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Do You like the new forums?
wildweasal
Member Posts: 1,053 Arc User
What is your opinion of the new Fourms
Do You like the new forums? 461 votes
Yes i love it i had a nerdgasm!!
3%
15 votes
Meh don't really care one way or the other
16%
77 votes
Oh god no! I hate it! and i can't unsee what i just saw it's horrible make it stop!!!
80%
369 votes
0
Comments
I'm not saying a lot of these things can't be fixed or improved. But I'm disappointed that once again something is forced ont he community which was not tested before. If it was tested the privacy issues, broken links, access issues and a lot of other things just wouldn't have happened.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
I've also had a quick look at the Vanilla forums website and the platform itself looks decent. A nice list of happy customers and a great deal of features. I reckon this 'stripped out' feeling people have here is more because PWI decided to go with a basic package rather than bells and whistles.
It'll take time to get used to, like every other change since. My only real problem with it is the quote and code boxes. Both are impossible to either see or distinguish from the original text.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
The only nice thing is being fancy with images, something the old boards were terrible for.
But everything else? Awful.
1. Lots and lots of useless, dead empty space on the sides of the forums with everything tightened up in the middle.
2. Posting text options are extremely limited. No text coloration, for example.
3. Wording with links embedded in them are not easily distinguishable from anything else.
4. Did you know the entire #3 point had an embedded link?
5. Going into "Toggle Full Page" for editing or making a post turns the entire goddamn screen a blinding white and you'd have to find the Ying/Yang symbol to make it black instead.
On average, these new boards are just horrible.
That actually falls into the bad for me.
The only nice thing, imho, is the ability to hide signatures/including sig images. Would be awesome if there was an option to turn all of the inline images, videos, Twitter, et al into bare links.
As for the deadspace on the side, well, I'm not looking at the side and I'm not sure how the text in the middle is cramped together. Since the forums are generally over on an older 1024x768 monitor, there is very little deadspace anyway. Course, the main is 1440x900...so for somebody with another 240 on either side - it might look a bit off. Girlfriend's watching TV or I'd switch over to see what it looks like there at 1920x1080. Would it be a case of stretching the post area out? Would just have a bunch of deadspace there then. Should the clutter the page up with wallpapers and that kind of nonsense so the deadspace is still deadspace but loaded with some crappy background?
As for the text options, I'm not having a problem doing anything like that myself. It's the same code that was used previously, and these are three of the common colors that I used. And I guess I should include this as a common fourth I used.
This is a link to Google.com...
This is a link to Google.com...
As for the full-screen edit...yep, looks just like it would following that Google link - like it would in Word, Write, Scrivener, Notepad++, etc, etc, etc...standard white background.
Now, none of that's to argue against your likes/dislikes, cause folks like what they like...just to point out how much of it is standard out there and how much of it is still possible.
Now, if we were talking about something like search...that's not really subject to likes/dislikes nor perhaps having to type some quick manual code. It simply doesn't function anywhere near how it did. Came up in another thread recently, I wanted to hunt down something where on the previous forums I would have pulled up the search, selected the poster, and put in the keyword - wham, bam, there was what I was looking for. Now? Yeah, no, that can't happen now.
Any bookmarks to the previous threads/posts are useless, so even if one managed to find a post where the post had been linked - can't get to it.
Then there are the various bugs, etc, etc, etc...privacy/security concerns, etc, etc, etc...
It's been annoying how since it was first announced about the migration to Vanilla (the first one), how all the complaints about the actual losses of functionality, the bugs, the privacy/security concerns, and so forth - have all pretty much been ignored...while the focus has been on the fluff of how pretty something might look (where some folks consider a cat that ate a box of crayons throwing up on the monitor to be pretty).
It was nifty, imho, being able to hide all the other sections of the forums so that Recent Discussions shows just the STO stuff - cause frankly, those folks talking about everything they wanted to turn the forums into a brutal technicolor assault on the eyes would have gotten me in trouble with the mods pretty quickly.
Yep, different folks like/dislike different stuff...not going to argue that in the least. Will argue about any changes that I would not like...which should be expected, yeah? Folks that like something, will argue for it. Folks that dislike something, will argue against it. Yeah?
1) Animated gif forum avatars don't seem to work, at least not in a very intuitive way. A few have found a roundabout way of getting them to work, but I can't reproduce it myself.
2) They look messy and disorganized. I guess I'll get used to that over time, however I did like how the old forums laid everything out a bit better.
3) Forum avatars are tiny, and I mean 40x40 tiny. It actually makes the forums look really bad, especially since there's plenty of wasted real estate on the sides. Why are they so small? We're long past the days of 640x480 and dialup connections.
Mobile...
Heh, not all reasons are meant to be excuses or to excuse something...they're just reasons. Cause, well, would "good" have gone anywhere near Vanilla in the first place?
I am very disappointed with this transition.
And where the hell is my post count? Don't even tell me it's lost in transition.
So the forums don't work on smalls screens and are pretty much unusable on large high res screens as well. Talk about a terrible design.
I guess its only natural to have some teething troubles.
we shall have to see how it goes, try this survey in a few months and I may be able to give an answer.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
Member since December 2009
And they are decidedly missing the Dev Tracker.
Now go on, ask me to not hold back and tell you what I really think.
Have to wonder if it was a conscious decision to limit the selection of options on the editing toolbar because of looking at mobile users and their space requirements. Most of the commands are available, even if the choices aren't there on the toolbar. Still think it trippy that Bold, Italic, and...nope, no Underline - goes to Strikethrough next...heh, oh well.
I don't like any of the options presented. I don't love these fora, but neither do I hate them, and my view of them is also not neutral. I'm more annoyed with them than neutral, but "hate" is too strong a word, since my annoyance is not so much with the fora themselves as it is with various little aspects of the change which are undesirable but also not intrinsic to either the new fora nor the change (for example, a redirect from old saved bookmarks would be helpful in adjusting, some additional buttons in the posting tools would be nice, certain things which should have been done before the change have yet to be done, etc).
I can't help but think some of the other hideousness was deliberate, and not over space concerns. The general disdain for this mess seems likely to reduce visits and posting- which could in turn reduce the visible complaints about things like Dilithium Rising and others that seem to have dominated the old forums of late.
One might think it could reduce trollage too, but the sole current "lovin' it" vote belies that.
the other day i couldnt even view these forums properly. now i can so its better, but far from useful. not even a mention from the people who run the forum or website to even acknowledge its being looked at.
frankly this vanilla forum should of spent more time in testing and working on streamlining the whole thing to a tigher package rather than what it is right now. still yes, working upto despise.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
The kind of thing where they would have done a test migration to another URL - gone through testing things afterword...work out the kinks...then moved forward with the actual migration, yeah? Kind of like a Tribble/Redshirt sort of thing instead of just dropping stuff straight out to Holodeck.
I'm pretending to think of it as a work in progress. The new Forums are just in Open Beta, I'm willing to give it a but of time, they cannot afford to drive everyone from every single one of their games off their own forums. It would really be bad for the livelyhood of all of their games.
I also seem to only be able to at the moment use the Forums via ARC, it never registers me logging in on Chrome, could be a cookie issue, on my end, so that I will have to investigate myself. In the mean time I have installed ARC on my smallest drive, a 60GB SSD that used to be my boot drive until I upgraded to a 250 GB SSD to go with the 1.5 TB data drive. That way I can carpet bomb ARC from my system if need be. At some point want to set up dual boot with Linux using that drive.
At any rate, I would say it would be a good time for them to make a Mobile App, to access the various Forums on Tablets and Phones.