Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Maybe it's just because you used the word "epiphany", or because I admire women on the internet like most people admire astronauts - but in either case, I am just glad that I found some way to help. :P

Unfortunately, Administrator praise has earned my fingers a presidential pardon, and they've been freed from their box. Woe be to the little people, the Fingers of Doom are *tap* *tap* typing for YOU! O.O

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

You may call me Neil :rock:

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

"This forum requires that you wait 60 seconds between sending private messages." That looks like some king of stupid joke...

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Presumably some kind of anti-spamming feature. Perhaps 30 seconds would be less likely to be encountered by an actual human.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

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.

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.

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.

There were friend lists? :)

Ouch, I had some of those too. But since this is probably a conversion issue, I can add them again.

... 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... :angel

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.

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.

I'd say those probably won't find much use, but I can ignore them pretty well. ;)

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.

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 *****.:p

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! :up:
- 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! :up:

Guess that's it for now. :happy:

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

LOL! :D

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

I am not sure what is up with all the whining about private messages and stuff when theres a million different kinds of chat clients that handle the kind of high volume and fast back and forth communication everyone seems to want (aka what forums or forum PM's are not for)

I would recommend a good IRC client or someting like ICQ if you want to send people messages while they are't online. Or shocker here I know use email :D

I love the new forums,everything about them seems to be an improvement over what we had except maybe the color but I understand reasoning behind that change. Could use some more arcade games though, maybe something I am better at ;)

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

:shock: What do you take me for? Certainly no calculator came near!

It was like one of those physics problems, like "estimate the mass of cheese in the UK", where you go "okay, let's say everyone in the UK has half a kilo of cheese. And let's say about half the cheese in the UK is owned by individuals, while the other half is in warehouses, shops etc. And the population of the UK is about 60 million. So... 60 million kilos aka 60 thousand tonnes". I love those things!

Edit: Can't believe having started to write out that inane example I actually followed it through! What a geek!

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

I like those things too,but I have like 2 weeks of summer vacation left I don't want to think about that kinda stuff til september. :D

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

You must have never played dominions 3 multiplayer.

People have a need for a single layer of abstraction for communication. It's either e-mail, or the board PMs. Most people are loathe to post their e-mail addresses on public boards for fear that it'll get picked up by spam bots. So if you're an admin, you could go around and send PMs to everyone to collect their e-mail addresses, and then send another round of PMs with all the addresses and who the players are.

It's just much simpler to use the PM system for in game diplomacy. Everyone knows the username of the players in the game without revealing their e-mails to the entire world. You can setup the PMs to e-mail you when you get new ones. The PMs (well they used to before a very small cap was imposed) be a good place to store relevant history for a given game, allowing you to look back on trades, alliances, and agreements you'd setup earlier. You also have all your game e-mails stuck in one place, instead of cluttering up your POP3 client's inbox.

Personally, I think the new forums have more cons than pros, and what pros there are seem highly irrelevant like all the scoring system stuff that just eats up vertical space and clutters the boards. Given the choice, I definitely prefer the old forums.

Jazzepi