Hello, forums are back, as am I. I hope I'll stay now, being absent for quite some time.
Since you asked about opinions and criticism on the new forums, I'll try to list the first things that come to my mind. I have skim-read this thread to not repeat too much which has already been mentioned before. I did read Mindi's post in that other thread rather closely, but while the advice was to reply there, I think, this seems to be where the party is at.
First off, thanks for all the time that you have spent on migrating the forums. I do know how much work this is, especially when one has to repeatedly pull an all-nighter. I'll be listing all the
issues that I can see so far, maybe I'll be able to give a little praise here and there, too, but as you should know you should never expect any praise from people, especially when you're changing things.
Lemme copy and paste stuff that I opened in my tabs so far. This might be out of order and repetitive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao
I started to comment on the new forums, but the animated gifs are drilling a hole through my skull.
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The animated gifs in the column to the left are very distracting, yeah. Especially those swirl/star effects. There were animated gifs in the top at the old forum, but they didn't seem to disrupt that much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jazzepi
2. The board itself seems smaller. It's like someone took it and squished it in from the sides.
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I think some other people agreed to this, and I can too. Somehow, the forums seem a little more squished together from left and right. At first I thought it's my screen resolution of 1024x768, but I heard it's fixed and everybody sees it this way. It gets a lot better if I remove the column on the left - but I expect that you don't want to do that.
The layout somehow seems disconnected. I think it would look better if the Main Menu box and forum header would be directly under the ".com.unity" top logo, without the Gamers Front logo and ad in between. I assume you don't want to do that, too
but maybe it would already help if the gradient in the background would go from black to blue sooner.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vfb
* My friends list was not converted and is now empty.
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There were friend lists?
Quote:
Originally Posted by vfb
* My 'favorite threads' are likewise gone.
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Ouch, I had some of those too. But since this is probably a conversion issue, I can add them again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vfb
* I don't seem to be able to edit my own posts ...
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... and similar threads, lots of people reported this I think: I'll agree that I'd consider the ability to continue to edit posts to be more important than the issues that we had with flame baiting and so on. I'm one of those people who have to edit every post he makes at least 3-5 times. It won't be needed that much for a discussion, but since people are using these forums to display and showcase their creations, they will need a way to edit old posts. The proposed "make the first post editable" might "fix" most issues, but first, it's going to be harder to implement a solution like this, and second, it doesn't fix everything, since there are threads with sections segmented into different posts and collective threads where multiple users contribute.
To be honest, now I am
really glad that I'm a mod so that I'm still able to edit things...
Quote:
Originally Posted by vfb
* All cross-links inside posts were not converted.
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This is the
biggest issue with the forum conversion in my opinion. It is extremely important to keep link consistency throughout the board. Unfortunately, it is not solvable very easily, because the site conversion renumbered the threads and posts, probably because numbers of deleted posts got reused. Thus it is not possible to write a simple "old URL => new URL" tool now, one has to work with the old forum data. You'll have to parse every post, look for links, parse their URL, look if they link to the forums, look where that thread/post will be on the new forum (the hard part) and change accordingly. I'd offer my help with this in case you get a reply from the vBulletin people and there are still issues with it.
On a related note, people were relying on the URLs for attachments to add preview pictures to their maps and mods.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
- An astonishing proportion of the vertical space on a page is taken up with the names of the poster and other stuff.
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Yes, this has grown considerably. In the new style of phpBB3 this is the same, the avatar image went from the left to the top of the post and the post header increased in height, so maybe it is "modern" now. I think that an interim solution would be to get rid of those experience bars on the right. Can those be disabled somehow, maybe in user preferences? It might help a little.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
- 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.
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I'd say those probably won't find much use, but I can ignore them pretty well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
- 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.
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That's another thing that I immediately noticed, too. The threshold should be increased, at least doubled, can this be done in user preferences maybe? The way it is now, the subforums and stickies take up 50% of the vertical space in the Dom3 main forums. For the old forums, threads only needed one column, now it's two columns per thread, too. I'd guess that things can get buried a lot faster now, which is a bad thing for the MP forums where it's important for active games to stay on the first page.
Quote:
Originally Posted by llamabeast
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...
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Hahaha, you really took out the calculator. You might remember that I argued the same in the mod forums long before the work on the forums began. I'd just suggest people should take the communication to email. The forums might be a more appropriate central storage for game-related things, but email is superior over PMs in a number of ways.
Now, to the things on Mindi's list in the other thread:
COLORS: It's strange to see that I'm getting sentimental over the old color scheme, too, which I considered being "blech" when I joined. You grow to love what you're accustomed to, I guess.
The default phpBB3 color scheme is mostly blue, too. Maybe a little lighter shade. Looks unsual, but it's not that tragic and it might be the easiest to change after all
SITE DESIGN / EDITING: see above
LINKS:
Biggest and most important issue in my book.
SEARCH: The Moderator forum doesn't show up on my list of things to search for. You might want to look into that.
THANKS / REPUTATION: I usually don't really like these things on forums. Karma points can be a *****.
Some issues I stumbled over:
Bulleted lists like they were used in the old forums don't seem to have been converted correctly. I guess this is a known problem.
Quotes are removed when quoting something now, probably to limit and prohibit nesting of quotes. It's true that nesting quotes five levels deep is problematic, it was especially with the old forum software. But I'd like to allow at least 1-2 levels of nesting. Because you can follow a discussion more clearly, and because I can find the section that I want to quote and reply to more easily when I'm writing my post.
The forums are logging me off automatically,
very fast. You can't really switch to other programs or type a longer reply without getting logged off it seems. Since you usually get a login token in some cookie, I think that this doesn't have to be this way, maybe it can be configured in user settings? And I don't want to stay logged in all the time like that "remember" function probably does. I just don't want to be logged off so soon.
The text size in the non-WYSIWYG textarea input is
very tiny for me (Firefox 2.x). It is okay in WYSIWYG mode.
Now for the GOOD things that I already noticed, and I have only used a couple of mouseclicks on this new site so far:
- It looks like the attachments are better now.
- IF you get logged off while writing a post and are asked to enter your login detail again, the forum now remembers what you wrote. The old software didn't manage to do that. THANK GOD!
- If you use the edit buttons like bold/italic or smileys now, it actually changes the things in place, or what you have selected. AWESOME!
Guess that's it for now.
Re: New Board - Props and Slops
Come to 
Visit my 
What do you take me for? Certainly no calculator came near!
Linear Mode
