Official Forum Feedback Thread
By
8_Ball,
Posted on: 2009-07-31 13:32 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Originally Posted by GibberingLunatic
I have to ask... What browser are you using? I see it just fine on my laptop with 1440x900 rez and 1024x768 (I have never heard of a 1200x768 resolution. you might be meaning 1024x768) using google chrome/firefox/opera
Have you tried using a diffrent browser? Seems like IE (crappiest browser in the world IMHO) which you are probally using just doesnt like the XHTML that the forums were coded in, or just isn't parsing the CSS clearly. Problems with the theme? try the villian theme, if that doesnt work. Suggest one. Don't just complain about it. This is VBulletin. one of the most moddable pieces of forum software available on the net. |
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| I have to ask... What browser are you using? |
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| I have never heard of a 1200x768 resolution. you might be meaning 1024x768 |
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| Problems with the theme? try the villian theme, if that doesnt work. Suggest one. Don't just complain about it. |
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| Now I not only have to deal with excessive scrolling due to bloated padding and a clunky interface built for extremely high resolution monitors, but I also must deal with a color scheme that strains my eyes and looks horrible. |
Raid Leader of Task Force Vendetta "Steel 70", who defeated the first nine Drop Ships in the Second Rikti War.
70 Heroes, 9 Drop Ships, 7 Minutes. The Aliens never knew what hit them.
Now soloing: GM-Class enemy Adamaster, with a Tanker!
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Horses for courses really. The old EU hero theme was great for me, the old US hero theme was vile. Both old villain themes were vile and bad for MY eyes.|
Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
My recommendations in reverse order - create a brighter color scheme that is easier to read or duplicate the old site's color scheme and decrease the amount of padding and unnecessary spacing.
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The new hero theme, whilst a little dull, is VERY easy on my tired old and knackered eyes. Not looked at the new villain theme.
@FloatingFatMan
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
My complaint is largely a simple one (aside from the unnecessary change in theme and colour): no more replies to specific people unless you want to quote somebody. I've already seen a lot of posts like "I clicked your link and..." You clicked on WHOSE link? Your post no longer comes with a name attached at the top, so how am I supposed to know who you're replying to if you didn't specify MANUALLY? Why can't we have specific "Reply" buttons for each poster? I preferred the threaded hierarchy of the old forums better.
*edit*
How the BLOODY HELL do I use the Quick Reply box?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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It's that weird pencil-and-paper symbol at the bottom-right side of a every post on the page.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
My complaint is largely a simple one (aside from the unnecessary change in theme and colour): no more replies to specific people unless you want to quote somebody. I've already seen a lot of posts like "I clicked your link and..." You clicked on WHOSE link? Your post no longer comes with a name attached at the top, so how am I supposed to know who you're replying to if you didn't specify MANUALLY? Why can't we have specific "Reply" buttons for each poster? I preferred the threaded hierarchy of the old forums better.
*edit* How the BLOODY HELL do I use the Quick Reply box? |
Raid Leader of Task Force Vendetta "Steel 70", who defeated the first nine Drop Ships in the Second Rikti War.
70 Heroes, 9 Drop Ships, 7 Minutes. The Aliens never knew what hit them.
Now soloing: GM-Class enemy Adamaster, with a Tanker!
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See the buttons in the lower right corner of people's posts? "Quote", "Multi-quote", and the last one is "Quick Reply".
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
How the BLOODY HELL do I use the Quick Reply box?
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Character index
Uh? OK, that activated the Quick Reply box. But... Why? It's supposed to be a QUICK reply. If I'm going to be clicking around links and suchforth, why bother to have a "quick" reply? It doesn't come with the name of the person I'm replying to, does it?
*edit*
No, it does not. Then what, pray tell, is the POINT of having that? Ugh...
And why do my new posts not have an avatar attached to them when my older ones do? Does it take some time for my avatar to travel to my new post or something? Should I give it more money to catch a cab?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Liking the boards over all missing or maybe can't find
keep me logged in
see all (pages)
as for the look colour should be smurf blue 
Pluses:
- We can have images in our posts and sigs. ( although I'd like the ability to have scalable images and/or thumbnails that can be clicked on to show the full size image )
- More modern look and feel.
Negatives:
- Highlighting of thread titles that have new replies is just barely noticeable. Needs to be bolded like the old forums ( or given a different color ).
- Need text for the various action icons. ( i.e. respond to message, etc. )
- Would like to be able to click on the thread title to be taken to the first unread message instead of clicking a little arrow icon.
- No way to have a link where you specify the displayed text for that link.
- No obvious way to return to the forum category list.
- A bit too much padding in the forum category list, requiring more scrolling than before.
- I was hoping for more space for my signature. Still limited to just 5 lines...making it pretty difficult to advertise arcs.
131430 Starfare: First Contact
178774 Tales of Croatoa: A Rose By Any Other Name ( 2009 MA Best In-Canon Arc ) ( 2009 Player Awards - Best Serious Arc )
Ok, how can i change the number of posts i can view?
On old forums i had 50 posts listing before i changed to a new page. Now it seems fixed at 15 :| it's annoying me.
Also, why doesn't these forums jump to last unread post when i click a thread with new posts in it? it's also very annoying since i don't wanna see stuff i read, i wanna jump to the new reply.
I just found it myself - it's in User CP, go to Edit Options in Settings & Options, and in Thread Display Options just choose how many posts you want to show under "Number of Posts to Show Per Page" thingy.
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I find that to depend on the mobile device you're using. If it's a regular phone that boasts internet browsing capability, like a Symbian phone, then I can indeed see things breaking quite significantly.|
Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
Yep. It's not just all the images, it's the whole layout. REALLY not friendly to mobile devices. Quite a few forums these days tend to have a mobile skin they switch to automatically...
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Things are much brighter on the smartphone front. Android devices seem to cope very well with it. There's also a small quirk that makes discussions easier to read; on the UBB boards, Android would wrap the text in a given post to fit to the width of the screen. This would mean you can't see the names of who actually posted anything without scrolling left and right a lot. On these boards, the body of a post is narrower, so you can see who posted and what they're posting at once.
Also, the page numbers are a little bigger, with more space between them. That's a damn godsend for touchscreen phones.
Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
Rickar - 50 Bots/FF Mastermind
Anti-Muon - 42 Warshade
Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.
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changed mine to 100 pages still prefer the old option of see all
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Originally Posted by Velinia
I just found it myself - it's in User CP, go to Edit Options in Settings & Options, and in Thread Display Options just choose how many posts you want to show under "Number of Posts to Show Per Page" thingy.
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Hate to break this to you, but your sig pic is one of the offenders. I've AdBlocked every sig pic I've seen so far as being a garish intrusion to the scrolling of a thread in order to read it.|
Originally Posted by Croesis
It's funny, there's a lot of arguing against graphic sigs because of the potential abuse, but as of yet I've not seen any major issues with huge sigs or inappropriate images. I don't see why people can't bite their tongue and wait til it actually happens and then report the user rather than try to deny a feature which allows freedom of expression straight from the word go.
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Really, a huge block of a graphic repeated over and over and over again by someone participating in a discussion is just downright stupid. It's one of the stupidest forum features I've every seen. Maybe, just maybe, if there was a forum for artists and you were 'branding' yourself with sample pics of your work, it would be justified. But *nothing* justifies that block of graphics in a text medium.
I adblock about 10% of the avatars for being distracting. And so far 100% of the sig pics have been distracting. We need a feature to turn of those repeating pics in a sig that doesn't turn off the occasionally needed posting of a pic in the body of a post.
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
Is there anyway we can get the BB coding tools enabled to help us with bold, text color in our posts and replies?
[B]Leading Badge Holder in the City of Community[/B]
Owner & Operator of...
[URL="http://www.vidiotmaps.com/"]Vidiotmaps.com[/URL] & [URL="http://www.badge-hunter.com/"]Badge-Hunter.com[/URL]
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I'm finding I have to log in twice. I actually want to be able to log in once and have done. Not log in twice every day
Thelonious Monk
The forums are different and people tend to resist change, but I think it will be fine after folks get used to it.
I ran into the same initial issues..
1) Login using game acct and password -- by the way I think this is a bad idea. It's much easier for game accounts to get hijacked with browser malware this way.
2) Clicking on 'English' to get the subforum view was not intuitive. I only figured this out when I followerd the links for forgotten/reset password and it took me to my game account credentials.
3) Dev forums HTML for table display seems borked
4) Lastly - didn't see this anywhere, but is there a way to limit the new posts results to only display your own language subforums? While it's nice to know our french and german friends are posting, I'm not fluent in these other languages and too lazy to use a web translator.
PS - and thanks for making sure Unique_Dragon's post made it over 
Typically the first thing I do when I log in is check the new posts and the dev digest -- both of these are slightly messed up for me based on the above.
We don' need no stinkin' signatures!
1. Text on colored gradient is not good, it is more difficult to read than text on a static colored background. This is a fact. And yet, just about every box of text is on a colored gradient.
Just because computers allows text to be easily superimposed on colored gradients or graphics or images does not mean they should be. Just because it's done often doesn't mean that it's good. It's bad. Very bad.
The only time that the background should have a gradient color fill is if the color change happens in the margins where there is no text. That can create a nice effect without compromising readability of the text. If the gradient can't be moved to the margins, then get rid of it altogether. Let the outer border boxes have gradient colors.
2. Width of the reply box is too narrow. I believe I've seen on other vBulletin boards the player controlled option of setting the width. Right now, it's 66 characters, it should be *at least* 80, though, user-configurable would be better. [For those who don't know, you can make the box longer by using the up and down arrows in the upper right corner.]
3. Put ignore user on the drop down menu when clicking a users name. Right now, we have to go to a users page and find a not-so-obvious link to put them on ignore.
4. Get rid of Quick Reply completely. The vBulletin Manual says to administrators:
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So, what's the advantage of Quick Reply? It just confuses things. People still have the choice of hitting New Reply at the bottom of a thread, or, they can click the Reply button on a post they want to reply to.
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5. Why is the font in quoted boxes easier to read than ordinary text? This one amuses me. Usually on other boards, the quoted text is tiny and sometimes barely readable. Here, it's reversed. It should be re-reversed.
6. Thanks for switching to vBulletin! Yay!
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
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Originally Posted by Beef_Cake
Is there anyway we can get the BB coding tools enabled to help us with bold, text color in our posts and replies?
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Choose the advanced editor.
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
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Manually using codes still works, but you can go into the options, scroll to the bottom, and change the interface from Basic to Enhanced. That will open up all the commands for bold/italics, fonts, sizes, colours, alignments, indents, undo/redo, URLs, pictures, quotes, and emoticons.|
Originally Posted by Beef_Cake
Is there anyway we can get the BB coding tools enabled to help us with bold, text color in our posts and replies?
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You can even select a piece of text and apply new formatting to it with these controls. It's much sleeker than the UBB boards.
Other points I like:
- You can specify the name of someone you're quoting, and the post you quoted. This lets people click "View Original Post" and jump back to whatever was quoted.
- It doesn't make the form you submitted invalid.
- An arrow is shown on the icons of threads you have posted in.
- You can see a history of posts while writing an advanced reply; just scroll down a bit.
- Multi-quotes. Aw jeah.
- The forums resize themselves to fit your browser.
- Hovering over a thread gives you a preview of the text.
My one bugbear is that the emoticons are GIFs which have been given a white transparency matte, meaning a horrible jagged outline is seen on every non-white background. Our Glorious Forum Moderators can either use PNG emoticons that use a proper alpha channel, or GIF emoticons with the right matte. The latter solution would need two sets of emoticons for the hero and villain themes, which is most likely more trouble than is worth.
Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
Rickar - 50 Bots/FF Mastermind
Anti-Muon - 42 Warshade
Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.
You can also manually enter the codes for different things just as we did on the old UBB forums.
I have "some" formatting icons even on the Quick Reply box. I think it may have been something I changed in the UserCP.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
Don't know if it was mentioned because i didn't click on each page but i want a way to load the whole thread. you know like the old "show all" option.
I really miss the old Search Results display. I loved how it showed exactly what post came up as a hit for your search. Now, if you're searching for a thread on a certain subject, you can't tell if the hits are in the original post or in a reply.
Speaking of replies, I also can't tell when looking at the list of forums if the latest post in the forum is a reply or a new thread because the "Re: " is being omitted from the post's subject line.
Issue 16 made me feel like this.
Warning: This poster likes to play Devil's Advocate.
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I'll try to respond to a few Negative points you brought up. One I'm going to ask for clarification on. I think I know what you are asking, but I want to be sure.|
Originally Posted by Hercules
Pluses:
- We can have images in our posts and sigs. ( although I'd like the ability to have scalable images and/or thumbnails that can be clicked on to show the full size image ) - More modern look and feel. Negatives: - Highlighting of thread titles that have new replies is just barely noticeable. Needs to be bolded like the old forums ( or given a different color ). - Need text for the various action icons. ( i.e. respond to message, etc. ) - Would like to be able to click on the thread title to be taken to the first unread message instead of clicking a little arrow icon. - No way to have a link where you specify the displayed text for that link. - No obvious way to return to the forum category list. - A bit too much padding in the forum category list, requiring more scrolling than before. - I was hoping for more space for my signature. Still limited to just 5 lines...making it pretty difficult to advertise arcs. |
- I agree that it is difficult to quickly spot thread titles that have new replies, unless you look for the small downward pointing triangle to the left of the thread title. Clicking that icon (though rather small) will also take you to the first unread post in the thread. I'm thinking that clicking the forum title not taking you to the first unread post is a vBulleting standard, although I could be wrong. If it's not a standard, there's likely a mod or theme or something to enable this. It may take some time to get it all smoothed out.
- Most of the action icons have a popup text if you hover over the icon without clicking it. Actually, much of the forum has this hover-over popup action, including thread titles giving the first pieces of the original post. Very useful for those threads titles like I Had an Idea or similar.
- This is the one that I need clarification on. You want to have a link that you can specify the displayed text for the link? If what you are meaning is having words be the links, like I did in that sentence with the word specify, that's easy to do, although it wasn't obvious to me at first. Basically, type the text the way you want it, then go back to the word(s) you want to be the link, highlight them and click the Insert Link icon and enter the address. You can also use the same [ url ] and [ /url ] tags like we did in UBB if you want. If you are meaning something else, please clarify. For those interested, the link above on the word specify takes you to a vBulletin Community Forum page on BB Codes. Very handy.
- I use the Forum Jump link in the lower right corner for almost all of my navigation unless I'm making a post. It's much easier as it lets me jump to the index of the current forum, jump to a new forum index, the UserCP, or just about anywhere I want.
- A bit of tightening up may be in order, but I'm going to give them time to read over the suggestions and also finish getting things completely rolled out. I'm sure they haven't finished with the new forums, but rather are just getting started good. Remember, several of those involved in varioius parts of the forum change have left in the middle of the process (that's taken a couple of years).
- Yeah, we complained about the signature limitations of 5 lines in the I13 Beta Forums. Either it fell on deaf ears, wasn't passed along by the people that left, or wasn't considered very important. Considering an IMG in a signature can take up more space than 5 lines of text ... yeah, that needs to be fixed.
vBulletin has many good points, some of them you just need to play with the system to find out about, or ask someone who's been tinkering with them.
Hope this helps.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
On my XP box, the desktop is set to 1200 x 1024 and even in Firefox the background image isn't fully loaded. I can see Statesman and Lord Recluse completely, all of Positron and most of Mako, but only small pieces of Sister Psyche and Ghost Widow.
So yeah, it's not just restricted to IE. I'm a big proponent of the change, but this is one I haven't found how to fix here yet.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
The new forums, like the new website, is a bloated mess that looks to me like it was intentionally designed to run on resolutions much higher than 1200x768. There is SO MUCH wasted space that it's beyond ridiculous. The unnecessary "white space" and the various breaks and padding separating the different sections of the page are uncomfortably large and enforces continuous scrolling to complete reading most articles or even individual posts now. The theme is dark, dull, generic, and very non-heroic - I would go so far as to say that every section of the site is designed for the City of Villains atmosphere were I not aware that it is a copy-cat of the main NCSoft site's equally flawed design.
The muted colors are also psychologically demoralizing for me. After the site was first changed, I deliberately set up a hot-link to jump straight to the forums because they retained the bright, easy-on-the-eyes visuals of the previous web site. Now I not only have to deal with excessive scrolling due to bloated padding and a clunky interface built for extremely high resolution monitors, but I also must deal with a color scheme that strains my eyes and looks horrible.
Who ever is in charge of these site designs needs to quit relying on dreamweaver (or equivalent template-biased program), take a internet course in color theory, and try fitting the site to a 1200x768 desktop (which for many users is still a standard). The whole design feels to me like it means to alienate its viewership.
Have you tried using a diffrent browser? Seems like IE (crappiest browser in the world IMHO) which you are probally using just doesnt like the XHTML that the forums were coded in, or just isn't parsing the CSS clearly.
Problems with the theme? try the villian theme, if that doesnt work. Suggest one. Don't just complain about it. This is VBulletin. one of the most moddable pieces of forum software available on the net.
Whoever gave negative rep on this post, saying "Unhelpful and demoralizing." needs to realize something, I'm not your mother, I'm not here to coddle you and tell you it will be O.K. I'm here to give out the straight facts and apparently this has been very useful to many others. so get over it.