[Mindi]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

I agree with essentially all of the points raised in this thread.

Shrapnel games is, so far as I can tell, an excellent publisher, and technically they also appear to be highly competent (thanks Mindi, Richard, and anyone involved in that aspect of things). However, I must admit I think site design is not a forte. There are a startling number of features in the new forum design that simply fail to follow simple principles of user-friendliness. Here are some examples:

- An astonishing proportion of the vertical space on a page is taken up with the names of the poster and other stuff. For a typical short post, e.g. that of Executor a few posts above, perhaps only 20% of the space used by his post is actually used for content. This makes the thread hard to read and disrupts the flow.

As told to you in the moderator forum during the forum testing, there simply isn't a better way to do it. If we put them on the side like the old forum, it will shrink the forum width even more and since we went to a fixed width this simply isn't a user friendly option. If you are wanting to go back to a percentage based site from the fixed width site, well you're going to continue wanting because that isn't happening.

- Below the last post on a thread we have a Bookmarks box, which frankly I imagine will be used very rarely at best, and then a Tags box, which similarly is not a key feature. Only then do we get to the quick reply box. Only a small proportion of the space in the quick reply box is actually available for text entry (and that in a tiny font which I presume is simply a temporary glitch). So, the process of replying to a post has several obstructions. Do these obstructions really make it difficult to reply? Of course not. Do they make it far more annoying than necessary? In my opinion, certainly.

Again this was discussed in the moderator forum during testing and all of which is your opinion. When people use bookmarks it helps the site get more visibility which in turn sells more games which keeps the games you like being published. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Tags is a great feature which I forgot to list on my PLEASE READ thread, but again a personal preference if you don't like them. When tags are used it allows folks to find things they are interested in more quickly, this is a good thing.

- In the main page of a forum, there are many fewer topics visible at once than before. This is quite serious, since only those on the front page will really get attention. In the Dominions 3 forum at least, there tend to be more topics currently in discussion than will fit on the front page.

Currently this setting is set to 20 threads (not including stickies), I may change these settings eventually, but really I think you are blowing the seriousness of this issue out of proportion. Typically in would take a many days for anything to scroll of the front page as there are only so many new threads posted in a day. Yes it might scroll a bit sooner, but not so much that it is hard to keep up for regular users.

- Maybe I am just stupid, but I can't work out how to tell which forum topics have items added since I last read the topic. The key at the bottom tells me that the envelope should have some paper poking out of it. None of them do, so I don't know what to make of that. Those red envelopes are poor symbols anyway. The majority of the visual space of each symbol is a red envelope. Since that's present in all of them it conveys no information and is just a distraction. Better to have symbols which are more different (and also less garish).

Again, you are bringing up things already addressed in the moderator forum during testing. Just because you haven't gotten your way doesn't give you a right to stomp yoru feet and yell it at the top of your lungs. The easiest way to find out what is new when you come in is new threads and threads that have new posts in them since you were last here are in bold. There is an arrow to the left of the thread title that when clicked will take you to the new post.

- This point arises completely from ignorance of web design. I understand you have opted for a fixed-width design rather than the old variable scheme. Given the large number of people using widescreen monitors etc, may I be so forward as to ask what the rationale there was? This is not a criticism, as I simply don't understand the issues involved. Were it possible to add an option to use the full width of the screen, this would undoubtedly make many people happy.

Addressed and answered in my PLEASE READ thread. It's for the cohesiveness of the site and really fixed width is the standard for many sites these days, it's not as if we are doing something that is a rarity. I have a widescreen monitor too, but there are many sites I have that are fixed width and most are set for the predominate standard width right now which is 1024wide.

Finally, I'd like to make a couple of comments about PMs. Firstly, the option to download the PMs as XML, CSV etc., while very welcome, will be useful to a minority of users. Most would not know what to do with such a file, and I have to say I'd have no idea how to display it conveniently, short of writing my own program.

This is ridiculous, if you don't know how to use an XML or CSV, simply download it as .txt (text file), save it to your desktop and click on it. It will open in any word processing program you have and is simple to read. No real knowledge of any in depth computer skills necessary. If you know how to get on the internet and use a PM, you should EASILY be able to download a text file and double click on it to open it up. Whatever program that is associated on your computer with text files will auto open it once you double click on it.

Secondly, I'm at a loss to understand why such a tight space restriction is needed. I imagine there are perhaps 1000 regular users of these forums, but let's say 10000. I imagine a typical PM should require 1-2KB to store (1000-2000 characters is not short), but let's say 10KB. Finally, let's imagine a generous limit of 1000 PMs, which of course in reality not all users would fill. The resulting disk space required would be 10000 * 10 * 1000 = 100 million KB = 100GB. You can easily and cheaply buy a hard disk these days with a capacity of 500GB. Hell, if that's the problem, just give us a donate button and we'll buy you one, it wouldn't cost much at all. So perhaps the problem isn't disk space, in which case I would be genuinely interested to hear where the bottleneck lies.

Ah, but you haven't thought of a lot of other things like performance issues from large tables and the fact that a small percentage of users like to abuse this feature and use it as a replacement for email. Frankly almost all sites put a limit on PMs and had our old software had that feature, we would have too. We created a monster by not doing so and now we're correcting the problem. We have raised the limit as posted in this forum and the moderator forum (FYI) to let people know what the new limits are. Again, unless you are going to respond to that same PM multiple times, once you have read and/or responded to a PM it's not necessary to keep in our system, it can be downloaded. And for pete's sake if you get a read receipt, delete it after you get it! There's no reason to keep things like that. For most people I imagine they can download their PMs once every couple of months and keep their boxes clean....others more often, most people even less often or they may never download them at all.

I do realise there has been an insane amount of work gone into making these forums work, and I do greatly appreciate that. There is just room for a few tweaks in order to make it the nice place to spend time we have been lucky enough to grow accustomed to.

I'm glad you realize that a lot of work went into this. Maybe next time your attitude in your posts will reflect that considering we've talked about almost all of this stuff previously in the moderator area. I understand you and others don't like change, but I will leave you with this quote that my husband loves to use in his job which I think is very appropriate here:

Change is inevitable. How you handle to change is controllable.