Random Page Feature

[QueElEs]

How tough would it be to add a button which you click and go to a random page in the EG? I'm sure it could help people get truly lost in it

But also it might be a nice way to let people see more obscure articles or corners of the setting they hadn't come across.

[stevebowers]

Trond may be able to do this; most wiki-type websites have one.

[Centauri5921]

just dropping in to say I would support this measure

[Centauri5921]

anything ever become of this?

[Avengium]

I think making a feature on the web to go to "Random Article" or "Random Page" could be great. There is a lot of articles.

Is difficult to implement / include in the web?

[Rynn]

We do have an ongoing project to revamp the website, functionality like this may be included but our IT guy is as swamped as any of us for time. Hopefully we will get something like this in future, but technical changes to the site are a lot harder to implement than content changes.

[Avengium]

Revamp the website means adding a lot of technical features?

[stevebowers]

The main problem is that we are all volunteers, including the guys in charge of redesigning the website; we have a lot of ideas about redesign, but the guys with skills in this area are very busy. On the other hand, we can add new content to the site relatively easily, so we are concentrating on that at the moment. I assume that the existing content would still be available after any revamp, making it available in a wider range of formats for instance; a random page feature would be very useful.

If you want to browse the site in a semi-random fashion, you can click on the 'by letter' feature in the top right-hand corner of the EG, taking you to a list of articles in alphabetical order; I do this quite often to finds articles I haven't read for a long time.

[Drashner1]

I know this has come up before, but I don't remember if this feature is on our current 'to do' list for the site redesign.

I have spoken with our Webmaster recently and although we are both very busy right now, we are hoping to pick up the site redesign project again in some capacity either later this year or early next.

There are a variety of technical features we would like to add to the site, as well as changing the overall look and feel of it in various ways.

If folks are really interested, I can pull up the 'punch list' we had put together for the site redesign and post it to the forum - although note I can't predict how fast these things may come to fruition. As Steve has said, we are a volunteer organization with lives and jobs outside of OA and all too often those things take up the bulk of our time.

Also re Steve's mention of content being easier to change or add: Starting next year I'm planning to devote most of my OA time to various content and structure projects on the site and in the EG that I think will improve it in various ways. Keep watching this space for ongoing developments in that area.

Todd