Are you having some sort of issue with Lords of Pain? Do you perhaps have a comment about the website or its content?
This is the place to do that. Whether it's issues with the Comments section, feedback on the news or results or simply popping in to say you love the place, you're more than welcome to do that in this thread.
Please note that feedback for LOP Radio can be specifically directed towards the LOP Radio feedback thread.
I assume someone has raised this elsewhere but the spacing of text on the Main Page is just crazy. It's a real headache to look at. Someone may want to have a look at that.
As I understand it, those in charge are currently flirting with different changes to make to the main page to "freshen it up" a bit. Not sure if the current look will survive, but it very well may.
Your not so much digging it is noted, though, and I'll bring it up when the opportunity arises.
I completely get why it has been done but I'm also not a fan. Just wanted to throw that out there too.
Yeah, it looks like a glitch. But I do understand trying stuff out.
Just want to say I'm really enjoying Leaf's continued LU coverage, anything LU is must read for me these days and he's doing a really good job with it week to week.
Thank you ever so much Mizfan.Originally Posted by mizfan
Sorry that I had a bit of a delay recently when I was unwell. Shouldn't be an issue now.
Naturally, no problem. I just hope you still have something to write about after Ultima Lucha Tres!
I've brought this topic up to a few people before, and it's been touched upon here too. But I wanted to make my feelings about the current state of the LOP home page known.
I admittedly don't venture to the LOP home page that often - I only go to read a handful of columns since I've been getting my news elsewhere (more on that later). The other day I went to the home page after installing Firefox on my computer just to test things out. I didn't have any ad-blockers or any other extensions on the site. I was pretty shocked to see how poorly the home page looks. I took a screenshot of what I saw (click for a full-sized view):
I'm not a designer or anything of that nature, but I do make websites for a living, so I feel like I have a few valid points to make about how there's a lot of detrimental stuff going on that affects both the main page posters and these forums as well.
- What's up with the line spacing between each column? There's no need to do what looks almost like triple-spacing since everything is on a bulleted list and it's clear that each thing is a list.
- The promotional links for the books written by LOP writers Doc and 'Plan are under some ads with no indication that these are things by LOP writers, so it makes it seem like one big blob of ads, which doesn't help those guys get some much-deserved promotion for their work.
- Speaking of much-deserved promotion, the original content for the site like Columns and Radio are buried in the bottom of the page, and the radio player is shoved down by what I think should be ads that weren't loaded in this screenshot. I believe these should be given more weight than the results and maybe even the news, because quite frankly the news that LOP has been posting recently are mostly regurgitated from elsewhere, with nothing to distinguish them from the thousands of other sites that post the same thing much earlier than they even appear on LOP. The Columns and Radio should be one of the main focuses of the site because these are the things you can't find anywhere and everyone who produces this content is pretty amazing at it.
- This has been a consistent gripe of mine, but why is there only one tiny link regarding the forums? I'm biased, for sure, but the forums are not being used as a tool to help keep people visiting this site. You can argue that the comments in each post serve a similar role, but a lot of those comments are just horrible, and there's rarely any constructive comments anywhere.
In my opinion, the main page of LOP is an eyesore. It looks outdated even by 2007 standards, let alone 2017. It doesn't help that the content that's worth going to this page for is buried towards the end where new visitors will most likely never get to. I know if I were visiting LOP for the first time and saw that home page, I'd click back on my browser and never come back.
I don't know if any of the people who run the main page or make decisions about it even come here to read about it, but I'd really love to know why the main page is structured the way it does right now, and if there's anything that's being done to address any of these issues. It sounds like I'm just bashing the home page, but I really just want to open some dialogue to see if there can be some changes that will benefit the home page and, by extension, the forums. There can definitely be some easy improvements that can be done.
I think the idea of the site front page is to be information dense and fluffy pretty pics lite but you are right Degen, in 2017 it does looke slightly amateurish.
Then again I have no idea how much it costs to run LOP and if the owner (I think he name is Calvin) wants to invest in it.
A strange thing in my mind is that the guy who owns it really has no voice on the site itself, I actually have no idea if he even likes wrestling let alone what he thinks about the product. I don't hear any of the behind the scenes stuff of course but that just seems strange to me.
That said he still provides this incredible platform and maybe that is what he wants to do, not be out front.
You do hear plenty of people complaining about the layout on Twitter, for what it's worth.
"Eat my ass, Mooney"
It's poor, and there's no real reason for it to be so poor in 2017. Even the most basic of wrestling news websites now use at least one picture to illustrate the highlight news stories and have something interesting going on to grab the eye. This has very little of that.
I 100% back what Degen is saying about elevating both columns and radio to have pride of place there, or at least be alongside the news, seeing as that is the main unique offering the website has. Personally I think LOPR is one of the real gems in the LOP crown and should be given greater prominence even than columns, because more and more people want to hear their opinions than read them right now.
The LoP news output has been consistently uninspiring since I began reading here, and is something I rarely, if ever, click on. Not offering anything new on the news itself and just parroting highlights is real Bush League stuff. I liked when Doc started to add some Docs Notes to the news - I know there was a bit of a backlash around it, but I thought it was a real step in the right direction to make the information that is published up there a lot more unique and give people a springboard to make comments on.
As a whole, the MP needs an overhaul in both design and layout. Degen has hit most of my issues with it up there, in all honesty.
I'm guessing it costs little to run nowadays, and I'm pretty certain that cost is covered by ad revenue. The fact that the website is the way it is and hasn't seen any significant change in at least 15 years signifies to me that Calvin has little to no interest in investing any more into it.
And when I say no significant changes in at least 15 years, I'm serious. Check the Wayback Machine and it pretty much looks similar to now. I'd go as far as saying that things have regressed a bit, with the removal of links to forum topics.
I'm sure Calvin digs wrestling and such, but he's never been one to talk about it. I don't know about the early days of the forums and such but I don't recall seeing him around much.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I'd love to hear this from him or someone close to him.
Not sure what this means. People complain about everything all the time - it's the Internet, after all.
The main draw for me waaaaay back in the day when I discovered LOP (basically since its inception around 1998) was partly the news. But that was because there weren't thousands of websites doing the same back then. Right now there's too many sites doing the same and in a much more timely manner. LOP doesn't have someone with exclusive bits of news or anything like that either, so there's really nothing to draw most people to the news sections, in my opinion.
The main reason I did come back quite often was because of Tito and eventually other people's columns, which is why I mentioned that the original content should be placed higher. I can't read 'Plan's work anywhere, nor hear Steve's opinions on Raw, for example. I'm certain others would be repeat visitors to the main page if those were more prominently displayed as opposed to being buried below the rest. I don't have any strong opinions on whether Columns or Radio should be above (although I've heard that some have super-strong opinions on this).
I am saying this because I do think the site is an eyesore, but I'm also guessing it would help with getting more people to stick around and potentially get into the forums (which I selfishly admit would be my main objective here). This is all speculation since I have no numbers nor any guesses to back this up. The best I could provide are using analytics tools like Alexa which indicate a downward trend (although these tools are to be taken with a grain of salt usually).
I was under the impression that it meant people elsewhere on the Internet are making the same point that you are here.
"Eat my ass, Mooney"
Ah, I thought you were talking about people complaining about Twitter's layout, and I found it strange that it was brought up like this. Now it makes sense in my head. My bad.
Ah, now you've said that and I've read it back I see why you might have thought that. I could have been clearer.
"Eat my ass, Mooney"
I think you are 100% right Degen, the news articles are neither unique nor a strength of the site. I'm sure poor Marc Middleton does his best but he is a one man band and it is hard to keep up with everything in the wrestling world.
The strength of the site is the writers and podcasters, they have a unique, educated and well thought out voices in a world full of clickbait, rumors, blind following and echoing of the general consensus and general fluff. It is why I came to the site in 2008 and why I continue to come back to this day.
Most news websites (wrestling or otherwise) these days don't even split opinion and news, while I wouldn't call for that I think you could rebrand them 'Feature Articles' or even just keep the name 'Columns' but give the writers better branding like a photo or logo to symbol it is their work and more prominence. A site I really love here in Australia called The Roar does this kind of thing really well:
Homepage.jpg
You can see that all of the writers have a clear place for branding and are given prominence but it still doesn't make stop it being text dense and looking just silly like WhatCulture.
On LOP you could have a section for news and a section for the writers with featured posts/columns in the widget at the top.
I'm not saying LOP should copy The Roar but just showing you can modernise without having to sacrifice the text/information heavy aesthetic that LOP is.
New main page layout on cell phone is not enjoyable tbh. Everything is like 1k font, no way to change size of text, and taking columns off main page and sectioning them into the tool bar feels like a death blow for columns here. No results on main page feels odd too. We are just news headlines and radio now up there?
As an update the main page has cleaned up a lot in the past couple days on mobile. Looks much better now.
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