Board Thread:News and Announcements!/@comment-27794543-20190606060029/@comment-27794543-20190606060048

Terminology and stuff: I only control the first four menus ("Explore" menu and "Discuss" link is done by FANDOM with no local-wiki control). These top items are called level 1 - I can have up to four of them. Under each level 1 item, I can have up to seven level 2 items, aka the sub-menus. And under each level 2 item, I can have up to ten level 3 items. There are a few other limits, but that's the general gist. See Help:Navigation for more information on how it works.

Menu one: Episodes → TV series

In the old navigation, the first menu was episodes. With seven seasons, that uses up all seven sub-menu spots. If we had an eighth season, it wouldn't fit. Because level 3 only allows ten spots, we could never list all 13-16 episode in each season. This left the admin wondering which episodes to leave out. One way around admin choosing was using "#category-CategoryName#" which would auto-populate level 3 with the most popular pages in specified category (however, it would not have a "more..." link leaving new users confused why only 10 of the 13-16 episodes were listed and why the episodes were listed completely out of order).

I didn't like the setup of the first menu. It pushed the link to the TV series page to be the third menu. It gave priority to episodes and then excluded a third of them. Also, I just wasn't convinced by it usefulness to casual readers of the website.

So I changed the first tab to focus on the TV series, i.e. seasons, episodes, cast, crew, etc. I put the link to the TV series page as the level 1 item. I put seasons as the first sub-menu – this allows up to 10 seasons in level 3. I put the episode guide as the second sub-menu, with one of its items being the list of s6 episodes. I then went through cast, crew, and extra pages.

Menu two: Characters

The second menu is characters. The old navigation had characters listed by groups. Specifically, the seven sub-menus were: The 100 (delinquents), Sky People (adults), Grounders, Mountain Men, Eligius, Relationships, and Novel Characters.

I felt that the grouping was a bit cumbersome – we were limited to seven groups (so if we add Sanctum Citizens and Children of Gabriel, we'd have to take out two of the sub-menus above) and there was no place for non-grouped characters (e.g. A.L.I.E.). Sky People, Grounders, Mountain Men, and Eligius only listed 4-5 characters each - leaving the sub-menus underutilized. Also, some of the pages under the tab weren't character pages, e.g. relationships, Crime & Punishment, Cerberus Project, Trigedasleng, etc. Those page aren't necessarily unimportant but it didn't make sense to call them 'Characters'. We can list up to 70 level 3 items under each level 1 menu, yet we were listing only 27 TV characters (but the wiki has over 150 such pages).

I kept the second menu as characters but have tried to make a more utilized system. The first sub-menu is the current main characters. The second is alive recurring characters from previous seasons. The third item is characters introduced this season (since I thought these might be of particular interest to viewers). The fourth item is deceased main characters. The final three sub-menus are other deceased characters grouped by seasons 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6. This is the menu I'm most interested in receiving feedback and suggestion on.

Menu three: The 100 → More

The third menu in the old navigation was "The 100". It's seven sub-menus were Locations, Events, Groups, Behind the Scenes, Book Series, Ratings, and Spoiler board.

I thought it was odd that the name of the series is the third menu - it's also where we first link to the series page. I thought Groups was duplicated since they were already linked under Characters (but since I redid menu 2 without those links, I kept Groups). The last two sub-menus, Ratings and Spoiler Board, did not have any items.

I renamed the menu to the generic "More". I put Groups first, Relationships second (which I moved here from the old Characters menu), Locations third, Events fourth, Etc. (Trigedasleng, Flame, Technology, History…) fifth, and Book Series (incl book characters) sixth. I had moved the Behind the Scenes and Ratings of the old menu into the new first menu, TV series (which I linked to TV series page), and Spoiler board into the Community menu.

Menu four: Community

This menu stayed mostly the same. The biggest edits were combining policies and guides into one sub-menu and moving the link to the spoiler board here.