Action Center Page

So - I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my experience when I play something, whether it be to make things more efficient or to provide some QoL features or the like, and this is a suggestion that's no different and incorporates both. However, this is a more major one so I'm a bit hesitant of providing it in the first place. This would also be something I'd probably code myself if I wasn't limited by site admin access, as I'm requesting the addition of another subpage. To start, basically when I play Pokefarm, either on mobile or desktop, I leave a lot of tabs open, which I'm sure a lot of other users do also. It's simply a lot easier to multitask and pop over from your active tab to refresh the lab or collect your training bags while mass clicking or hatch the eggs in your party, whatever, if you keep the respective page open. And while this is mostly fine, as some of the buttons don't dissapear from the page when you click on them (such as the lab refresh button), others do. Meaning the user needs to refresh the entire page when they want to preform that action again, which seems unnecessary and puts a bit of extra strain on Pokefarm's servers. Additionally, some of these pages need to be refreshed on server reset, and the easiest way for me to handle that is by closing my browser and reopening all the tabs at once. My suggestion then would be to add an additional customizable page to Pokefarm (referred to as the Action Center in this post) with the main functions from the other pages as the content. Users can choose which pages they'd like to have in their Action Center and which sections from those pages. This would cut down drastically the number of pages the player would keep open and the need to refresh each individual page. In addition, if all the buttons on the page do not disable or disappear on click (i.e. the training bag collection button) and instead are persistent (i.e. the lab refresh button), the user wouldn't even be required to refresh the page at all. To clarify on the sections I refer to of what the user could add to their Action Center, here's an example of how I'd build my Action Center, with the sections I'd include and the order I'd list them:

• "Party" from the Party page (the 6 slots)
• "Eggs" from the Lab page
• "Pokemon" from the Daycare page
• "Eggs" from the Daycare page
• "Shelter Area" from the Shelter page
• "Wonder Trade" from the Trade page
• "Collection Area" from the Trade page
• "Missions" from the Scour page
• "Garden" from the Garden page
• "Your Pokéwalker" from the Walker page

Basically, a section is a area of a page consisting of a header followed by a container of content, or similarly, a tab in a list with the content contained in that tab. The basic idea would be if an element exists as a section or a tab somewhere on a Pokefarm page, you can add it and its content to the Action Center. If you're following along then you've probably noticed the two exceptions on my list above; the party and the shelter area/field. The party is an essential feature of Pokefarm and while it isn't structured on its page in the same way as many of the other elements on Pokefarm, I'm confident in assuming many users would want to include it in their list. On the other hand, the shelter area would be great to include in the Action Center, but may be a big enough feature on its own to limit to its own page still, so I'm not fully sure on whether users could add it to their page. Suggestions in my suggestion, I suppose. One similar but admittedly much smaller feature already in place on Pokefarm are the custom bookmarks users can set. An example of this is in the last screenshot; my bar includes custom links to pages I've set, like the Fishing, Dojo, and Garden pages. Another one is the ability to choose which notifications show under that bar. Clearly there is already support for user customized pages, although of course for both of these the user still needs to visit the actual page; clicking the notification buttons don't preform the main pages' functions. One concern could be that users may come to rely too much on the Action Center after they build it (or gain access to it if it's premade, if the idea is accepted and the customization part isn't) and would miss the text or other features on the standard pages we have today. I do not suggest the Action Center as a full replacement for these pages; the option to visit the specific pages for additional features and information should remain. The main purpose of the Action Center should be to condense the most common actions to one page and reduce the load on Pokefarm's back end while also simultaneously reducing the amount of pages users need to keep track of. If you believe I missed something important, or would like to add on another part of a suggestion to this, or even just to say you do or don't support - any and all feedback is welcome, and thanks for taking the time to read this! I'll be watching this thread of course and I'll do my best to respond to everything when I'm able to read it. As an addon to my suggestions, I normally include the amount of workload I think they would take to implement; I am aware that this shouldn't be considered for the suggestion and admittedly it's moreso to win over Niet, I suppose, and to show my thought process to any other coders reading as well. My initial assumption would be that the customization part of the page would be the hardest part of this. I would think having a list of checkboxes at the top of the page where users could choose what elements they'd like to add would be the easiest solution? Incorporating the function buttons from the other pages shouldn't be difficult because as far as I've seen they don't read any other content on the page and just send their coded AJAX requests. But this is an assumption, as I've said I can't implement this suggestion on my end without the ability to add another page so I haven't spent much time looking at each of the buttons themselves.

I first wanted to say that is a really well written and thought out post. That also being said, I feel like you may be in a minority with how many tabs you normally have open at once on the site (though I am very happy to admit being wrong) and this seems like a monumental amount of work for something a fairly small subset of the player base would ever use. I am a pretty hardcore player and I almost never have more than one tab open at a time, the only exception was being when I was the TR leader and I needed to have my forum post open to edit in one tab and the stuff I was editing easy to see in another.

I'll second Raziya on the tabs things - I generally only have two tabs open, one for clicking and one for everything else, though I will frequently open and close other tabs when needed, which wouldn't really lend itself well to this feature since I don't want them to stay open if I'm not using them. But also, I don't think I would want to have multiple things open on the same screen - I think it would get too crowded and I would rather switch between tabs to let each tab have the full screen. On the rare occasion I do need two PFQ tabs visible at the same time, all I have to do is open them in two separate windows on my computer, which gives me more flexibility since I can open any page rather than only certain pages that are available through this feature.

Hey, thanks for the praise, haha. I just like to explain myself and get people to understand the way I think and to do that feel like I need to cover everything I can about the situation so there's no confusion. Anyways, I do wonder everytime I share something like this how many people actually play the same way I do. So I do realize I might be a 'bit' overboard with the tabs I keep open, yes. On the other hand, in a semi-related other suggestion I opened, I found people who mass-click pokemon and then collect training bags like I do. I'm sure those people also perform other tasks on the site, and even if they don't keep a seperate tab open for each one, just having those buttons all on a page that doesn't have to be refreshed everytime is a very useful feature in my eyes. I just also would like to be able to add other functions to that page as well, and have everything in one place. :) I understand what you mean with crowded, but if it's incorporated correctly or left to users to pick what they want on their page I wouldn't really feel like this would happen. I feel like the layouts would be pretty similar to how they are on their exclusive pages, just with each feature you choose stacked on top of each other, so it'd still be the full screen width. Maybe users could also collapse sections they've added so ones they don't use as frequently (Garden, Scours) wouldn't take space from the more frequent ones (Dojo training bags, Lab). Also to be even more extreme, I normally do have a second Pokefarm window open. In fact, I normally have lots of windows open, which ends up being harder for me to switch between the two Pokefarm ones without mixing another app in accidently. So I'd still prefer a singular page to multiple windows.

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