Vanilla Incoming Features/Request for Feedback

yetweallfalldown

Hi Folks,

Over the past few weeks, our team has outlined several different points of feedback coming from both the community and our internal team. The community team's main focus to provide an a channel for official information on titles under the Perfect World Entertainment portfolio. We want these forums to be simple to use, easy to navigate and customize-able for what our players want.

So with that said, here are areas that our team is looking to focus on/improve:

• Easily identify official comments - We have added forum titles that identify members of the community team, PWE team and development teams. In addition to this, we are looking to bring back the Dev Tracker, which will be an area that we collect all official comments for Neverwinter and Star Trek Online. It will work primarily for these as we have several individuals giving official comments in these forums.
• Forum Page Numbers - The forum page numbers only appear at the top. We are also going to be adding them to the bottom.
• Visual Changes - Right now, the background and text contrast with each other too much. We will look to soften this (color recommendations are more than welcome) and improve readability for things like links embedded within the forum post.
• Animated GIFs in Sigs - I'm hearing the two sides of the coin whether we want animated gifs in signatures or not. I'm not saying that we're going to make a decision on this just yet, but definitely feel free to chime in if this is something that you want or not.
• Latest Posts - Sometimes these don't show up and we're looking to fix this.

These aren't the only items on our list. I'm really most interested in hearing is what you want. I can't promise that we're going to change everything, but the feedback is important. I'll keep my eye on this thread moving forward. You may not hear from me, but I'm watching (kind of like Batman who is way better than Spider-Man).

Alex

sov42

1. Keep animated gifs in Sigs, but if it's doable, I'd say restrict them to no bigger than 200 x 200 pixels.
2. Colors from the old forum format were fine.
3. I dunno if it's possible, but it would be really awesome if there was a way to make it so we can see in the list of threads in the bug reports forums if Staff members have read the thread. That might help us know that an issue is now known.

Also, give Trendy lots of cookies, because she's awesome.

qziqza

if anything i think height is the main issue with signature gifs. in many cases, images over 175 to 200, stand taller than the posts they are attached too, probably more apparent when scrolling down a page as a result of the high post count to them. as for the width, i cant really think of a reason to restrict that, the signature naturally stretches across the full width of the post, so it actually looks better to have an image that does the same, i find it often looks odd, having a standalone square image with lots of dead space to the side/s.

the only issue i can see with gifs, is very much the same issue we can have with flat images.. that of them being inappropriate (for a variety of reasons) however if you were to implement some basic rules and restrictions governing the use of imagery (animated and normal) maybe even bullet point those rules within the signature creator? the community would be able to police them via the moderators.

other possible options would be to have an account cooling off period before being able to use images, maybe 14 days active, with a minimum post count (you could maybe even tie this into a badge/title so it becomes something you have to earn) you could also add a restriction to the number of image changes in any given set period of time, maybe this would be easier to achieve if members could only upload a single file for use in a signature, at any given time, rather than being able to just link a file.

i think its great that we get to personalise our accounts in this way, it would be a great shame to loose that freedom of expression, because of a few immature vandals. restrictions are far preferable to removal

sylenthunder

qziqza wrote: »

if anything i think height is the main issue with signature gifs. in many cases, images over 175 to 200, stand taller than the posts they are its attached too, probably more apparent when scrolling down a page as a result of the high post count to them. as for the width, i cant really think of a reason to restrict that, the signature naturally stretches across the full width of the post, so it actually looks better to have an image that does the same, i find it often looks odd, having a standalone square image with lots of dead space to the side.

I thought they recently capped the height for signature images? I know one of mine was larger than I intended it to be and it started auto-shrinking a little while ago.
________
Update
Yep, as I posted this it appeared on the selection. Height of the image is adjusted to 150px now.

sumghai

qziqza wrote: »

if anything i think height is the main issue with signature gifs. in many cases, images over 175 to 200, stand taller than the posts they are its attached too, probably more apparent when scrolling down a page as a result of the high post count to them. as for the width, i cant really think of a reason to restrict that, the signature naturally stretches across the full width of the post, so it actually looks better to have an image that does the same, i find it often looks odd, having a standalone square image with lots of dead space to the side.

I'd agree with having a height limitation for images used in signatures, or for that matter, general signature length restrictions.

EDIT

Ninja'd - looks like the limit(s) are in place. Thanks guys.

sylenthunder

Hmm, looking at it further, there is a bit of a limiter, but it seems to be sporadic. I just had one cut down to 188.266px (dunno why that odd size), and have one of them that it doesn't seem to be affecting the height, and is only using the width limiter I put in place myself.

Further testing is necessary, but I do agree that there should be a hard limit set to 150 or 200px for the height.

AH! Found it! In the forum code, it's got "max-height: 350px !important;" So looks like the hard max is 350px, but not sure why it's randomly re-sizing the other images to smaller specs.

__________
Update:

Ok, looks like if you're using Astarelle's mods, then it will re-size them smaller than the 350px. I used plain IE to view it, and they are all hitting the 350px max set by the forum.

ovenusarmanio

1. Keep gifs in signatures but bring back the old size limit, which was hard capped by the software at 500x100. Atm, there is already a rule in one of the forums that is 650x150. That would likely also be fine, but again that should be hard capped. Also limit file sizes. While you are at hardcapping, impose a limit on the number of characters in a signature.
2. Please remove the limit on post-size in threads. Moderators can delete anything abusive, but having a lot of room to work with is essential to guides. ATM we can't even edit old guides to include the new vanilla links because they can't be saved, they are too large.
3. ADVANCED SEARCH. By poster, by sub-forum, by child-forum, by date, etc. Allow us to filter out other forums from the search. I don't want to search STO for a PW thread.
4. We need individual posts numbers in addition to forum page numbers. It makes it far easier to link to a specific one.\
5. Did mention a better search? SEARCH!
6. Have the flag button actually get the attention of someone, be it a gm you actually want to have take care of this stuff or a moderator. If that's too complicated, then remove it entirely. That way people tag/message.
7. The tools that were built into the community created enhance need to just be available, like better smileys, font size adjustment, linking videos/images, etc.
8. Fix the search.
9. Allow us to click a button to go back to the top of a page
10. Fix the bug that makes it so clicking the >> in a quote to go to the quoted comment, actually takes you to the quoted comment. It does not always do this.
11. Allow us a toggle to see our drafts, and to easily hide and unhide categories
12. Fix the Search.
13. Batman is better than Superman..

As for color palette, just pick something that goes well with the Arc logo and isn't so plain, boring, and hard to see.

sylenthunder

My two cents on the sig images... Allow animated Gif's, but possibly put a limit to the size of the image in bytes. For signature size, a width of 750 and height of 200 should the the absolute max for images, with a hard height of 300 or 350 for the entire signature area. You could also shrink some of the buffer in the box footer below the sig. It's kind of large right now.

Definitely take some of the features from NLGRG and Asty's mods. Especially for editing fonts.

Allow standard gif avatars, and increase the avatar box size to either 100 or 150px. The current 40px is just silly.

Definitely fix the Search engine to be more functional like the Advanced Search was on the previous forums.

I agree with the size of the posts also. Unlimited may be a bit too much, but at least 20,000 characters would be nice.

qziqza

ovenusarmanio wrote: »

1. Keep gifs in signatures but bring back the old size limit, which was hard capped by the software at 500x100. Atm, there is already a rule in one of the forums that is 650x150. That would likely also be fine, but again that should be hard capped. Also limit file sizes. While you are at hardcapping, impose a limit on the number of characters in a signature.

2. Please remove the limit on post-size in threads. Moderators can delete anything abusive, but having a lot of room to work with is essential to guides. ATM we can't even edit old guides to include the new vanilla links because they can't be saved, they are too large.
3. ADVANCED SEARCH. By poster, by sub-forum, by child-forum, by date, etc. Allow us to filter out other forums from the search. I don't want to search STO for a PW thread.
4. We need individual posts numbers in addition to forum page numbers. It makes it far easier to link to a specific one.\
5. Did mention a better search? SEARCH!
6. Have the flag button actually get the attention of someone, be it a gm you actually want to have take care of this stuff or a moderator. If that's too complicated, then remove it entirely. That way people tag/message.
7. The tools that were built into the community created enhance need to just be available, like better smileys, font size adjustment, linking videos/images, etc.
8. Fix the search.
9. Allow us to click a button to go back to the top of a page
10. Fix the bug that makes it so clicking the >> in a quote to go to the quoted comment, actually takes you to the quoted comment. It does not always do this.
11. Allow us a toggle to see our drafts, and to easily hide and unhide categories
12. Fix the Search.
13. Batman is better than Superman..

As for color palette, just pick something that goes well with the Arc logo and isn't so plain, boring, and hard to see.

that all sounds good to me..!

ooh, and also, not sure if its been mentioned elsewhere, when i look at my comments via my profile.. id really like to be able to differentiate between what i have quoted and what i have replied.. so maybe just have the users name and 4 or 5 words from the quote, followed by my reply and have it in different colours for clarity.. that would be awesome, thanks..!

ovenusarmanio

For the staffing issue, you guys need to get old staff that aren't employees marked in red as well. You don't have to put current or anything but, if someone is asking about a GM rule. We should be able to quote an employee and have people instantly recognize it as the official stance on the policy. If it was overruled later, that's one thing. But a lot of that stuff still stands, even if the person in charge of that account no longer works there.

Exampe: This is an official policy clarification from PWE regarding Territory Wars in Perfect World. It has NOT been overruled by a GM publicly. So as far as we know, this rule still stands and players can still be banned for not following it. So having a clarification on what is meant by it is very useful. The person making this post was the community manager for a while, but has left the company. Something he officially let us know in a public thread, so it's not exactly like the cat is out on the bag on that. Still, anyone who joined after he left is not going to know that.

http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/6386507/#Comment_6386507

So this should be more easily distinguishable from just some random arc user.

monkeybone13

A couple issues bugging me:
1. Text color. In the old forums we could drag our mouse across text to highlight it then click a color palette and it would automatically put the [color][/color] thingies in the comment box automatically. People have pointed out how to do it manually but I'm not very familiar with BBCode nor do I know the names of most colors that would work.

2. Logging into the forums. In the old forums when I logged in I'd be on the same exact forum page I was viewing. But logging into these new forums sends me to http://www.arcgames.com/en/games and I have to navigate back here. If I had multiple forum tabs open and go to refresh the pages after logging in it won't show I'm logged in. So I end up having to close all tabs then navigate the forums to reopen the pages I was viewing.

3. Oh yeah. Links in posts to websites use to be a blue colored text automatically. Currently, as seen in my post here, links show up as white text. This makes it hard to see that something can be clicked on, especially when someone adds other text in to hide the link making a certain word or phrase be the link instead of the website address.

Seschat

1) I'm in the "size limit on .gifs in signatures camp.
2) Forum avatars back up to 100 pixels.
3) ADVANCED SEARCH. What we have is useless.
4) Dev Tracker for CO, too. We get so little attention as it is, we'd hate to miss it drowned out in the new collective.
5) HTML links in another color. The standard blue/purple is fine.
6) Quotation clarity. Hard edges on the boxes would be good.
7) Some way to separate out Discussions by game. I would prefer to see all my STO threads separated from my CO ones. It is worse for my room mate, he also plays NWO. I think he's given up on the forums.

Frankly, I find that this whole "One big happy family" approach to be, well, bollocks. I liked having the forums separated out. Mental train of thought didn't get derailed by a random STO post in the middle of the CO ones, I had a separate visual identity for each game, and frankly, we don't all seem to get along. Just read the "Why is my forum title for a game I don't play" threads. There are STO players holding a grudge against NWO for swiping their devs. There are CO players still pissed that STO took their devs, and then gave them to NWO.

sov42

Oooh, oooh, a block/ignore feature would be nice, too.

iconians

My suggestions:

1: Make animated gifs optional to the viewer on a case-by-case basis. Turn off animated signatures for individual users or provide a "Disable All Animated Sigs/Pictures" option on our Preferences page.

This way both sides of the coin can get what they want.

2: Provide multiple themes in the same way STO provides UI themes in the Options tab. Maybe I want to see the STO forums through Romulan lenses.

3: Forum titles? I wouldn't mind getting my Veteran/LTS titles back. Not crucial, but it is something I'd like to see.

4: Like buttons. Mousing over said Like button should show who likes a particular post in the STO forums. Maybe devs can say they like something without officially commenting on it by clicking something in the corner. This could show that devs actually do read the forums, and what people say, even if they don't have anything to say in response. Kind of like how the polls show who voted.

Liking something is a lot easier than making a post saying "I like what this person says".

5: Still waiting for our badges in Vanilla. "Any minute now..."

yetweallfalldown

sov42 wrote: »

Also, give Trendy lots of cookies, because she's awesome.

Did Trendy tell you about the time that I made her eat habanero chips?

yetweallfalldown

Seschat wrote: »

4) Dev Tracker for CO, too. We get so little attention as it is, we'd hate to miss it drowned out in the new collective.

I believe we should be able to implement dev trackers across the board. That's my goal.

yetweallfalldown

iconians wrote: »

2: Provide multiple themes in the same way STO provides UI themes in the Options tab. Maybe I want to see the STO forums through Romulan lenses.

To be honest, this one would be a little tougher, but we'll investigate. I'd prefer to get the standard version hammered out as that reaches the majority of users before we start doing multiple themes.

iconians wrote: »

5: Still waiting for our badges in Vanilla. "Any minute now..."

Similar situation here in the sense that I want to fix things before we start adding all the bells and whistles. We'll tackle this one down the road.

gulberat

1) ADVANCED SEARCH, and with that, a dev tracker.

2) Eliminate the post length limit. It was no problem on the old forum, and very useful for guides and fanfics--I do not see any reason it should be a problem now.

3) I like the idea someone came up with where the devs can push a button on bug posts to acknowledge they read it and are aware of it--even if they don't have time to type up a response.

4) Get YouTube videos to show the title before you click on them. I would like to know before I click like on most sites with embedded videos, instead of having to guess.

5) Back to top, and page numbers, at the bottom of a thread.

6) If "flag" is not WAI on the moderator/CM side, either fix it or change the TOS to allow people to PM the mods. The Arc ticket site DOES NOT WORK to report a thread and does not even offer a category for it anymore.

7) NO GIFs. While there have been some nice ones some people have done, they have been abused to a point where I just don't want to see it anymore. Plus those who are seizure-prone have no way to turn them off in other places besides signatures. Still graphics are fine as long as they don't break the thread or have obscene stuff in them.

8) Make the swear filter more reasonable. We don't need F-Bombs, but h.e.l.l., d.a.m.n, c.r.a.p, s.u.c.k.s., and p.i.s.s. are not that bad (for example). For goodness sake, multiple games have the word H.e.l.l. in important lore items (think of Star Trek's "Year of H.e.l.l.," which is relevant to the current FE, and I think NW or CO has one too?).

gulberat

iconians wrote: »

1: Make animated gifs optional to the viewer on a case-by-case basis. Turn off animated signatures for individual users or provide a "Disable All Animated Sigs/Pictures" option on our Preferences page.

FYI the AdBlock Plus extension on Firefox lets you right-click and set up an individual filter for any particular image you don't want to see.

qziqza

gulberat wrote: »

iconians wrote: »

1: Make animated gifs optional to the viewer on a case-by-case basis. Turn off animated signatures for individual users or provide a "Disable All Animated Sigs/Pictures" option on our Preferences page.

FYI the AdBlock Plus extension on Firefox lets you right-click and set up an individual filter for any particular image you don't want to see.

it can also do the same for all occurrences of a particular file type (.gif for instance) on a post, a page or a site.

custom settings are really quite versatile

qziqza

gulberat wrote: »

4) Get YouTube videos to show the title before you click on them. I would like to know before I click like on most sites with embedded videos, instead of having to guess.

test post for youtube.. infected ground elite tutorial

i see what you mean, in something like this it is clear what you are about to watch, but if it was a blank screen to start or just a hyper link then that is different. although as a rule of thumb, if i dont know exactly what it is, i tend not to click, just in case lol.

gulberat

qziqza wrote: »

gulberat wrote: »

4) Get YouTube videos to show the title before you click on them. I would like to know before I click like on most sites with embedded videos, instead of having to guess.

test post for youtube.. infected ground elite tutorial

i see what you mean, in something like this it is clear what you are about to watch, but if it was a blank screen to start or just a hyper link then that is different. although as a rule of thumb, if i dont know exactly what it is, i tend not to click, just in case lol.

Yeah...I would've liked to try more stuff in the music thread, for example, but when I don't know who the artist is, or what that artist typically does in their music videos, I'm really reluctant to click.

frtoaster

yetweallfalldown wrote: »

Forum Page Numbers - The forum page numbers only appear at the top. We are also going to be adding them to the bottom.

1. It's good that you will be adding page numbers to the bottom, but there is another problem that you haven't considered. On the first page, the page numbers appear below the first post, which can sometimes be quite long. I think the page numbers should appear above the first post.

2. I see a couple of people mentioning advanced search. See the links below.

http://blog.vanillaforums.com/help/vanilla-forums-friday-theme-tip-advanced-search/
http://blog.vanillaforums.com/news/crafting-a-better-forum-search/

So the question is "How much is PWE paying Vanilla?"

http://vanillaforums.com/plans

3. Several people have already mentioned this in different threads: The test server forums for Star Trek Online are hidden unless the user is logged in. And we can't post to the Tribble release note threads.

4. I can't delete my notifications.

5. You should restore the option to view drafts.

http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1191774/no-option-to-view-drafts


Honestly, I'm more concerned about the security and privacy issues, not only with forums, but also with the main website arcgames.com.

http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190682/firefox-isnt-accepting-ssl-certificate-from-arcgames-com
http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190685/ssl-error-on-arcgames-com-ssl-error-no-cypher-overlap
http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190911/pwe-shares-our-email-addresses-with-vanilla-forums-and-disqus

And then there are the security issues with Arc itself:

http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190680/arc-installs-vulnerable-version-of-flash
http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190869/arc-client-insists-on-installing-outdated-flash-plugin
http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/1190971/allow-non-administrators-to-run-arc

pottsey5g

1. The forums do not scale on modern high resolution screens. At high resolution 50% of the page is empty and black. At Ultra HD 75% of the page is empty and black. All we get is a tiny strip of text in the middle of the page. This is only going to get worse as resolution move up and makes the forums and website very hard to read.

gchioday

Mooksy from the STO..Freedom Fighters Fleet.

How does one REACTIVATE there account..
I was in the process of getting a Lifetime Account ..... I played for less than 30 minutes and then got disconnected from server, and when i tried to relog in, MY STO ACCOUNT is BANNED ?? I am unable to relog in, and there is no direction as to reasons why my account is disconnected...

Can someone tell me, what are the steps i need to take to get my account reactivated...plz.

sylenthunder

pottsey5g wrote: »

1. The forums do not scale on modern high resolution screens. At high resolution 50% of the page is empty and black. At Ultra HD 75% of the page is empty and black. All we get is a tiny strip of text in the middle of the page. This is only going to get worse as resolution move up and makes the forums and website very hard to read.

The community forum tools created by Asterelle and NLGRG work well to help with that. you're going to see that on most fourms though because they are designed so they will work on a 1024x768 screen or 1280x1024 for backwards compatibility. I personally don't see the point in viewing any website in Ultra HD, but then I really don't see any overall benefit to 4k HD either. Unless you've got a 60" or larger screen, it's not like your eyes can discern the pixels.

gchioday wrote: »

Mooksy from the STO..Freedom Fighters Fleet.

How does one REACTIVATE there account..
I was in the process of getting a Lifetime Account ..... I played for less than 30 minutes and then got disconnected from server, and when i tried to relog in, MY STO ACCOUNT is BANNED ?? I am unable to relog in, and there is no direction as to reasons why my account is disconnected...

Can someone tell me, what are the steps i need to take to get my account reactivated...plz.

For a banned account, you'll need to sumbit a ticket. Check the link in my signature, or send an email from the banned accounts email to [email protected] (I think that email address is still valid. I'll have to verify it.)
https://support.arcgames.com/app/games/detail/a_id/1917

Edit: I haven't gotten a kickback response on that email yet, so i'm assuming it's still valid. When they respond I'll have more information.

sylenthunder

Ok, that email is definitely correct. I got the auto-response.


For the forum search, OMG this is so bad. I searched "support email" and here's the results...

Search results should at least be listed with most recent or most accurate result first. This thing's got neither.

angrysprite

IDENTIFY WHICH GAME A FORUM POST BELONGS TO.
~Sorry for the shout, but c'mon!~

I play all three Cryptic games and even a couple PWE games. And when I'm surfing' forums it can be a nightmare to remember where the hell I'm at in terms of which game the comment (and especially: Official Announcements) belong to.

flyingfinn

Animated GIFs in Sigs

Come on! Wasn't this the whole point for changing to Vanilla.
YOLO.
But gettin switcable Forum Titles, that would be QoL change.
Since people have earned different titles during these years.

tehbubbaloo

i request you stop using superfluous !importants and resist inline styling.

nrglg

tehbubbaloo wrote: »

i request you stop using superfluous !importants and resist inline styling.

No kidding. Yes, please tell the designers to stop using !important in the CSS. You guys have literally no reason to use it since you have a single theme and full creative control.