Hi everyone,
This takes a little bit of explaining so please bare with me...
1) Widget ordering - putting Latest Discussion back up to the top
You know the 'widgets' (green boxes) on the right of the page in the side bar?
Over the last few months, their ordering has gone slightly wrong and that has affected the performance of TSR, primarily, the Latest discussions / Trending widget has been pushed down. We know that that widget drives forum engagement and is relied upon by members and guests heavily to navigate around the site.
As such, by it being pushed down, we've noticed a drop off in people being able to move around the site and people are clicking on it less. It used to always be the 3rd widget in the column.
We are going to reorder the widget default ordering to put Latest Discussions back into that place.
2) Fixed positions
At the same time, as I've mentioned in the past, we are making big technical improvements to TSR this year. One of these is to introduce personalisation into widgets and feeds, something I know you have been asking for for eons.
We're still at the early stage of this project and in April and May you will start to see the first bits of this appearing. E.g. the 'Today on TSR' widget will soon start displaying different content to different people based on their education level. For instance, GCSE students won't see quite the same level of promotion for A-level results day because it's not of interest to them yet.
What this means however, is that we have to make some of the side bar fixed for now. So you will find that the customisation you may gave made to the side bar is removed and the widgets will revert back to the default order.
For most members, this poses no problems as barely anyone uses the custom widget ordering. But I know for some of you do use this. So this is a heads up that this is coming. In the future we may be able to make a change to this for you, but for the next month or two, we will all have to use the default view.
I hope that makes sense and you can understand why we are doing this. There is likely to be a couple of months of changes as we change TSR a bit behind the scenes. Think of it like a very complicated Rubix Cube and the developers are having to shift some blocks to move others first (is my non-techy way of explaining it!)
Thanks,
Jack