Some input after browsing the forums for 30 mins or so on a PC, Chrome:
Positive
Forum breadcrumbs
I sort of like the way we log in
Frequent posters and the statistics is neat, although I am not sure if it’s the sort of info I needed
The ability to see all posts of a specific user in a thread is neat
Preview is ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC!!!111one
Minor feature requests
How to see all posts of a specific user in all threads?
Is it possible to change the font to something less rounded, this is too… hm, let’s say optimism inducing; are we still supposed to be in a dystopian universe? (very minor and unimportant request)
Please rename Discobot to something more spacey , also with some different logo. It breaks the immersion. I know this is supposed to be GalNet (?) and Gallente are traditionally bad at design (just look at their ships) but we deserve better. Additionally, Discobot is not fully EVE customised. Why there are real life (and serious) quotes instead of memes and EVE related quotes?
Alliance and Corp names under pilots’ names please
Is it possible to move the capsuleer name to the left side of the comment, under the avatar picture so that it doesn’t waste additional space please?
Easily switching between multiple characters on the same account or even multiple accounts please?
Additionally, is it possible to display the name of currently selected char next to the icon?
Please can you make the design not so flat? Is it possible to make individual comments’ backgrounds a bit brigher, like in old forums, so that it stands out a bit and helps to focus on the comment itself?
Possibility to downvote comments we don’t like?
Minor concerns
No pages. Are you saying that I’m supposed to load 200 pages of some threadnought to get to the newest submissions? Why? What is the point of it? Why can’t I just click on the last page, which would load it much faster?
Major deal breaker
OK this is quite serious. This design looks clunky and the waste of space is horrid. I can’t believe you actually prefer this design, with much less POSTING are, with much less READING area, where the majority of space is simply dead, unused.
Just try there, you’ll see, it’s not slower. It doesn’t load “everything to this post/the end” but some post before/after where you selected to go, and loading some post each time (hopefully, else it wouldn’t be usable). (the thread below have 1200+ posts)
Basically a “compact” style, which focuses more on the text itself and how to put as much info to the screen as possible rather than fancy empty space anywhere.
On Discord, in EVE and elsewhere I always switch to the most compact style possible. Old forums were exactly at the sweet spot between fancyness and the amount of text.
It’s the wasted space top-to-bottom that is my concern here, wide theme doesn’t fix it.
More granular “reactions” would be nice, but remember that Discourse deliberately doesn’t provide a way to suppress content just by disagreeing with it - there’s a plugin to add more reactions besides “Like” but those reactions, even if negative, would still give the content more visibility, not less. This is by design, so that you can promote things you agree with, but you can’t silence things you don’t.
Um. Karma system (like/dislike) would increase or decrease the visibility of posts. Emojis would just add funny pictures. How would you filter trolls and badposters with emojis?
(and no, it’s not silencing, look at reddit, badposts are still visible, you just need to click on them)
If they are violating the forum rules, you Flag them, otherwise, you filter badposters by not interacting with them, and by spending time promoting good posts and the posts with less interaction naturally drop out of the summary view:
Edit: Flags, by the way, do hide posts once they accumulate enough “flag weight”, but they also alert both the user and the moderators. If the user edits their post, or the mods overrule the flag, the post is unhidden. Keep in mind when you do this, that the moderators can overrule flags and even take action against you if they think the flags are abusive. Once the mods have overidden a flagged post, it won’t be hidden again no matter how many flags it gets.
Flag weight depends on “trust levels”, the more active you are, the more “weight” your flags have, and the newer the user, the less “weight” it takes to hide their post. An active contributor to the forum will be hard to suppress with flags, while someone who just made a new throwaway pilot to post with will be easily squelched, but even a single flag that doesn’t actually hide the post gets thrown into the moderation queue.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s good and as it should be - poor arguments ought to be refuted, not swept under the rug - the latter would be a thuggish approach, not a rational one.
Not on a user level, it’s bound to the theme. But we are looking into possible font changes. This will be reviewed further with our web designer, CCP Señor Coconut.
Not all content is rendered at the same time, there is lazy-loading involved.
Saw that you tried the wide theme, and that you iterated on this idea here. Definitely something we can look into, just like we’re currently experimenting with the wide theme.
But… Disco!
