New Board - Props and Slops

[Executor]

I'm starting to like it less and less with every passing minute!!!
And what are these orange blue and green lines under personal info about???

[Mindi]

The bars are vbexperience, it's a different way of measuring your activity. Awards are also given out for different things. That is an area that is still being tweaked, all we have in currently is the base install for it. Eventually you may be able to 'earn' different options on the board through some of these type of tools.

[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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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).

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

[Gandalf Parker]

I meant to ask this earlier.
Can we finally change the title of the web pages so that the name of the tags and bookmarks is not Intel Forums?
I would prefer if each one started with "Shrapnel"

[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.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Mindi

EDITING: Editing on the old board use to have a cap of 6 hours and eventually it became broken in the software allowing the users to edit without cap limits as some of you have realized, this has been fixed with the new board software and has been restricted to 30 minutes. There are various moderation reasons to do this, for one we have people who get into arguments and then go back and edit and act like they didn’t say the things they did.


Another reason for the cap is so if you get angry and leave over some disagreement with another user, you cannot edit out useful comment that you had contributed to the community. In particular this happened with one user in the Dom 3 community and frankly that kind of behavior is extremely childish, but because some people act that way when they get angry we have to have some sort of stop in place to prevent one user from harming the community at large.


We've heard this may be a problem in MP game threads. We are going to examine our options before making any decisions.

As others have posted here, the ability to edit posts is indeed very useful for MP games, and it is nice that you're taking this issue under consideration.

It isn't only for MP games this comes in handy though. It is quite common for some people to post (sometimes quite long & detailed) strategy tips/suggestions/guides and similar things (And I'm not talking about you only Baalz. ). Quite often these posts are the start for an intresting and fertile discussion on the subject, and sometimes the OP would like to be able to edit his first post to include the suggestions, tips, and insights provided by the rest of the community.

It would be nice if it would be possible to at least retain the ability to edit the OP's of each thread, (This would also solve the MP issue mentioned before. ) though I don't have the slightest idea about the software issues involved.

[Twan]

Personnally my main complaint is the limit on edit policy. I find extremely unadapted especially considering posts can have attachments like mods or maps, and it's not your interest to see old versions use space on the forums, nor the interest of players to have to go through 50 posts to find the good ones, nor of course the interest of the poor moderators to have to do the work each time someone want to edit something somewhere. (And as said above this policy show a lack of knowledge of how MP threads are used too.)

I support Zeldor's suggestion : make at least the first post of each thread editable without time limit (or better the first page of each thread, so a big list separated in several posts would be editable too), or better just remove this stupid limit (seriously are moderation problems so big here that you need a limit when far bigger boards don't seem to consider it necessary ? -don't know any board where users have a time limit on their editing rights).

.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Amhazair

It would be nice if it would be possible to at least retain the ability to edit the OP's of each thread, (This would also solve the MP issue mentioned before. ) though I don't have the slightest idea about the software issues involved.

Good suggestion, I'll put it on the list of possible solutions to that issue.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Twan

I support Zeldor's suggestion : make at least the first post of each thread editable without time limit (or better the first page of each thread, so a big list separated in several posts would be editable too), or better just remove this stupid limit (seriously are moderation problems so big here that you need a limit when far bigger boards don't seem to consider it necessary ? -don't know any board where users have a time limit on their editing rights).

Stupid limit to you, smart limit to us and yes you would be surprised about how much of an issue the editing thing is whenever a flame war breaks out or a user gets mad and deletes content. And yes there are plenty of places that limit editing. Some places don't allow it at all for that matter. We're trying to find a good compromise on those people who want to add something to their post or fix posting/typing errors without getting into a situation where we do he said she said and don't know the truth. We'll be looking at our options but until we can do that this issue is closed. We've heard from all of you and will examine it, but continuing to complain will not make that happen any faster.

[llamabeast]

I wasn't trying to be unhelpful Mindi. I'm sorry if it came across that way. I understand this must be a pretty rotten day for you.

(regarding vertical space) As told to you in the moderator forum during the forum testing, there simply isn't a better way to do it.

If it is possible (and of course I don't know that it is), there is a good deal of room for rearrangement. The avatar pictures don't need to be so big (the old size was fine), and the graphs could be placed alongside all the text in the top right rather than below it. Finally there is a bit of space underneath the main header which just contains the post symbol, generally a bit of paper. This could be incorporated somewhere in the main header. All those measures together would make a big difference.

With regard to the bookmarks - yes, sorry, that is my personal opinion, and I only repeated it here to open it to debate. Sorry if that was an aggravating thing to do. I still feel that they would be used just as often if placed below the Quick Reply box - I'm certainly not suggesting they be removed! - and that would generally add to the ease of use of the site.

Regarding the number of threads on the front page, my feeling is that generally are more than 20 active at any one time. Maybe I'm wrong though. Since I guess it's easy to change at any point, it isn't a big deal.

Apologies for missing the fixed-width thing in the "please read" thread.

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.

After ending up doing a lot of technical support over the last year or two with my Dom3 server, I merely venture to suggest you may be being overoptimistic. It's not a big deal though, if people aren't sure they can just post a question on the board and they will quickly find help. So disregard that point.

Ah, but you haven't thought of a lot of other things like performance issues from large tables

Fair enough, I wondered if it might be something like that. I've never done any database programming, so couldn't form a judgement there.

Again, apologies if my tone overstepped the mark. I am honestly merely trying to help, but I think perhaps my judgement was off. Particularly in the second paragraph, which was just stupid, particularly on a day like today. Everyone is stupid sometimes.