New Board - Props and Slops

[Executor]

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.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

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.

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.

[llamabeast]

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 When a lack of trust is implied and privileges withdrawn, they have a far greater tendency to abuse whatever privileges remain, because the feeling of mutual trust has been broken (not, you understand, that I'm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.

[llamabeast]

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.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Executor

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.

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.

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.

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.

[llamabeast]

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.

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

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Mindi

As I told llamabeast, kindness and patience would go far in being heard. Threats will get you no where.

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.

[Executor]

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?

[Micah]

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. =)

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Baalz

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).

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.

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".

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.

I don't want to beat a dead horse on the issues that have already been brought up.

Again, see cyclical comment above.