For example, when the automated forum bot tells me “hurdurdur, you’ve replied to the same person 3 times, have you considered sending them a pesonal message?” and showing me a picture of an envelop. But then when I attempt to send another use a personal message, there’s no way to do so - I’m assuming - because I’m not a high enough user level yet.
If I’m not a high enough user level, I should be exempted from recieving stupid notifications from a bot suggesting that I do things that I literally cannot do.
This is the ■■■■ that makes me lose faith in CCP - that lack of polish and detail.
The forums are “powered” by Discourse. They can change settings (i.e. badges, private messages, turning on trust levels), but the send message thing is a Discourse problem.
Yeah, the “have you considered sending a message” message is really weird.
I don’t think any of us can, but CCP haven’t disabled that in their instance of Discourse, which I agree - it’s one of those small details that CCP never attend to, that is symptomatic of their limited ability to deliver a fully polished experience.
Another thing was the following when CCP was on their censorship trip with the Slow Mode: When someone flagged your post and it was hidden, you were given the opportunity to edit it to remove the flagged content. Slow Mode prohibited the editing of messages after a minute. The forum kept telling you that you could edit your post but the post then told you that you cannot. CCP never responded to inquires about this inconsistency, even though it was entirely possible to get posts auto-hidden by the bots with the first flag and you could not do a thing about it.
And lets not forget that the forum is really inconsistent with the Replied-to-display. I just replied to someone but the forum doesn’t display who I replied to. A post above I see who someone replied to, however. This feature is supposed to make it easier to follow a discussion but there have been a number of incidents where this info has not showed up on the posts and caused confusion about to whom someone replied to. Brilliant implementation by CCP or brilliant coding quality by Discourse.
Just more instances where CCP just doesn’t think things through. Luckily, they removed Slow Mode again a while ago, ie. they removed a feature that they “thought” would improve the experience but it had nothing but the opposite effect.
This forum is not developed by CCP and like any piece of software it has a few quirks.
As to the personal message problem:
No, sending personal messages is not possible here (but you can do so ingame).
For some reason Discourse does not automatically disable that popup about personal messages when personal messages are turned off. This is something to take to Discourse, not CCP.
So rest assured…
… it has nothing to do with your strust level.
I hear about people having issues with this, but never encountered it myself, yet reply to specific posts quite often. What is it you do that triggers this issue?
What sometimes happens is that people confuse the ‘reply to post’ button with the ‘reply to thread’ button which both are at the bottom of the thread. There (usually!) is no difference in behaviour, as the forum considers a response to the post above you to be not worthy of a ‘replied to’ indication as it automatically assumes a subsequent post is a reply unless specified otherwise by replying to any other post sbove the lowest one.
So reply to bottom post and reply to thread both do the same thing: no ‘replied to’ indication.
… unless someone else happens to post while you were typing, in which case it is now special that you posted in response to a post that now is no longer the bottom post, so the forum now specifies your post as a ‘reply to’.
I can see how that can be confusing (and honestly, I dislike this kind of ‘smart’ behaviour) but accidents with it can be avoided by only replying to a post if you intend to reply to that specific post, and reply to the thread otherwise.
My personal most annoying quirk with the forum is how it automatically removes a quote from our post if it was quoted from the post directly above it. So annoying… if I want to quote, let me quote.
Some people spasm post quite often, others never do. The ones who do run into all kinds of “issues” (ie, barriers to try and persuade them to stop spasm posting).
If I knew what it was I would not be here talking about it. As you can see in the picture above, I replied to the specific user but my post has no Replied To tag. Funny thing is that, even if I was “Spasm” posting (whatever that is), so was Aisha because her posts show no Replied To tag neither to your post nor to my post, nor does it show the tag in your reply to her Spasm post. Spasm posting seems to be quite widespread.
Funnier still: Spasm posting doesn’t effect the “XYZ replies” counter which lists this post as reply to your post, but the tag doesn’t show up. Discourse is full of wonders and miracles when it comes to “spasm” post.
It’s just another word misused to blame someone for doing something completely harmless on a forum. Some people think they can order everyone around and it shows when they use words that never existed for that purpose in order to try and shut down the next person’s freedom of expression.
Strange…
Just trying to figure it out: how did you initiate that reply?
In my experience,
No reply to tag
initiated by replying to thread
initiated by replying to latest post in thread
Reply to tag
initiated as reply to any but latest post
initiated to latest post,but someone posted in between so that itno longer is the latest post
Quoting people or addressing people with @ is independent of this tag.
So you can reply to an earlier post of person A and quote person B, and your post would show as reply to A even though the quote is of person B.
Aisha was replying to my posts, which happened to be directly above their post, which means that there is no ‘replied to’ tag by default as it falls in the first category I mentioned.
Replied to tags only apply if you initiate a reply to earlier posts, not to the latest one.
Still I think it counts as a reply towards the ‘spasm post counter’ (for lack of a better word) and after three replies to the same person in a thread you get the (useless because nonfunctional) recommendation to send them a private messate instead of chatting back and forth on a public forum.
That was what I did to reply to your post and the other topic. Would make sense but it’s definitely not helpful or intuitive. The omission of the tag makes sense at the time of the posting but just a few post later it becomes impossible to figure out who replied to what unless there’re quotes.
I’ve made several mentions of quirky forum behavior over the years.
Discourse should be quite customizable, but I suspect that CCP have just started it “out of the box” and no one at their company have been given the time to properly set it up.
I understand that the forum have little priority, but just seems kind of wonky with issues like the OP described, where the PM system is disabled but some of it’s frontend interface is still present.
I’ve learned to not expect anything better from CCP at this point.
It’s a forum, it doesn’t need advanced features and especially not as that might require more moderation. If you want to send someone a mail you do it in game. Stop whining.
I haven’t been whining about missing moderation… wut? If you message is specifically directed at me, then I’m confused.
I’ve been supporting the notion of keeping the forums as little moderated as possible. There were some other people who wanted a strictly moderated forum and the only thing I said regarding that, was that they should then equally expect their posts to get heavily moderated.
Also, I don’t want fancy features. I prefer if CCP actually just removed all the unused stuff like the things described in the OP.
Another thing was the following when CCP was on their censorship trip with the Slow Mode: When someone flagged your post and it was hidden, you were given the opportunity to edit it to remove the flagged content. Slow Mode prohibited the editing of messages after a minute. The forum kept telling you that you could edit your post but the post then told you that you cannot. CCP never responded to inquires about this inconsistency, even though it was entirely possible to get posts auto-hidden by the bots with the first flag and you could not do a thing about it.
As you can see in the picture above, I replied to the specific user but my post has no Replied To tag. Funny thing is that, even if I was “Spasm” posting (whatever that is), so was Aisha because her posts show no Replied To tag neither to your post nor to my post, nor does it show the tag in your reply to her Spasm post. Spasm posting seems to be quite widespread.