FrontierNav Update: 21 July 2024

It's been a bit quiet on the blog for some months. I've mostly been focused on adding more data to FrontierNav and polishing some existing features.

For anyone curious, here's some of the larger pieces I'm working on or planning to some time this year, in no particular order. I'll get into the details of each idea once I start working on them.

More visible community activity

Every day, FrontierNav has a lot of new visitors, new sign-ups and returning visitors. These numbers are growing each month. This success isn't publicly visible so it gives the impression that no one's visiting, which then causes people not to stick around, discuss, and contribute.

To solve this issue, I'll be introducing activity-related features to show the size and activity of each wiki. This might include features like a members and online list similar to chat applications, activity feeds, completion and profile stats, and notifications.

Later on, it should be possible to introduce bridges to other applications like Discord and Mastodon (ActivityPub) to help others more easily contribute, be notified of activity, and keep things decentralised a bit.

This is a broad area to improve so it'll likely spawn a ton of new features once I get into the details.

As a side effect, I'm also hoping to improve the analytics and feedback I'm getting so that I can focus on what visitors need.

Draft change requests

Currently, data changes are stored locally on the author's device and shared by creating a change request. This means a lot of changes are not visible to everyone else and incomplete changes are wasted. It's also evident that some authors don't realise they need to create a change request for others to see it.

Draft change requests aims to solve this by automatically creating a change request on the first change that is only visible to the author and admins by default. Then the author can publish the draft when it's ready. General improvements

As usual, there's a bunch of tweaks and improvements to be made to existing features. Things like: Organising the map list when there's tons of maps. Editing posts. Adding descriptions to table columns. Adding notes to list items. Sorting logic for various lists. And so on.

Gathering feedback

If you have any feedback on these plans or want to see some focus on other features, let me know.

Thanks for reading.