New Board - Props and Slops

[vfb]

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.

[Dedas]

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

[vfb]

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:

The administrator has specified that you can only edit messages for 30 minutes after you have posted. This limit has expired, so you must contact the administrator to make alterations on your 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.

[Zeldor]

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...

[Psycho]

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?

[Annette]

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.

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

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

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.

Originally Posted by Zeldor

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...

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.

[Zeldor]

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

[Executor]

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.

[Annette]

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

[Mindi]

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.