New Board - Props and Slops
 

Things I immediately noticed and didn't like.

SLOPS

1. The tiny stored PM cap.

I know that there was a huge issue with the number of PMs being saved in people's accounts, but the current 100 message limit is far too low. I generate well over 100 messages from a single game. I use the board PM system explicitly so that I can store those messages and look at them later in case I forget about an agreement/trade/pact. Since I usually play in 4-5 games at any given time, I can usually expect a load of about 300-1000 messages depending on whether or not I survive for a long time.

In short, the cap was put on because a tiny fraction of the users were clogging up the database with their PMs. PLEASE raise the cap to something more reasonable, say 1000 PMs, so that I can continue to use the on board PM system to do diplomacy.

2. The board itself seems smaller. It's like someone took it and squished it in from the sides. There's less room given to the individual threads, and I find the screen much more "busy" with irrelevant stuff. I'd really like to see the individual cell size of each thread increased (when browsing from a general page outside of a specific thread) as well as the text inside of those cells.

Basically I feel like I'm playing in this tiny little sandbox and not using the majority of the window.

3. The number of icon usable for the main thread of the posts has shrunk considerably. I always used the icons to show a difference between the multiplayer game threads so that they're easy to pick out. So, basically, please add more icons that we can use for the post ones.

4. I dislike the "new post" icon. I felt the way the old system worked where the thread itself was simply bolded was much more effective. It's more difficult to differentiate between a thread that has a new post in it than one that doesn't because the icons are all so similar.

5. Apparently there's no way to delete posts anymore :( How frustrating. Can an admin please move this to the general board?

PROPS

Otherwise things look okay, and I'm glad the transition is finally over with! Thanks to all the admins for putting in the time and effort to get stuff over-hauled so quickly. Hopefully the transition will equal less down time in the future. Oh, and the new boards are very zippy, which is extremely nice. No more waiting for load times.

Jazzepi

I think the new forum is a major downgrade, on the order of Windows Vista. We all knew the ins and outs of the old board, and it was quite well done. This new forum is full of useless bells and whistles, and is quite generic. It looks and acts like any old board you might find on the web.

And I agree that the 100 message limit is a joke. C'mon Shrapnel, it's just text. You can store 1000 per user easily.

The animated icons are driving me nuts.

I predict that this new board will drive down MP game participation by at least 50%

Overall, the new site looks really nice though. It's just the boards that I find useless now.

yeah i agree i really do NOT like the new boards... and i too am also scared of MP suffering due to it.
It is the first day they have been put up though. maybe things will be improved. (im still for the old boards though :P )

I started to comment on the new forums, but the animated gifs are drilling a hole through my skull. How am I supposed to get in character for Perihelion, Lord of all Creation, when I keep seeing this stupid bouncing question mark out of the corner of my eye? If forum admins are reading, please ditch the animated icons. Didn't we learn anything from the <blink>blink tag?

I Agree! 8(
 

Maybe I just wanted so much out of these forums, it's just like "morning after" disappointment?

Jazzepi already hit most of mine.

But I wanted to add:

6. Anti-Idle - Can this be disabled somehow? I used to leave browser pages open to my PM Inbox, and to the forums. There's no data being transferred unless I click on a page, so essentially the anti-idle is sucking bandwidth from the server by forcing people to log back in constantly.

I love you guys, just please please..... Make these forums more like the comfortable and loving wife we left behind on friday, and less like the cheap **** we woke up with after a weekend in Vegas.


<3 <3 <3

I understand that you use a new board software, now can we tweak the interface back to where it was? This tiny font used in quick reply is killing my eyes.

BTW, what's up the huge user name row? IMHO, the space would much better be used for other things, like text in a post.

I would just like to say that I agree on everything said above. Why all this clutter and advertisement? It just feels cheap and disrespectful, and that is certainly not the recipe for a strong community.

Do use the possibilities the new forum software offers but please don't throw everything at once in my face like this.

Sorry for these additional gripes:

* All cross-links inside posts were not converted. The Strategy Index is now a list of strings to search for.

* My friends list was not converted and is now empty.

* My 'favorite threads' are likewise gone.

* I don't seem to be able to edit my own posts ... but I'm sure that's just me ... is it? If I can figure out how to edit my posts, then I can delete this line! EDIT Okay, so I can edit this post with the 'Edit' button. But I don't have an 'Edit' button in my old posts. I'd like to update the first post in my 'Max Path to Search By' strategy thread. Is there a time limit on how old a post can be before it is editable? Or is it just posts that were converted from the old board?

And, I have to say that back when I was playing 5 MP games at once, I'd fill up the 100 messages limit pretty quickly. Some turns I'd get 3 or 4 or 5 PMs from one player. Organizing gem contributions for a secret Dispel could be 10 or 15 messages for just one turn for one game. What I don't get is that PMs are actually really tiny, compared to attachments and most posts ... so why is the limit so low?

Editing is very possible for me (and easy too) by just clicking the edit button under my post. Very capable forum software I must say but it could be used in a much better way.

Dedas, can you Edit all your pre-conversion posts too?

(another edit) One good thing about this new board is that the Dom3 ads now seem to be served from beta.shrapnelgames.com. So at least I have any easy way to block them! And not worry about my wife looking over my shoulder and thinking I'm on Adult Friend Finder.

No I can't... just post-conversion posts apparently.

Oh ... now my Edit button is gone for the above posts. Must be some kind of timestamp thing after all. Looks like it's less than an hour, too.

Edit Did an edit of this post, then cut & pasted the post number from above, and got this message:

Is that just the default for the new software? For MP games we need to edit the very first post quite a bit, and often many days or months after it was first posted:

* When the game parameters have been decided on.

* When the map isn't decided in advance.

* When pretenders get submitted.

* When somebody becomes dead or AI.

* When someone subs for a nation.

* When the game's over.

I really expected something good... forums were down for many days, many times.

The really bad thing is that new message does not replace oldest one, so if someone has 100PMs already he cannot get any new ones... and by default it puts copies of all you send into sent mail, so it makes just 50PMs. Add the fact that I got all my Sent Items that I deleted about 10 days ago present here, almost 700 messages! It was a bit over the limit, so no one could contact me...

I am sure that the new forums are much safer and have some neat new features, but I liked the appearance of the old ones much more. Is there any way we can customize the appearance of the forums, so they would look like we're used to?

Good morning and thank you for returning after what seemed to all of us an excruciating amount of down time. When Mindi arrives this morning, she will designate a central location for reporting bugs so we can efficiently respond and make the necessary tweaks to ensure all features are working as they should. I'll respond to some of your questions and comments here, and it's possible this thread may be moved or merged once that area is set up.

If I understand correctly, the pm cap is something we may be able to adjust in the near future. One of the new features we'd like for you to try is the ability to download your pm's to XML, CSV or Text. When you're viewing your list of pm's, you'll see this option at the bottom of the page. It would be very helpful if you give this a try and see if it is a viable way to manage and store your pm's during an mp game. It would be helpful to hear feedback on what an ideal number for the cap would be. We can't allow it to be limitless, as it was on the old board.

The page is set at a fixed width and set to accomodate a variety of screen resolutions. Please go in to your control panel (User CP), then to Settings & Options, then to Edit Options and test the options provided there.

I'll have to defer this to Mindi, as I'm not sure what's available and what is fixed as part of Tim's design plan.

This is a feature that will not change and is in place for moderation purposes. If we could have had this feature on our old boards, we would have. There is time limit up to which you may edit your post - I believe it is 30 minutes. That should be adequate time for a poster to reread what has written, make corrections and clarifications if necessary. It was extremely difficult to moderate forums when users had the ability to make a post which violated our rules then edit it before a moderator could review what was said. You are always welcome to ask a moderator to edit your post after the 30 minute window has closed.

VFB brings up a good point about the need to edit mp game announcements, which I will discuss with our team to see what a possible solution may be for that.

This was a known issue identified during our testing. Please read Mindi's announcement here:
SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!

As to the comments I've read so far about appearance, please go into your User CP panel and explore your editing options. I think some of the concerns raised here can be adjusted by changing your personal options. The sidebars and game advertisements are here to keep the "lights turned on" . Please understand Shrapnel Games' primary business is to sell games. We appreciate your participation here and making this your forum home. We understand it's difficult to adjust to a completely new look and changes in functionality. We hope you'll enjoy trying out the new features available and find they're worth bearing with us until this new home feels comfortable, too.

Annette:

Few things about PMs:
1. Can you globally turn off automatic saving copies of sent messages? You need to tick that off every time to save space.
2. Selecting all messages in one folder does not work - it selects only one page, so if you want to export or delete you need to do it page by page.
3. Exported messages looks really really ugly and unreadable, maybe it's because that are old messages with old forum formatting.
4. Probably 500 messages in Inbox would be fine, maybe add some additional space for people with higher ranks or smth similar. 1 day of diplomacy in 1 game can generate 20-50 messages a day! Some people would need to export few times a week and finding trade agreements and NAPs would be really painful [point 3].

For MP games threads - could you just enable unlimited modifying of 1st post in the thread? And I really don't see anything bad about editing posts later.

And yeah, I really missed the announcement about forums going down that weekend :)

The old forum worked so much better for me, much easier to handle and the appearance of the forums was nicer, and I too think 100 PM's is not nearly enough for people who are in multiple games or even admins.

Here's the official thread for reporting bugs:http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=40153

Everyone, please see the recent thread I posted in this forum for common answers to some of these questions. If you have questions that cover something DIFFERENT than I covered in that thread I will answer but since many of the questions asked in this thread are covered there, please start a new thread to do so.

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???

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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).

.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a very good idea.

No I wouldn't say that, in some ways it's a great day for Shrapnel, but I'm not going to tolerate a lot of nit picking considering what we've went through and what all is working RIGHT. Many other sites that do conversions like this take many more days or even weeks to be back up again. We did this in less than 3 days with 3 to 4 people at a time working on it! This is a great accomplishment but that also means we're exhausted and are still working on it so patience and kindness go a long way.

As someone else said in the last couple of weeks, we have one of the smallest allowed avatar sizes of any board, so the fact that it's 32 pixels higher now is not a big amount of space IMO. As for putting other things across the top of the postbit instead of under the right stats, there are some issues with that as user IDs are different in length for different users which means that space is variable and will probably look a mess if too much stuff is put up there. It may even push out the side of the table throwing the whole template off. As far as the line with the post symbo and post time, if you look on the right hand side of that same line there are other important symbols and functionality, including the box for moderators to click to use moderation for that post. I don't know if that can even be changed in vb or if it's that big of a deal to try to change all the templates to do so.

You should be lucky I put them at the bottom of a thread and not the top. ;)

Please tell me what is so hard. You click on the txt, it opens a box and asks you were you want to save it on your computer. Once saved, you open it....again, I'm not seeing what's so hard. Especially coming from anyone who has uploaded or downloaded a file before. It's a basic computer skill that anyone learns after a short time online.

Mindi:

It looks like only Dominions MP players are posting here. The thing is that game is turn-based strategy and is played by e-mail. That requires some other communication method for diplomacy and trade. You just cannot wait few days for an in-game reply. E-mails don't work for obvious reasons, both privacy and easy of use - you know who is playing that nation, so you simply PM him, instead of PMing him for e-mail address :)

That is quite mature community that does not need to be poked in the eyes with that ugly childish addons [btw, that women in new 'I want my dominions' ad looks like she needs some medical attention]. There should be an option to get rid of that bookmarks tab, also that strang xp/activity bars. We are not 11 old children that need to write and link everything we do.

Width is the big issue too, probably around 90% monitors sold now are widescreen now and standard size now is 19-22". And people want to make use of it, not get squeezed by tiny text, tiny amount of threads and cluttered space.

Everyone here values all work done by Shrapnel and Illwinter and we want better forum both for you and us. But the thing is that if it stays like that we can expect to see a creation of new forum [for example on llamaserver] and migration of MP community there. And they would just ignore Shrapnel forums and all those ads, so no exposure and no sales, as you said.

As I told llamabeast, kindness and patience would go far in being heard. Threats will get you no where. And I would dare say that social networking is not 'childish'.....it may not be your cup of tea, but it's the predominant type of community on the internet these days.

And again, I have a wide screen monitor as well, but I still go to many sites that have fixed width. Most people design sites with the predominant screen resolution in mind at the time. That resolution right now is 1024.

Thanks again for your responses Mindi. Just one small clarification:

Sorry, I meant the bit just below the poster's name, rather than the bit above it. That seems only to contain the bit of paper.

:)

Mindi:

No threats intended :) Just some advices, I did see some online communities collapsing in my life and I really don't want to see anything bad happening with the great thing we have here.

Christ almighty.

the forums have gone from being ugly and functional to being ugly and non-functional.

I am assaulted by flashing adds and animated gifs at the side of thread titles. These make it impossible for me to stare at the page. I'm pretty sure it was discovered back in the internet prehistory that flashing objects, animated gifs, and the like are at best extremely distracting and at worst impossible to look at.

I had to block all images from shrapnel in order for me to be able to read the forums

It seems, however, that little things like "reply" buttons (and all the others) are also actually images, and so blocked.

Hence, the whole forum is currently a disaster.

Okay, for those of you who found the animated images distracting, I have removed how many of them you can see on the page before clicking 'more' to get additional smilies. I don't know what I can do about the post icons, I will have to look into that one.

I would also hate to see the more dedicated part of the Dom3 community move to another forum better suited to their needs. That would be a very unfortunate event indeed - for all parties involved. But things like childish advertisement (we are wargamers after all, we like to be taken serious :)), a cluttered and hard to use interface and other similar things will go a long way in making that come true.

Most of us are of course patient, especially so soon after the software change. But at least I got a little worried after seeing the new forum, if not chocked. :)

The only addition to the ads is the one on the side. The one at the top of the forums was there before and considering we shrunk the latest news blocks on the side, the ad box takes up no additional space. There is no animated gifs at the side of thread titles unless someone has chosen a animated post icon of which there are only 2.

Ahhh, basically taking that away would take away a poster's ability to post a seperate title to their response. The reason you are only seing a piece of paper is because no one who has replied has titled their response differently than the OP.

animated icon at the side was a pair of clapping hands. The flashing game ads were previously at the top of the page, and so could be gotten out of the visual space just by scrolling down a bit. the ads now at the left cannot be.

also, thanks for upping pms to 300, but now the sent and recieved seem to have been duplicated... i'm now at over 200 of my 300 used ;p

Those of you who are being auto logged out, are you clicking the "remember me" box when you log in? As long as you have clicked that box, you should not be logged out.

It seems that the forum update mostly improves the moderator side of things. I was expecting something that helped on the user side, not something that totally changed the look. :( This is made worse by the fact that the new look is horrible, especially the current shrapnel games from page, and especially the bland, BLUE cd in the middle. It's like a hole in the middle of a page, not an eye-catcher, and a blank cd certainly doesn't give a good image of your games. Other problems I have with the current Shrapnel Games frontpage. I understand it's still under construction (link to free games doesn't work), but IMO that's just more reason to point these out now when people are still working on it.

- The cursive titles It's what we do and Buy it! Buy it! are horrible. Please replace them. Defining your publishing as something you do feels bland, and the buy it! line seems way too direct, even desperate. IMO, even something like what we do best and order today! would be a vast improvement. I'd also like to see It amuses us and take it! take it! (blog and free games, respectively) changed. I don't think your blog (from which I've only read discussions about the niche game economy) is supposed to be amusing, and Take it! again goes way above my comfort level.

- The title images (Our games, Our blog, Our forums etc) should link to the page in question.

- I really hope the images under "Our games" are temporary. They make it look like all your games were sold either in dvd cases or in boxes, but at least Dominions 3 isn't.

- Ordering your games alphabetically by category doesn't work. The current way starts from BOARD games, and ENDS in STRATEGY and WAR. This doesn't work for "publisher of permier war and strategy games".

Being able to edit first posts of threads is important, but preferably there should be some way to set any post as always-editable, because there are mods (e.g. Conceptual Balance for Dom3) that have several different versions that are made downloadable as different attachments. When a version changes, all of these should be edited.
Perhaps making all posts with attachments always editable?


Color scheme of the new forum is bland. The old brown gave the forum most of its feeling, IMO. Please bring it back, if possible.

Graphic ads on the side of the forum are really distracting. Text ads on the side are fine, and image ads on top and on bottom are tolerable, but breaking the color scheme with off-color ad is really bad. If you need an image ad on the sidebar, please put it to the top of the bar, to where the main menu is currently located.


The new forum software doesn't jump to the first unread post of a thread when the thread is opened normally. You have to click the tiny arrow-icon next to its name. This is counter-intuitive. Most people don't want to read the whole thread again every time even a single post is added to it, and the first page could still be opened by selecting the '1' that's after the title.


As said before, the poster's name on top of each post takes huge amount of space. I really liked the old system, but I understand you aren't changing back to it. Still, could some vertical space be saved by moving some of the info to the center of the name/avatar line? Perhaps the new activity indicator bars? Also, it might be better to limit the avatar size so that large avatar won't strech that space any further. Changing it now, before new, bigger avatars are uploaded, would be better.


The size of text in the reply box is tiny when compared to the actual text size. This might be due to my personal settings, but I haven't been able to find an option for changing text size in the new software. Is there any way to change the size of the text in text field, or the the size of the text on viewn posts?

EDIT:
As some other people, I was shocked when I first saw the new forum. Color scheme and look were a big part in that. I even felt like this wasn't the same forum at all, and that I might leave it just for that, and the small things yet to be ironed out.

Minor thing on the front page: It says "Please bare with us". This should be "Please bear with us", lest it appears to be an invitation for some group stripping.

I won't address the site design as that wasn't my portion of the change over but I will say although there is a great addition to moderation there is also a great amount of new features for users. Read my "PLEASE READ" stickies, I posted some of the new features in there although I only touched on a portion of the new features. Also additional features will be coming.

Asked and answered as to why we don't want all posts to be always-editable. We've had a good suggestion about allow OPs to edite first posts, I'm going to investigate that option.

Umm, we've posted for 3 weeks that the new avatar size is 80x80m and that no one CAN upload bigger avatars, so this is not an issue. As to why things are on the right or left and not in the middle, I think I answered the reasoning for that in an earlier post.

Let me check and see if something was changed. This is probably caused by existing users not being switched to the standard editor. I can probably do a mass update this evening to do this, but you can do this yourself by going into your usercp, edit options and near the bottom where it says editor, switch from basic to standard or expanded.

I was on Standard before and switched to Basic, which I prefer. However, in both cases the text size is very very small. If you fix the glitch with the Standard setting, would you mind fixing it for Basic as well? The current text size is definitely too small. (Just to be clear, I'm talking about the Quick Reply box here, and I think the main Reply box is the same).

i'm sorry to say i agree, the writing is to small and the on old board it was way better in telling if there's a new post or not,i have to agree with most thing's they have said but this new board does have the potencial to be better.by the way now i have to download spellcheck?

I havent looked into it (distracted at the moment). But other options on the OP and MP thing...
Can we attach a text file and make it viewable?

From some of the comments it looks like some people need to remember that the purpose of these forums differ slightly between Shrapnel, and the users. Not much, but some.

Edit:
OK that seems to work all right for me. It allowed me to open it in NotePad.
So the first post can include a text file with all the changing info that used to be in the first post of the MP games. That is, if we are allowed to over-write the old one with a new one even after the editing time-out. That wont be any harder a routine to get used to than the idea of having the changing info in the first post was to get people used to doing.

Re: New Board - Props and Slops
 

Gandalf, while that is a solution (assuming you can edit the text file), it will be markedly less user-friendly than being able to edit the post directly.

I should say being able to edit the first post only would be reasonable. Not ideal by any means, but okay.