This is not really a forum, but a sort of hybrid… A few like Discord is for Mumble/TS/Lite social networks, this forum sound like a hybrid twitter/forum.
And so, it suffers of some flaws that most of the traditional forums avoid.
For exemple, the support of external images without options to disable it if wanted. One reason that external images are bad is the post #12 of this topic. 3.2 MB for a useless animated image ! This forum is supposed to support mobile browsing if I have read correctly, but it will cleary be a forum to avoid if you have a limited amount of data per month. Just to say, my previous mobile account offered not more than 50 MB / month and any MB over it cost 0.05 €, no joking… And what about people with not-so-high-speed broadband connection who will have to download useless data ? If a topic is clustered by images like that, this forum will become unusable, the previous one is better on this plan.
The waste of space is also terrific. The content of a post is now using less than in the previous forum -who wasn’t great on that aspect-, annoying when you have a big monitor. It feels like I am reading a newspaper. Why do we have our actual display resolutions if it is not to use them… ? Well, I guess that Stylish/Greasemonkey will help me to correct that.
I would prefer too pages than this scrollbar, or at least this scrollbar should take less space to free some for the content.
I would prefer that the poster information (name/avatar) take more space to make it more easily identifiable. Also, corporation/allance name are mandatory but I can understand that it is not easy to add them right now.
Well in short, I admit that I am oldschool and prefer a standard forum than this innovative one. Mostly because a standard one got years of experience and so offer options and display data more decently. Discourse is innovative, but trashing down years of UI progress isn’t a good thing.
I have to agree with several people, this information density and access is not good for me.
I think a forum/account-based text-sizing option would be good so people can choose what view is really best for them and have that setting remembered. I’m not great at reading fast but I’m not bad at reading either, so for me having this spacious text and the extra space between lines makes me work more to consume the information, both with my eyes/mind and also my hand as I have to do A LOT more scrolling.
Additionally, pages. I HATE the facebook/tumblr style of more-and-more-and-more-and-more added to the page for a ‘long thread’ or whatever. Unless there is a way to skip to the end (which was not immediately obvious) then : IF I am just interested in seeing the latest posts in a thread to see the current state of the conversation, then I’m forced to scroll downdowndownodwnodwn and download through maybe a thousand messages (which is not data-friendly for mobile users) before I can see the end. This is not okay.
Normally when a game or anything brings unpopular changes, my preferential response is “yeah change can be hard sometimes” or “we all have to adjust” but in this case … well I was never much for using the forums, but now I think I will actively avoid using the forums whenever possible because using them will be so much more work than it was before =’(
You can hit the End key or drag the thread scroll bar (not your window scroll bar) to the bottom to move to the end of the thread. Admittedly not obvious, but it’s there. As for loading, I’m not sure, maybe @CCP_Avalon can answer that one?
I posted about this in another thread - there’s a slider that shows your position and lets you jump around quickly without having to load an entire threadnaught in the process:
There’s also a summary mode to tame threadnaughts:
biggest ‘issue’ with the CSM forum, is that it still show up in the ‘new’ list.
As I don’t white knight bad decisions, it’d be nice to be able to filter them out of that. Or other forum sections I’m less interested in.
Or put it down below where nobody see it like the russian and french ones (below them would be fine actually).
The Discourse forums load your previous known location on the forums, if you’re entering the thread for the first time (or aren’t logged in when browsing it, and the session is lost) the forums will drop you off at the first post.
But it is as you described, the END button will drag you to the bottom of the forums, or you can use the track bar on the right of the topic.
Other keyboard shortcuts can be found by clicking the sandwich menu, and selecting keyboard shortcuts, or by hitting ? on your keyboard.
That slider gets massively in the way of the wide theme, for replying. Readability on the default theme is at best meh. I’d drop that fancy slider and stick to what fits with expectation patterns.
I’m not a developer, I have zero affinity for things like keyboard shortcuts. Think of it as the default mouse type majority user. Going back and forth between mouse and keyboard (End to scroll to bottom? seriously?) falls way outside of patterns.
I don’t know, it just feels like the old “modern is good” debate I once had with the web team at the time these “new” forums. I had hoped for something which would be useful for bringing people back to the forums again, because as a community portal it is not doing well in competition with other streams - and all of those reinforce inward storytelling, if at all. And if we can remember one thing from past lessons, it’s that there’s a foundation requirement for eve.
Incidentally, how do I switch character. After all, we’re designed to be schizofrenic in New Eden, we should be able to be professional about it
According to the devpost, you currently can only do that by logging out and logging back in. Which sucks, but still an improvement over the original “you can only post with your main” plan presented a few months back.
Yeah, that was yet another fine example of forcing top down where it comes to anything web once again. Silly me, I’d assumed they would have seen that light by now, considering the feedback.
No … I think he means CCP decides over the layout / design … instead of offering a set of layout choices like MOST other forums do- especially those that target both mobile plattforms and desktops with the same content.
@Drizzd That’s only part of it. As far as CCP has come in the past few years with turning things around, there’s always one or two segments which have a seriously awful tendency to just push changes through in a top-down manner. As in their perspective being magically awesome, as opposed to, you know, common standards of best practices, usability and so forth.
Heck, no offense, but where it comes to web stuff, this has not changed since beta. Where it comes to these matters, it is always the same pitfalls. And always it ends up throwing stuff out and having to adjust to what appears undesired: putting the user perspectives first.
As I said elsewhere, I had hoped that the old pitfalls would no longer be present for this arena as well. After all, given the venture model changes CCP has undertaken (and continues to roll out) EVE Online is slowly but surely building up again a much larger dependancy footprint in outward bound communicative information streams and storytelling. While every other medium currently in use (actively or passively) reinforces an inward bound focus. The worst thing to do is top down approaches for changes such as these. A bad thing to do is to roll out and then adapt. It’s business.
Kind of ironic, we could go back to the ancient original forum incarnations and look up the very same debates - and put a timeline together on how CCP had to grudgingly adjust accordingly, it’s a waste of energy and resources best spent in a different manner. And the poor devs have to clean it up - someone really ought to get them some cookies.
Everything that has been written above criticising the forums (not negatively) I agree with.
These forums I’m sorry are absolutely dreadful. ‘a timeline’ ? no no no no no.
I do hope you do not continue developing this! Honestly it’s not down to the whole, I don’t like change theorum. They are just bloody aweful.
As you can see I don’t post a lot, I do however frequent these forums most days and much prefer the latter than now.
Can’t you just customise a version of VBB or some other advanced forum software.
VBB is so customisable as Im sure you know and one of your creative team members could surely whip up a theme of sorts.
But please, it’s clunky and 'obtuse’
N
Wasted effort, it’s a done deal - just accept it, where it comes to web stuff it always goes this way. Top down, shiny, form over function. Quiet decision, deployment out of the semi-blue, then fake thankful for feedback, and so forth.
Any word on being able to kill the infinite scrolling, implementing pages, and in doing so turning this social media inspired forum into an actual forum? I’ve tried it and as much as I find some parts really useful (the reply window preview is a good thing), I find myself actually struggling to read the damn threads:
There is nothing really separating new (or updated) threads visually. Its all grey
Infinite scrolling works on a social media platform, not a forum.
The sections themselves seem to merge into one. A gap between each (a physical gap not just a ) would help - much like the current forums
Hopefully you can implement these changes before you shut down the current forums…
