So, this is Mene. I love Mene and transferred from a less than awesome site to be here. It was bigger and had more activity in one day than Mene sees in a month, and that's not really a bad thing at all when considering the differences in the communities here and there, but there's one thing that I really miss about the other site; it's evolved beyond much of anything else online.

If any of you know Gaia, you know the layout differences between it and Mene almost immediately. I know it's weird, but it's that layout I miss most of all. That layout, over the span of 11 years, has become one of the easiest things to navigate that I have seen on the internet. If we could transplant the here to Mene I think it would not only help the site, but help bring in people who think Mene is "small" and "outdated."

Seriously, when talking to Gaians about Mene, some of them often comment about how our avatars are weirdly designed (ironic because one of the biggest complaints in their SF is how all the new items look spray smudged in order to save time on their creation) and how Mene doesn't have enough short cuts, and it's a turn off to constantly have to troll the forums and lurk for your posts, or to cut through multiple pages to find something. For me the subscribed threads option is out of the way and, off the top of my head, I can't tell you where it is.

--Legit right now. I just opened a new page, went to the forums, went to my profile, cruised the tabs, went back to the forums, clicked on the SF forum, found "subscribe to this forum," clicked it, scrolled down the magical sidebar I keep forgetting about and clicked "list subscriptions", found my whopping six threads, and it's now I'm realizing that when I click "move to folder" I'm given the options to receive instant, daily, weekly, or no notifications. I'm debating on whether or not to try it because I don't know if it means my personal message box here on mene, or my actual email. I hardly ever check my email so... but yeah, this is what I'm talking about--



Right here is an example of Gaia's alert system. It's located in a tab labeled "My Gaia" and you can see a notification section and when something new happens a little word bubble that pops up next to your avatar. Not unlike when we on Mene get pinged or a wall post.

--I just clicked "My Account" to see if we had a personal page other than our profiles and I'm just realizing I could have erased seven steps from my previous exploration. I honestly thought that was just a direct link to the settings and options. Oops--

On this format it wouldn't work exactly the same since we don't have a section dedicated to viewing all of your private lists and sections at once, but it would be cool to have an extra tab on your profile (private tab) that would show you alerts like this.



Imagine a tab that could show you updates the same way the New Posts live feed does. Well, not exactly the same. It doesn't have to be a huge, detailed thing. On Gaia you can go in and edit what kind of alerts you want, like this:



It would be cool if we could go to our profile and see everything that's happened in our threads and subscriptions while we've been logged off. Pings would still happen and donation and PM alerts, but this would be a more casual alert system for those and more.

And to address the issue of of me looking all over Mene for a single link like a newb on Portal, another thing I want to bring up is that beautiful button you see in the lower corner of the first picture.



It's a singular collapsible tab that you can customize with your own links to various pages. All you literally do is go to a page, open the task bar, hit the plus button copy and paste the link from that page into the box, name it, and voila! A permanent link to that page so you can always be one click away from your favorite things.

But legit, off the top of my head, that's probably the only thing I really miss. I've got so many items on Gaia and I hardly use any of them, the games are fun, but so are the ones here, everyone here is a heck of a lot nicer which encourages me to clean myself up, and even though it's small I recognize a lot more people on Mene than on Gaia when chatting day to day. Though that's probably because people here don't change their users twice a month.

Oh, and there are a few things about the Market layout, but mostly this.

A notifications tab would be nice, but I'm not sure what reason it would have to be on the profile page. If anything, it'd more convenient to be a hovering tab on just every page. Kind of like the feedback tab we have floating at the bottom of the screen. A live feed would be most efficient, too. Like you said, it could say 'so-and-so posted in your thread ___', 'so-and-so wants to trade', so-and-so bought your item from marketplace, etc.

being notified by the PM system should be eliminated. This could clear up the PM box as well. So no more 'psst someone ist talking about you' or anything like that. Just regular PMs from actual users. Disabling the PM notification function and allowing users to just view the notifications bar so you don't have double notifications would be most efficient.

I do agree Mene is a little cluttered in terms of function and practicality. There's A LOT of links in the tool bar above, and then in the my account section has a whole book as well. A quick bar would be cool for those who want to avoid that and it would seem more user friendly. perhaps a default list of links can be placed there and customized as wished?


dunno, I think Gaia is also a cluttered mess in terms of layout (thre is just too much going on in each page) but they have implemented many shortcuts too. I've seen other sites have cleaner tool bars and interfaces that makes browsing and the overall experience simple and easy. Which we need. You just want to chat and not focus on how to figure out the site.

Mene does need to revamp the interface to be more friendly and less complicated and cluttered. It might be a turn-off for new users who dont want to hassle.. But Idk I've gotten used to it so it doesn't really bother me all that much. (There is the problem of old users not liking the new interface as well haha)


Good ideas, but we really need more activity. With slow forums, functions like these become useless because there is no rush to check things right away when no one is moving at 90mph. For example, we once had a chatbar at the bottom of the page. But nobody used it so it had to be taken down. It was a waste of effort and money, even though it was a nice idea.

(though it's ironic how i say Mene is wordy when I write a whole book as well, haha)