Don't like them (even with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. No preview on mouse-hover, no page numbers, no search system, those ungodly-yet-allowed-animated sig banners, and overall "color/theme" is rather awful as well. But then, my eyes are not bleeding from rancid use of eye-popping psychotropic colors. Still though, to channel Yoda: these forums, approve of them I do not.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. No preview on mouse-hover, no page numbers, no search system, those ungodly-yet-allowed-animated sig banners, and overall "color/theme" is rather awful as well. But then, my eyes are not bleeding from rancid use of eye-popping psychotropic colors. Still though, to channel Yoda: these forums, approve of them I do not.
It's obvious you didn't use enhancement extension, so why did you select option 4? Because several of your complaints have been covered.
* Preview on mouse hover
* Page numbers
* There are multiple colors and themes by various people
* Signature sizes are restricted to their official size of 650x250 (assuming you run global fixes)
We've gotten a response from mods about the GMs response to what we're doing, and they are okay with it and even support it while other things are getting handled on their end. The reason no sticky or anything like that has been made is because we don't have a dedicated thread for it.
As for the mobile thing, yeah, I don't use my phone that much for internet purposes. You're going to have to rely 100% on PWE.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. No preview on mouse-hover, no page numbers, no search system, those ungodly-yet-allowed-animated sig banners, and overall "color/theme" is rather awful as well. But then, my eyes are not bleeding from rancid use of eye-popping psychotropic colors. Still though, to channel Yoda: these forums, approve of them I do not.
yep, have to totally agree with comment @nrglg gave you, all the things you mentioned are available via the enhancement tool, 2 to 3mins of my time and the forums became a far nicer place with many options to suit my personal tastes. if you haven't tried them, your poll answer doesn't just make 'no sense' it is misrepresenting all the work put into the enhancement tool.
We've gotten a response from mods about the GMs response to what we're doing, and they are okay with it and even support it while other things are getting handled on their end. The reason no sticky or anything like that has been made is because we don't have a dedicated thread for it.
As for the mobile thing, yeah, I don't use my phone that much for internet purposes. You're going to have to rely 100% on PWE.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. No preview on mouse-hover, no page numbers, no search system, those ungodly-yet-allowed-animated sig banners, and overall "color/theme" is rather awful as well. But then, my eyes are not bleeding from rancid use of eye-popping psychotropic colors. Still though, to channel Yoda: these forums, approve of them I do not.
yep, have to totally agree with comment @nrglg gave you, all the things you mentioned are available via the enhancement tool, 2 to 3mins of my time and the forums became a far nicer place with many options to suit my personal tastes. if you haven't tried them, your poll answer doesn't just make 'no sense' it is misrepresenting all the work put into the enhancement tool.
I'll support vonro here. Several of the machines I view the forum on I do not have the permissions to install modifications to the web browser, simple as that.
--
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BatRon 11 ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ Millennium Triumphant ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ Emerald Armada
Champions Online closed Beta tester. Star Trek Online closed Beta tester.
I'll support vonro here. Several of the machines I view the forum on I do not have the permissions to install modifications to the web browser, simple as that.
That's not the issue. vonro chose option 4 when they should have chosen option 3 if they don't have the ability to install it. Also, what machines are you visiting the forums on? Not a personal one I guess which is confusing to me if you're trying to play an MMO. I'm guessing it's awkward circumstances which I'm not going to pry in to.
Whatever the case, the enhancement assumes you're an adult with your own personal computer. For everyone else, it's up to PWE to solve it and to that I say...well, they seem to be working on it. At the very least they are inquiring about how to go about fixing things at the moment. So let's all hope.
The color scheme is fine. I'm not too picky about that.
But not being able to preview the first few lines of a thread by hovering the cursor over it in the listing? That's basic functionality.
And the buttons to navigate between thread pages are now only at the top of the page, so every time you finish reading a page you have to scroll back up to the top... it's technically usable, but I don't think "not literally broken" is a high enough standard. I shouldn't be too surprised, given the "users are physically able to accomplish tasks so it's fine" UI in STO itself.
This isn't the first forum I've seen that relies on user-generated hacks to spackle over the software's problems. User-generated content is one thing, but if you can't at least create the environment properly, what are you even doing?
Don't like them (even with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
I like them even less now than I did before the forced redirect into frames broke the ability to go to the latest post, the ability to go directly to a post from notifications, and the ability to bookmark individual posts. Posts I bookmarked here at the new fora before the forced redirect into frames are now useless bookmarks in my favorites. The forced redirect into frames also makes the page take longer to load, and makes the page jump around as it's loading. This made things worse, not better, and if it's all about advertising, as some have claimed, yo, G, we already have plenty of that in the Arc client without having to add more in the fora.
We can no longer delete notifications.
The language filter still needs significant work.
We still don't have the forum titles which we paid for restored.
The flag button cannot be used more than 3 times in less than a minute without the forum giving you an automatic spam block for "posting" too much.
There is still no way to go to the next page at the bottom of a page.
The toolbar across the top of the post still doesn't have font color.
Old (pre-migration) bookmarks still do not redirect to the new location of the post or thread.
I have yet to hit the character limit in a post, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. While it's in place to prevent stupidity, responsible parties should not be penalized for the acts of the stupid.
As for the color scheme, I like it. It's easy on the eyes, unlike blinding white or "let's-be-even-more-pro-Federation blue."
And no, I'm not going to download the mods for the fora; PWE should fix things instead of expecting us to use third-party stuff to fix things this migration broke, and to fix things they broke when they instituted the forced redirect into frames.
And no, I'm not going to download the mods for the fora; PWE should fix things instead of expecting us to use third-party stuff to fix things this migration broke, and to fix things they broke when they instituted the forced redirect into frames.
I can understand your position, but really the third party stuff is damned good and I definitely think more people would like it if they tried it. I'm not saying it excuses PWE's poor performance on getting these forums into a usable state but, in my experience, community created content is usually better because it can be tailored more to individual needs. Not to mention that in the last few weeks, not a day has gone by where there hasn't been some feedback related update to the user generated content... yet PWE still haven't even activated page numbers at the bottom of threads, which literally needs about 14 characters worth of code removed from their CSS.
On the last STO forums I was using custom CSS edits for around two years (since the last forum update) because a lot of the things they broke never got fixed, and still weren't fixed by the time we migrated to Vanilla. So I wouldn't expect miracles here.
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
Like them (with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
i see quite a few people commenting and voting option 4, even though they have never used the enhancement. im interpreting that as 'don't like them and wouldnt even if i tried the fixes'. i suppose i understand the sentiment, but not the vote.
in short, i dont think the pwe theme is going to get much better. for whatever reason they prioritise hijacking our tabs and forcing them into slow-loading frames over simple usability fixes like the post-content pagination. i get that some ppl might think they arent savvy enough to install an addon, or maybe dont want to out of principle, but if youre waiting on pwe to unveil some snazzy theme any time soon...
meanwhile in enhancementland, we have themes that pwe have not a hope of offering you:
pro blue
pro red
pro green
va eclipse
the blues
sto - fed
sto - kdf
sto - rom
beautiful - light
choose a theme!
choose emoticon sets!
block users!
plus: all the annoyances commonly complained about- fixed. font faces, sizes, and colours in the editor, and much much more!
WOW! I just installed the package and your Federation theme and I am very impressed! I suddenly like these forums a lot better, and am just plain wowed that we live in an age where fans and amateur programmers can make software improvement patches like this that can be attained and implemented by users basically instantly. Living in the future is awesome!
Glad you're liking the theme!
Join date is wrong, I've actually been around since STO Beta.
True alters don't have a "main". Account wide unlocks for all unique event rewards!!
Don't like them (even with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
I'll say THIS forum is awesome after they 'upgrade' to some horrible 1980's style florescent green ASCII block font on black screens with a flashing cursor after C:\PWEFORUM\GENERALDISCUSSION\ [ENTER TEXT HERE]
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
I'll support vonro here. Several of the machines I view the forum on I do not have the permissions to install modifications to the web browser, simple as that.
That's not the issue. vonro chose option 4 when they should have chosen option 3 if they don't have the ability to install it. Also, what machines are you visiting the forums on? Not a personal one I guess which is confusing to me if you're trying to play an MMO. I'm guessing it's awkward circumstances which I'm not going to pry in to.
Whatever the case, the enhancement assumes you're an adult with your own personal computer. For everyone else, it's up to PWE to solve it and to that I say...well, they seem to be working on it. At the very least they are inquiring about how to go about fixing things at the moment. So let's all hope.
How about those who have tried the enhancement and while they like the enhancements they still don't like the base forum itself and believe that we shouldn't have to go to third parties for basic functionality that is in the standard install of vanilla but has somehow been disabled or removed by either PWE or their third party host, or that they should not be hosted by a third party in the first place?
@belidos vonro never tried the enhancement. If you still don't like the forums after installing it, that's dandy. Point was, vonro didn't try it otherwise they would have known that things they complained about, the enhancement currently covers. Please read the posts for context next time.
It stinks, I keep getting messages saying things like: "We're over capacity
Please wait a moment and try again", and "Something has gone wrong. We've run into a problem and are unable to handle this request right now. Please check back in a little while."
Don't like them (even with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
It's strange, I've always heard good things about the Vanilla forum software, I can only guess that the serveradmins barely know what they're doing with it. I'd love to see the old forum software come back, at least it always worked without any issues (that I know of)
@belidos vonro never tried the enhancement. If you still don't like the forums after installing it, that's dandy. Point was, vonro didn't try it otherwise they would have known that things they complained about, the enhancement currently covers. Please read the posts for context next time.
I did read the posts and there is no context, all there is is you assuming he hadn't tried the enhancements, yes he said he didn't like that the forums didn't have the same features you list in your enhancement, but that doesn't mean he didn't try the enhancement.
He could have tried the enhancement but still stated he didn't like that the base forum doesn't have those features because he believes they should have been as standard and not third party.
For all you know your enhancement may have even swayed him into not liking the forum because those enhancements should have been standard and your enhancements highlighted that fact to him after he tried them.
A 3rd party JS injection by and maintained by Asterelle that fixes problems and adds enhancements as well as incorporating a theme management system with themes by various community members.
It's strange, I've always heard good things about the Vanilla forum software, I can only guess that the serveradmins barely know what they're doing with it. I'd love to see the old forum software come back, at least it always worked without any issues (that I know of)
Lol. The 'serveradmins' are from the same company that developed Vanilla ... this is a Vanilla-hosted site.
It's strange, I've always heard good things about the Vanilla forum software, I can only guess that the serveradmins barely know what they're doing with it. I'd love to see the old forum software come back, at least it always worked without any issues (that I know of)
Lol. The 'serveradmins' are from the same company that developed Vanilla ... this is a Vanilla-hosted site.
Adding to that, from what I recall, to get anything serious done, Trendy has to request Vanilla's people to do it rather than just tear into the code herself.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
It's strange, I've always heard good things about the Vanilla forum software, I can only guess that the serveradmins barely know what they're doing with it. I'd love to see the old forum software come back, at least it always worked without any issues (that I know of)
Lol. The 'serveradmins' are from the same company that developed Vanilla ... this is a Vanilla-hosted site.
It's the same company, but a completely different team and they're pretty much useless, either that or they're lazy and just don't care, I've used them before a few times, never again.
Don't like them (even with the fixes from asterelle and nrglg)
One thing I hate about this new forum, is how it unloads, then reloads a page whenever you change page at all.
i.e. it goes a little like this
Me - clicky on linky!
Forum - Loads the complete page more or less instantly....UNLOADS and page goes blank, staying blank for several seconds...then reloads the page again, from scratch.
In all, it makes this forum a far more frustrating experience for me than any other forum I have ever used.
EDIT to add...
Another thing that bugs me is the way it doesn't scale horizontally very well any more. Other pages (even the old forum) would scale properly and add a scroll bar at the bottom whenever I moved the window to the side to make it take half the screen (often to keep an eye on something else while I'm reading the forum).
This new one doesn't scale well nor does it add a scroll bar at the bottom to scroll horizontally, something which would make this forum a wee bit more tolerable for sure.
One thing I hate about this new forum, is how it unloads, then reloads a page whenever you change page at all.
i.e. it goes a little like this
Me - clicky on linky!
Forum - Loads the complete page more or less instantly....UNLOADS and page goes blank, staying blank for several seconds...then reloads the page again, from scratch.
In all, it makes this forum a far more frustrating experience for me than any other forum I have ever used.
so why did you stop using the enhancement? it fixed that problem.
Another thing that bugs me is the way it doesn't scale horizontally very well any more. Other pages (even the old forum) would scale properly and add a scroll bar at the bottom whenever I moved the window to the side to make it take half the screen (often to keep an eye on something else while I'm reading the forum).
This new one doesn't scale well nor does it add a scroll bar at the bottom to scroll horizontally, something which would make this forum a wee bit more tolerable for sure.
thats the first time i have ever seen somebody that likes horizontal scrollbars. what resolution is your monitor running at?
Comments
It's obvious you didn't use enhancement extension, so why did you select option 4? Because several of your complaints have been covered.
* Preview on mouse hover
* Page numbers
* There are multiple colors and themes by various people
* Signature sizes are restricted to their official size of 650x250 (assuming you run global fixes)
yep, have to totally agree with comment @nrglg gave you, all the things you mentioned are available via the enhancement tool, 2 to 3mins of my time and the forums became a far nicer place with many options to suit my personal tastes. if you haven't tried them, your poll answer doesn't just make 'no sense' it is misrepresenting all the work put into the enhancement tool.
I'll support vonro here. Several of the machines I view the forum on I do not have the permissions to install modifications to the web browser, simple as that.
BatRon 11 ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ Millennium Triumphant ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ Emerald Armada
If not, I am still not happy.
I can deal with the bad design thanks to other people providing nice CSS skins for the forums.
That's not the issue. vonro chose option 4 when they should have chosen option 3 if they don't have the ability to install it. Also, what machines are you visiting the forums on? Not a personal one I guess which is confusing to me if you're trying to play an MMO. I'm guessing it's awkward circumstances which I'm not going to pry in to.
Whatever the case, the enhancement assumes you're an adult with your own personal computer. For everyone else, it's up to PWE to solve it and to that I say...well, they seem to be working on it. At the very least they are inquiring about how to go about fixing things at the moment. So let's all hope.
But not being able to preview the first few lines of a thread by hovering the cursor over it in the listing? That's basic functionality.
And the buttons to navigate between thread pages are now only at the top of the page, so every time you finish reading a page you have to scroll back up to the top... it's technically usable, but I don't think "not literally broken" is a high enough standard. I shouldn't be too surprised, given the "users are physically able to accomplish tasks so it's fine" UI in STO itself.
This isn't the first forum I've seen that relies on user-generated hacks to spackle over the software's problems. User-generated content is one thing, but if you can't at least create the environment properly, what are you even doing?
We can no longer delete notifications.
The language filter still needs significant work.
We still don't have the forum titles which we paid for restored.
The flag button cannot be used more than 3 times in less than a minute without the forum giving you an automatic spam block for "posting" too much.
There is still no way to go to the next page at the bottom of a page.
The toolbar across the top of the post still doesn't have font color.
Old (pre-migration) bookmarks still do not redirect to the new location of the post or thread.
I have yet to hit the character limit in a post, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. While it's in place to prevent stupidity, responsible parties should not be penalized for the acts of the stupid.
As for the color scheme, I like it. It's easy on the eyes, unlike blinding white or "let's-be-even-more-pro-Federation blue."
And no, I'm not going to download the mods for the fora; PWE should fix things instead of expecting us to use third-party stuff to fix things this migration broke, and to fix things they broke when they instituted the forced redirect into frames.
I can understand your position, but really the third party stuff is damned good and I definitely think more people would like it if they tried it. I'm not saying it excuses PWE's poor performance on getting these forums into a usable state but, in my experience, community created content is usually better because it can be tailored more to individual needs. Not to mention that in the last few weeks, not a day has gone by where there hasn't been some feedback related update to the user generated content... yet PWE still haven't even activated page numbers at the bottom of threads, which literally needs about 14 characters worth of code removed from their CSS.
On the last STO forums I was using custom CSS edits for around two years (since the last forum update) because a lot of the things they broke never got fixed, and still weren't fixed by the time we migrated to Vanilla. So I wouldn't expect miracles here.
in short, i dont think the pwe theme is going to get much better. for whatever reason they prioritise hijacking our tabs and forcing them into slow-loading frames over simple usability fixes like the post-content pagination. i get that some ppl might think they arent savvy enough to install an addon, or maybe dont want to out of principle, but if youre waiting on pwe to unveil some snazzy theme any time soon...
meanwhile in enhancementland, we have themes that pwe have not a hope of offering you:
pro blue
pro red
pro green
va eclipse
the blues
sto - fed
sto - kdf
sto - rom
beautiful - light
choose a theme!
choose emoticon sets!
block users!
plus: all the annoyances commonly complained about- fixed. font faces, sizes, and colours in the editor, and much much more!
chrome, firefox, opera, and internet explorer supported
https://github.com/asterpw/pwevanillaenhance
free jkname
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Glad you're liking the theme!
On my iPhone scrolling to the bottom reveals simple back, first, last, forward buttons which work fine for me.
How about those who have tried the enhancement and while they like the enhancements they still don't like the base forum itself and believe that we shouldn't have to go to third parties for basic functionality that is in the standard install of vanilla but has somehow been disabled or removed by either PWE or their third party host, or that they should not be hosted by a third party in the first place?
Please wait a moment and try again", and "Something has gone wrong. We've run into a problem and are unable to handle this request right now. Please check back in a little while."
I did read the posts and there is no context, all there is is you assuming he hadn't tried the enhancements, yes he said he didn't like that the forums didn't have the same features you list in your enhancement, but that doesn't mean he didn't try the enhancement.
He could have tried the enhancement but still stated he didn't like that the base forum doesn't have those features because he believes they should have been as standard and not third party.
For all you know your enhancement may have even swayed him into not liking the forum because those enhancements should have been standard and your enhancements highlighted that fact to him after he tried them.
Lol. The 'serveradmins' are from the same company that developed Vanilla ... this is a Vanilla-hosted site.
Adding to that, from what I recall, to get anything serious done, Trendy has to request Vanilla's people to do it rather than just tear into the code herself.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
It's the same company, but a completely different team and they're pretty much useless, either that or they're lazy and just don't care, I've used them before a few times, never again.
i.e. it goes a little like this
Me - clicky on linky!
Forum - Loads the complete page more or less instantly....UNLOADS and page goes blank, staying blank for several seconds...then reloads the page again, from scratch.
In all, it makes this forum a far more frustrating experience for me than any other forum I have ever used.
EDIT to add...
Another thing that bugs me is the way it doesn't scale horizontally very well any more. Other pages (even the old forum) would scale properly and add a scroll bar at the bottom whenever I moved the window to the side to make it take half the screen (often to keep an eye on something else while I'm reading the forum).
This new one doesn't scale well nor does it add a scroll bar at the bottom to scroll horizontally, something which would make this forum a wee bit more tolerable for sure.
thats the first time i have ever seen somebody that likes horizontal scrollbars. what resolution is your monitor running at?
free jkname
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!