Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

There might also be a way to have it display directly in the message the way we used to do with images.
I might get a chance to play with it later, or someone else can try.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Ha!

I finally made it to the reply box!

At first I couldn't log in. Had a new 'space' in my login name. And something (don't know what) was missing in my profile ???

I'm having some trouble finding my way around, but that will probably change now that I am logged on.

Considering there is a picture gallery available now, I can't see why avatars and PM's should be limited. Hmm, it might be bandwidth related when I think about it. At least the avatars. Which reminds me, I need a new one.

I'm a bit concerned about the editing stuff as well. Editing the first post will probably solve the MP problem. The mod threads might be another issue. Editing the first post will probably cover most problems, but I imagine there might be instances where attachments are added by several people developing a mod and each ned to edit their own post to make their addition up to date. If the first poster administers everything it might work anyway.

Hmm, I'd better poke around some more to lessen my initial confusion.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Was your username and login name different on the other board? We could only import one name so we went with username since that's what all the user's see.

Well the picture gallery will allow people to put pictures through their Usercp rather than uploading everything as attachments in posts. At least we hope that's the way users will use it because then those pictures won't be so hard to find. Avatars, size wise, is limited because of space issues.....as you can see people are already complaining because we are allowing 80x80 avatars instead of the previous 48x48. File size wise, we thought 20k is a big file allowance for an 80x80 pic. Do you disagree?

Still thinking on this one, I need to do some searching for possible solutions. Right now I'm working on the font size issue some people are seeing in the reply box.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

I like this new look.It has some issues but remember site conversion sticky thread,they are still working out afew things.Be happy that the forum is up because like Mindi said,they could have just waited til everything was perfect(I missed the forums).

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Tell us what you 'really' think, Edoperez. :rant::tough::hammer::rant::soap:

Thanks Mindi, for all of your hard work! You are greatly appreciated, here at Shrapnel, if nowhere else.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Ditto.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Endoperez is, I fear, merely saying what many of us feel.

Not to worry though, early days and all that. There have already been a huge number of improvements since the preview version I saw as a moderator, and no doubt that preview version itself took a massive amount of work to set up.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Personally I'm kind of a stickler for not having things "remember me", I don't like leaving my passwords laying around - even on Firefox.

Anyway Mindi, we know (or we SHOULD know) that you all went through a lot this weekend, and I for one also appreciate all the hard work and attention to detail that was paid. It's obvious that you all want these forums to be attractive AND functional. To not only entice random surfers, but to also properly display the communities that spring up around these games, and the high level of support they tend to receive from their developers.

The problem - and I do think it's ironic that there are so many comments from Dominions players, seeing as it is the highest selling title from Shrapnel, as well as claiming the most active community - is that we are being asked to give up a LOT of functionality and capability, for a lot of control and marketing (for Shrapnel).

I don't think that anyone meant to put anything in a threatening way, but there is wisdom in looking at this from more than a police sort of view. I see so many replies with "this was out of hand", "we don't want that", "people would do this", that remind me of someone cutting off their foot to stop from stubbing their toes.

All leading up to this conversion, many of us were a bit excited, because we kept being told the new software would "allow us to do so much". Currently all I see is that the software allows YOU to do so much - but all the users of the forums get, in trade for all that we are giving up, is slightly larger avatars.

I believe your team is highly underestimating the importance of the Edit issue. I believe you also badly underestimated the PM issue. 300 is still a bit cramped for a really active player, and I think it's a bit silly that the suggested answer is manually archiving what could potentially be 10-15 messages a day.

I'm personally in no hurry to go anywhere else - I like it here. But rather than viewing things as threatening, please just have a little break and then look at these issues again. It's not that people are itching for a reason to leave, are ungrateful, or are otherwise unhappy with Shrapnel. But the Dominions community is very active, and very prolific. It's in everyone's best interests if you at Shrapnel continue to provide room for us to do our thing, and if we keep our thrumming hive of activity here, posting links and drawing attention. Just to reiterate - we WANT to stay here, so please reconsider how inhospitable the new forum functions, for our needs. I won't even go into the look of it, I think if it works great, people will tend to get over the rest.

<3

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Great post Jim! This is exactly my feelings as well.

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Ok, I'll second (or fifth) three things. First of all: Quick Reply is so tiny that I can barely even type in it. Can this be user-modified? It's very disorienting and hard on my eyes.

Secondly-the dark blue, aquamarine, white coloring is inherantly cold (ice=blue/white/aquamarine) and offputting. The orange-brown/parchment color was welcoming and warm. As it is, although the dark blue itself looks cool enough, the greyish aqua that occupies most of the body of the forum page looks dull and dreary, like dirty water. Very officelike, very corporate memo, not very gamer-friendly.

Third: By eliminating editing after half an hour, you've effectively killed four mod nations I was in the process of developing, atleast for a year or two. Please give us the ability to edit atleast the first post. It will save so many problems and so much confusion-not to mention so many posts.

Also, please keep the users in mind. A strong forum community is one of the best things Dominions3 has going for it. I'm sure there are a lot of other Shrapnel games out there that also benefit from it. It's not a threat to say that if you make bad choices about the forum, and the way it looks and works, that it's going to drive people away and make the ones who are here less active and less efficient. That's just the reality of the world we live in.

I don't hate the new board like cancer, but please don't "fix" what wasn't broken already, just in an effort to look shiny and new.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Like Kristoffer said his username was changed as was mine, that really troubled me for a while, first I thought I was deleted becouse I have a brother around here and I had my account almost deleted once before, but that problem is solved.
Anyway, been looking at this new forum, and the thing that is bothering me is, can't find the right word? It isn't reviewable ( pardon my English )
I do appreciate the effort to upgrade the forum and many thanks for putting it up before you made "everything perfect", but I guess that was the point for putting it out before it was done, to see how people react on it and to change it according to suggestions and complaint.
As far as I go, It's a little harder to link on other conversations and to follow up on the threads and I think that will cause people to lose interest a little, at least I have, and there are far less threads on the forum and only the first page gets full attention, so my opinion is that should be changed along with a little more PM's
Hope to see a new even more improved forum up soon.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Yes, you have to go into the usercp and do edit options.....and switch from the basic to the standard editor. The basic editor quick reply box is set by vbulletin and is not an option easily changed in the back end. I'm continuing to look, but there is a very easy way to solve this problem per user by not using the basic editor.

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And exactly mine too. Good work Jim.

I do sometimes get the feeling that we are considered annoying punks who criticise things, get in arguments with each other and abuse those privileges we are granted. We are in fact an exceptionally mature, intelligent and productive community. An incredible amount of good stuff is churned out on the Dominions 3 forums. There have been numerous studies done which show that when people are trusted and given privileges, they tend mostly to behave well. When a lack of trust is implied and privileges withdrawn, they have a far greater tendency to abuse whatever privileges remain, because the feeling of mutual trust has been broken (not, you understand, that I'm implying that is in danger of happening here, but it illustrates a general principle). Of course, because of your positions as staff you will tend to hear a great deal about anything that does go wrong, for example the guy who deleted all his posts when he left the forum. You are much less likely to notice the large quantity of useful stuff that goes on, the lists of things which are constantly maintained, posts edited to provide links to later posts which solved problems and so on.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Mindi, I have just switched back to the Standard editor once again and can confirm that that did not help. The text remains tiny.

Perhaps it may be a browser issue? I use Firefox 2 at work and Firefox 3 here - both show the problem.

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Again I ask, did you have a different login name than display/username? If so this was posted last week that you would no longer be able to use both and would be using the username/display name as your login name.

Actually the main point of putting it up before it was finished was not because we didn't have a path to getting finished, it was because we wanted the users to have as little downtime as possible. However there's always going to be little things that need fixed (functionality of some sort actually broken) during an upgrade of this level. No conversion like this is every perfectly smooth. That doesn't mean we won't take opinions and suggestions into consideration...to imply otherwise is insulting...but the site's been up for less than 24 hours and we're still tweaking things from a broken functionality standpoint. I suppose we could have been down for several more days and had everything absolutely perfect but we thought the users would prefer being able to use the forum over it being absolutely perfect on launch.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Yes, thanks, I think we do appreciate that. I have noticed things getting fixed before my eyes over the course of the day.

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Mindi, I have to say you're coming across as extremely defensive and basically attacking the people in this community who are overwhelmingly being polite and offering constructive criticism, and feedback on how they use the forum and their preferences (note: everyone should follow this example). Llamabeast's posts (as always) were extremely polite and he was voicing opinions which seem to be overwhelmingly the sentiment of the people I've talked to in the community. Responding with a "STFU, this is how it is and you can take it or leave it" is an astoundingly great way to get people to do exactly that. I'm a professional software developer myself (as are several members of our community), and am quite familiar with the unsatisfiable demands of unreasonable customers and the difficulty of having people criticize something you've just spent a lot of time and effort on. I'm also realize that well thought out feedback is absolute gold and telling your users that they should just do everything differently because it works fine for how you use it is a great way to alienate your user base.

It's perfectly valid to say "I hear what you're saying, but we can't do it that way because of technical/business reasons". You did that a couple times, but mostly what I'm hearing is "we decided to do it this way and its not open to discussion. Don't bug me with suggestions".

The people in this community are invested in it, and you've got to realize it feels a bit like somebody just came into the corner pub where we've been hanging out and remodeled everything, changing the beer on tap and the music played. The dart board's not there anymore and, well I'll stop the analogy there but the point is that we *want* to like the new board and simply telling us to get used to the new music is mind boggling if your intent is to keep the same community - which is what *everyone* here wants.

I don't want to beat a dead horse on the issues that have already been brought up, but the reason that people are complaining about the PMs is because this is a pretty central facet to the MP community. Chopping off functionality here is a dangerous thing, and it does seem a bit surprising given the cost of disk space and Llamabeast's suggestion to put up a donate button.

The reason people are complaining about not being able to modify their posts is that this also a central facet of this community, from keeping lists of strategy guides up to date to maintaining a hall of fame. I often update my posts for anything from typos and misspellings to revising a strategy guide in light of something new I learned. This gives people a sense of ownership for the things they post, and chopping out intangibles like this is a dangerous game.

The above two changes, at least to me, make this feel like a less intimate site. This is also I feel the root of many of the smaller complaints from the fixed width to the smaller number of visible posts to the cooler tones being used.

Anyway, I realize a whole lot of effort has gone into this change, please take these suggestions as feature requests from people who are invested in seeing the site and community flourish.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Yes I had a different login name but I realized the issue latter when I failed to login for about half an hour.
I know I must be a little annoying, have nothing better to do at this point but just one more perhaps stupid question on my part,
what do exactly thanks stand for?
I think earlier it was mentioned something about privileges, and what stops one from saying e.g thank you mindi, executor, llama...
and make a thousand thanks post that will maybe get him some privileges?

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Regarding the editing issue, is there a possibility of allowing free editing and simply backing up previous posts to some moderator-accessible archive? This would allow people to report any abusive posts that come up so that the mods could review the previous edits of the post and take action if needed. It could also be used to restore content from any disgruntled users (with a bit more work from the moderators). Luckily, I believe that both of these scenarios have been rare enough that it doesn't make sense to impact the functionality of the entire forum to deal with a very few bad eggs, even though it would require more work of the moderators when stuff like that does come up. Software limitations may, of course, prevent this from being a workable solution, but I thought I could ask. =)

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I disagree. First off I have been fixing things all day based on feedback. The only thing I have gotten irritated about is the fact that certain things (some of which I have repeated said we have to examine all our options for) are being continuously brought up. The more I have to address the same issues that I don't have an answer for yet the less work on the forum I can get done. The less I can get done the more those things some of you are complaining about have to be put off and the longer it goes that any changes are delayed the more posts we get for the same exact things. It's cyclical and I've just asked for some patience.....i.e. waiting a bit before continuously harping on the same things. I don't think that's too much to ask.

First off, I'm not going to discuss the llamabeast issue with you but it has to do with most of the same things being discussed in the moderator forum and our expectations for moderators. I would disagree in saying his post was polite given the circumstances, but that's between me and him at this point. Second off, there are certain things at this point that just CAN'T be changed and there are certain things that are out of my control. Everything else I have asked for patience on (I didn't say they wouldn't be changed at all, I said give us some time to evaluate options) and instead the same things keep being brought up. See the cyclical comment above.

Again, see cyclical comment above.

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No the thanks is just that, to say thanks for a post. Vbexperience is the bars on the right hand side and it's new so we haven't done much with it yet, but that's what I was talking about with 'earning' features. It may stay, it may go......it's not high priority at the moment and it's strictly the base install for that mod so it hasn't been tweaked.

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I'm going to reply in Mindi's place as she's busy at the moment working on some of the reported issues. Edit: I took so long writing this post that this sentence is no longer true!

I'm pretty sure this was addressed in the main thread we're using for making bug reports. This is one of the things Mindi is looking into.

Yes, that is our goal. I don't agree that it's ironic that the majority of comments are from Dominions players; I think it's to be expected. As you said, the majority of our forum users are Dominions players, so it makes sense that they would make the majority of posts. We also have not yet publicly announced we're open after a three day hiatus, and I think we're seeing the Dominions community return more quickly than some others.

Are slightly larger avatars truly the only new feature you see? And that just sort of happened; we don't really see it as an improved feature. With our goal of growing and servicing our tight-knit community in mind, we've added several social networking tools. Some of the new features like the ability to create social groups (added with the multi-player community in mind), post photo albums, and run arcade game tournaments may not be important to some, but we believe they will be enjoyed by others. These are the types of activities people who flock to social networking sites enjoy, and we believe it's a great opportunity to have these types of networking tools within our smaller community where many meaningful relationships already exist.

I'm not sure if you've had a chance to fully explore the expanded options in your user control panel, and I know that some of the functionality there is still being tweaked, but there are many more controllable options for you there than we offered in the previous format. One of my favorite new features is the ability to forward and copy other users within the private messaging system. Maybe I'm alone, but this will make my life easier.


We're not underestimating the importance of the Edit issue at all! Mindi and I have both posted in various places that we've heard some good suggestions and are exploring options for this. Some very valid reasons for needing this feature to be improved have been brought to our attention, and this is a high priority on our list of changes. You won't see a full restore, and you probably won't see a change immediately, but please do understand we are committed to finding a compromise so we have a win/win situation. In the meantime, if anyone needs a post edited, it can be done by contacting a moderator with your request.

I think raising the pm limit to 300 is a good compromise, and we may have to come to agree to disagree on that for the time being. It's the same limit QT3 imposes on it's users, where there are also large communities running multi-player games. I understand it feels stifling to go from absolutely no limit to this, and that's our fault for being so liberal in the past then imposing a limit. The ability to export pm's to a text file, while seen by some as a punishment, is actually an enhancement some users have requested.

And we WANT everyone to stay and be happy. We understand that there are some who are disappointed with the look and disagree with our design decisions. That's to be expected, and we experienced the same reactions when we launched what is now the "old" site. This is a good thread for voicing those opinions. What is truly helpful to us are constructive suggestions for improving functionality, and these should be reported in the stickied thread at the top of this forums.

Thank you for your feedback.

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Mindi:

Welcome to the Internet :) That is normal that users want everything. And that is normal that they will repeat their demands, especially when they seem important for them. And you need patience to calmly respond to everything. Or hire some volunteers for that :) OH, and expecting patience from users is extremely unrealistic.

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I've been on the internet since 1993, so I'm no stranger to this behavior. ;)

That doesn't mean that I'm asking the impossible for some patience. Does it mean I will get it from everyone? No. But I don't think it's unreasonable to ask.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

My biggest complaint, and one that will keep me away, regrettably if it cannot be addressed, is the tiny font size. While my eyes were much better before i hit 40, now that I am over 40, I need at least normal sized font that we used to have in the old dominions forums.

I cannot imagine that the new microscopic font size is intentional, but is some kind of kink being worked out.

Thanks in advance for helping us older users whose eyes are not as sharp as they once were.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

As has been pointed out, I guess it's true that we are in danger of running in panicking circles here. I've just been PMing with Mindi and she (like Annette above, and indeed Mindi herself earlier in the thread) reassures me that they're reading everything we're saying and they're taking it all into account, but of course these things take quite a while to implement, even working flat out as the Shrapnel team seem to be at the moment. So I guess we should probably reserve this thread for any issues which haven't already been discussed above, and in the meantime all try to be patient.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

This is the issue I have been working on.....can you tell me what browser you are using?

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

I agree with Xietor, I'm 17 and I need my eyes.:)
But this is being worked on I think from reading Llamas posts.

Edit: Ahh Mindi beat me to it...

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Well, I think this passage here, hits on where the perceived value isn't translating from administrator > user. I know not everything is working fully, or implemented yet, don't get me wrong there. ;) But for many of us who are here already, the loss of things that are so integral to our use of the site, severely hampers our desire and enjoyment for seeking out and trying new features, so we only see the one that was pointed out so far, the avatars.

I am sure with the current user base, if you asked people if they would prefer to have unlimited PM storage, or "photo albums", the overwhelming majority would choose the PMs. And it is this sort of decision that has led to such frustration from a number of people here. I mean, how many PMs worth of data does a single 800x600 image take up? Doing away with multi-quoting (I noticed that the forum no longer quotes the quotes of a quoted post, guessing PMs no longer do either) would do wonders for the actual storage space involved. And then it bears asking if those stored PMs actually impacted the site functionality or stability before the conversion tests were started? If not, it seems entirely reasonable to just expect it the next time, and warn people pre-emptively in a few years when someone thinks it's a good idea to go through all of this hassle again. ;)

"Social Networking" is indeed popular. Mostly among 15 year olds, who shape much of what is "popular" in a consumer sense in this society. It can be directly tracked, that the rise or decline in popularity from on networking site to the next, is directly correlated to their high school age users. The argument being voiced is threefold: First, the Shrapnel community has very few users in that demographic. Secondly, adding that sort of tools is not entirely likely to spontaneously garner any sort of attention from them - shrapnelgames.com is not the new Facebook. And finally, if by some tragedy of fate they DID show up here it would be highly disruptive to the community at large, and would probably kill Shrapnel, for a short boost in sales.


I know you said that rather than keep hearing complaints, you want suggestions to make things better. It must be somewhat disheartening, after all of this effort, to think that what you are seeing as complaints, largely are actually those very suggestions - but are generally the same suggestion in other words, "please don't make so many changes". It's hard to make suggestions that you might see as constructive, when to us the long term usability of the forums themselves has been compromised. Shrapnel Games, and the games that you distribute, has always been about niche appeal. I've read very verbose and well thought out blogs, posts, and news releases explaining why it's never been Shrapnel's goal to be "popular", or to compete in popularity contests. I think we're all just completely mystified, and a little distressed at how much of these changes are based on what "popular" sites do.

<3 always,
James Douglas Morrison (AKA Damon Schmitt :P)

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Mindi:

But you still do simplest admin mistake - reply to everything. Just go back to your job, let people do some complaining here and do a mass reply in 6, 12 or 24 hours. And you will have some things fixed by then, that is much better than posting replies :) And nothing bad will happen here.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Nevermind, browser doesn't matter. I have duplicated the issue and now am working on root cause analysis.

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The size is quite a bit better since I switched modes. Thanks Mindi!!!
I'm guessing there's no way to alter the font size directly, though. But it's workable, as-is.

That's one problem, the second problem is that it still defaults to that ugly dishwater blue, and won't let me change my background within the field itself-atleast until I've actually sent the message itself. Is there help for this? I just want a nice, light grey background. Ideally, there'd be a way to user-define the whole forum colour-scheme, but I don't know if this would be possible?

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I told what I didn't like about the new page, and about the new forum. It's still under construction, and I pointed out what I'd rather see changed. In hindsight, using such a harsh tone meant that even if I had a point, it would be ignored because I wrote it in such a hostile way. I apologize for that.

I still think the site could be improved. Perhaps it's just my small monitor, but the blue cd in the frontpage takes up the whole middle section of the new page, and about half of the visible area is blue. Scrolling down or changing into fullscreen improve things a lot, but something of a different colour (like the wizard in Dom3 game page) works better for me.

Besides that first view of the frontpage, I don't have problems with the visual look of the page. Things like images not being links yet or the exact catchphrase above some section are just nitpicks. As I said, I'm sorry my dislike came out that harshly. That's partly because I was shocked at seeing something quite dear to me (I've spent years in these forums) change so much.

EDIT: I just discovered the button for thanking a person for a spesific post, and that's a wonderful "social networking" tool. That's great!

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Jim,

Mindi mentioned before that the issue with PMs wasn't disk space, but the time taken for database access or some such. It's been implied that the old system was causing them some kind of problems. In any case, probably bringing up this issue again in a couple of weeks' time would be more productive since Shrapnel just have a silly amount on their plate at the moment. Indeed, that's probably the best course for all issues, since we'll probably find most of them fixed if we just don't think about it for a few days.

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Dam*,like 3 pages of posts in how long?

I was just playing a scenario in winSPWW2,this must be a world record.

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Busy times!

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LOL, good point, Zeldor. Just wait til Scott gets here :angel

Jim, I had an epiphany after reading your post. Once we have all the pages completely functional on the main site and once the forums are tweaked to death (or Mindi quits, whichever comes first), we will be sending out a press release announcing our new "look". I haven't read the release yet personally, but I'm assuming it will be like our others, explaining improvements and enhancements much as we do with a patch announcement. I just realized we haven't given you guys enough information - in our effort to get back up as quickly as we could, we forgot to tell you what we did and maybe a little about why we did it.

So please, give us a few more days to get things the way we want them. We really didn't make these changes in order to restrict your enjoyment, and I guess it appears that was our goal. This was an oversight on our part, for which I apologize.

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What resolution is your monitor set at?

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Indeed. Of course, that was the old system architecture, not this new system. ;) It was more a point about priorities and overt user needs, than anything else. <3

I agree that most things should settle out over time. Except the post editing issue. That one is not going to go away, because it's a matter of extraordinary importance relating to so much of the most valuable activities going on in the Dominions forums. But I am sure the Admins are rapidly becoming fully aware of this, so I will try to stop my cursed fingers from making more words.

Bad fingers, get back in your box!

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Either that or people just complain alot.I think this Thread should be a sticky,if you ask me.

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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

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You may call me Neil :rock:

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

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

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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