at the moment, the imperial Navy Swat team is being painted as we speak 🙂
As we get the armies more sorted and table ready it will be easier for us to turn this kind of thing around more quickly.
You might recall the suggestion email i sent about a News / Article / Video filter? That’d be good.
Another suggestion: community tagging. Allowing users to suggest tags for items of content, and if enough people suggest the same tag, say, 5? it becomes official.
Hello, I joined back stage fairly recently so some of what I say here may already be available. My apologies if there’s already a solution.
Extra tags and / or multi tag searches would help. The areas where I feel this would help me in particular are:
– trying to find hobby lab articles specific to Sci Fi themes. E.g. “Terrain” + “SCI FI Wargaming”.
– to categorise unboxing, new releases, themed weeks etc. The content list for a particular topic can get filled up quickly with fairly light articles which hide the more in-depth articles. I’d appreciate some way of viewing a list that lets me exclude unboxings, new releases etc. For example, the Infinity list is full of short, preview videos for new releases which, after being viewed once, just clog up the list.
Is it possible to do a longer, titles only list for categories? It can get tedious clicking on the previous entries button. To be honest I don’t tend to go further than two clicks back.
I’m not sure how we find more general community articles? The sort of things Oriskany mentioned in the Articles section of his earlier post appeal to me but I often can’t find them.
Perhaps by organising along the lines at the top of the starter site, a better link to the vlog vidoes and Hobbylab episodes. And a speciel category for how to paint vidoes.
It would be good if it were easier for you to automatically maintain links between multi-part articles. Whoever is maintaining the article descriptions for Romain’s painting videos, for example, often does a pretty good job at adding links to subsequent parts once they’re available; but I’ve certainly had cases where I’ve had to keep going back to my search to find the next part, or where I’ve got to part 3, and then had to jump back to the first part to find a link to part 4.
Ideally, things that are both tightly coupled and short (like the various “paint this particular model” series) should have some way for the content creators to tag it, so that a wee table-of-contents is automatically generated in the article (either on-the-fly, or whenever the next part is added).
Actually, this brings up another point. When searching, it’s often not useful to have the same result come up four times — if I’m search for articles on painting repair, “FIXING HARRIET KINSLEY” is really only one result (even though it’s got four parts), and I’d get a better feel for the available resources if I only saw one entry per multi-part tutorial. Whether you’d do that by putting a table of contents and all the tags on the first part (and hide the other parts from the tag search somehow), or make a separate index post that has the links and tags (and hide all the parts from tag searches), I don’t know.
I guess that you wouldn’t want to collate all the videos into one post, since that would orphan the comments associated with the original posts. And you probably want to continue to have tags on the posts for the individual parts, since clicking on the tags to take you to a tag search page is still useful functionality. Perhaps you need to make it easy/automatic to copy the tags from previous parts into new parts (and/or backfill the tags for old parts)?
Once these tools were in place, it shouldn’t be to bad to fill this in for existing posts, I would have thought — just search for things with ” part ” in the title. Okay, maybe you’d want to think about ways to automate that bit, but a couple of lines of perl should put that right. 😉
As others have said hobby lab is hard to find. But may be more sub categories in sections ie click bolt action then have tabs for painting, bat reps, unboxing, news etc.
Definitely hobby labs, sometimes I’ll stumble across something great but I’ll never be able to find it again.
They’re great to have on whilst painting to as well.
Sometimes when I’m browsing or searching a specific entry or video, I’m annoyed with how the “Previous Entry” button at the bottom of any BoW page work. Once I pressed it, it will lead me to the new page and the the newer entries are gone; if I’d like to see the newer entries again, I have to press back in my browser. Its not a big deal if I’m looking for something from like yesterday or so, but it’s a major problem if I want to scan through the whole week (for example).
Would it be possible if you make it work like how the Kickstarter website work when we’re trying to browse projects? I think it works better because every time we press “Load more projects”, the newer entries are still there while it shows older ones too..
Hello,
This is not directly related to the tags, however.
Could be possible to have a better approach to the login system?
I mean: I try to access to something only for backstagers and system returns: “you should log in first” which is fine. But after I did my login system doesn’t return back where i was in the first place 🙂
Thank you for all your work!
F.
Just hit refresh when that happens.
What is happening is your browser (or perhaps the site), is serving you a cached version of the page (we do this because of the traffic volumes) by hitting refresh it should serve you the non cached version.
I see, thanks for that 🙂
I’m just too lazy and I wanted to be automatically fowarded to the content required 🙂
How about – and this is a long shot – for each video letting us, the community people mark it with tags?
That way a Flames of War video could be marked as FoW, Flames of War, WW2, 10mm (or the scale, I forget), demo games… and so on?
Regarding older content perhaps a timeline, so we can select a month and tag from there? That might not be possible, but it makes us do the legwork.
It is almost certainly not really feasible in the short term, but being a binge video watcher, I would love the ability to queue up a bunch of different videos into a queue, hit play, and sit back and watch. Maybe make it a Backstage feature or such 🙂
To be honest, being the lazy person that I am, I hate having to click the next link to go to the next video, so the playlist ability is one of the reasons I tend to stay on YouTube more than on this site when consuming content. I check every now and then for Backstage content, but a playlist feature might keep me in the site more actively.
If I was re organising the content I think I’d try to do it in a sort of box file system. So first you click on a genre, which gives a list of games to click which you want, then it gives a list of article types ie News, un boxings, hobby and painting. This would allow you to drill down to what information you require quickly and easily. You could also have the main series as top level files as well so any one who wants painting can click 3 colours then get a list of type of tutorials.
You could even set a group of willing volunteers to help do the tagging?
Just my thoughts on it. All I ask is keep up the good work on the great content.
Lol. May be I should of watched the next blog before commenting!
Great that you’re doing this – I feel I’m missing out on a lot because I can’t find old stuff (or don’t know it exists).
Here’s what I’d like:
– For searches to return results in chronological order (so I can go back and watch through all the weekenders from episode 1 until I’ve caught up with the point at which I joined backstage). And as a backstager I’d like to be able to search in weekenders and XLBS’s at the same time.
– I’d love to be able to ‘mark an article as read’ (or watched). So that over time, as I do get through more old content, I can see easily if I’ve already read/seen it. It would also be handy to be able to ‘star’ an article as well as having it be read. So that in future I look for articles that made me think at the time ‘this is fantastic, but I don’t need it right now’.
– A diagram or list of all the tags that are used. So I could check it and be inspired ‘I wonder what sort of content comes up if I search using the 6mm tab?’ but also so that I can quickly see what the best search terms to use are. It would be helpful if you could search using multiple tags at the same time (and excluse certain tags e.g. ‘new releases’.)
– You know the 40K allies chart? It would be handy to have something similar so that we could get a visual overview of what’s available. So along the top axis you’d have a list of systems/settings and factions e.g. 40K / Space Marines / Imperial Guard / Orks / Bolt Action / Germans / British / French / Infinity / Haqislam / Ariadna, etc.
Along the side axis you’d have various themes e.g. Introduction / Fluff & Fiction / Rules / Modelling / Painting / Tactics / Battle Reports / Communities, etc.
This way, you could look at the grid (or grids – you might need to do one for each of the major settings / systems) and very quickly see that yes… I want to look at introductory articles and battle reports which specifically reference this particular faction for this particular game.
Need a better organization of the hobby lab and painting tutorials.
i would like to see number of players for board games so 1 player sci fi of 1 player fantasy , also if it co op games too
I have trouble with these kind of things, but all this time and all I do as a backstager is watch xlbs. when you click on backstage logo is there something i’m missing that directs you to all backstage content? Also I don’t know how to get to the vlogs for the 40k armies? I’ve tried using the search function to type in vlog but its all random things.