The new forums have potential, but some tweaks are needed.
portraits - EvE players can be very creative with their portraits. Can’t see what they’ve done at all with the small size of portraits on new forums. I liked to see all the creative portraits players had made, I doubt I was the only one. …and round pictures? That cuts off a lot of what a player has to work with when making their square portrait. Why sell cosmetic stuff if you won’t let us even see it?
Choice to display corp / alliance of poster. (not clicking on every portrait - come on now that’s extremely impractical) Builds a sense of community in EvE.
Preview of part of post when hovering over title. Helps a lot to decide if you want to read more.
At least basic signatures. I know I have gotten some good EvE info or entertainment from people’s signatures.
I would really like rectangular portraits. Circles just don’t do it for me.
And the option to show corp/alliance below the name would be a good thing to have.
Portraits: if there is more support for changing to squares, I’m fine with experimenting with it. Sizes are unlikely to change, but each can be expanded by clicking the portrait or character name.
Preview part of op: I’ve heard a few others mention the same. Something we can look into if it can be done.
Signatures: We have opted for biographies instead of signatures. Biographies are readily available with a single click. If there’s an argument to be made - other than saving a click - to having signatures, and it receives sufficient support, we’ll be willing to reconsider offering signatures.
I imagine the argument to be made is that biographies will likely be an unused mechanic (both in terms of people bothering to write one, or bothering to click a portrait to see if someone has one)
I thought I would mention why I like biographies, as I feel like it is a feature people may not know about.
If you click on any person’s image, you will get their biography. If you click on their image within their biography you will go to their profile page.
TLDR: If a user wants to look at someone’s profile (Summary, Activity and Badges). They will see their biography as well
One more thing about portraits: they don’t seem to update anymore from image server, what I can see is that character portrait image is on discord server. Any chance this will be changed in future ?
You are correct, the forums do not watch for changes / pick the portraits from the image server all the time. Instead the portrait is updated on login.
[quote=“CCP_Avalon, post:3, topic:4834, full:true”]Sizes are unlikely to change
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Why? How can you not look at these new portraits and think, “Hmm, these portraits are pretty small?” I have never seen avatars this small on any forum I’ve ever used. A lot of people like to spend time on their avatars and seeing them displayed on the forum is a small part of the fun of the game for them.
Are you trying to save money on bandwidth, is that it?
If you increase the size of the pictures you also need to adjust the width of the displayed post. (People already complaining about “wasted screen real estate”) The position of the name and surely quite some other stuff that would break when you use it on a smaller screen (mobile).
Now from my experience that’s possible. But since those would be custom code this might be overwritten when there is an update for the software this forum runs on. And depending on how often this happens you would have to change that every single time there is an update. Also you never know if the code you wrote will work after the next update - and there would be complaints about such a sudden change for sure.
It may seem like a minor change, but it can be quite a load of work. At least if you wan’t to make it good.
What I think would already help is to make the current profile pictures rectangular, so they would reflect the in game avatars better. We will see.
