Official Forum Feedback Thread

Subjective, but important usability issue:
The little triangle we click to show new messages is *WAY* too small. It should be about triple the size.

Subjective feedback: Forum Colors

On my screen the colors of the forum appear to be shades of teal.
However, the background appears to have COH blues (in Statesman's Costume and the heading), and COV reds (in Lord Recluse's costume, with his eye colors 'echoed in Statesman's costume). Other colors in the background, on my screen, appear to be sky blue, purples and oranges. So on my screen, using teal shades for the forum seems to not match well with the background.

In my opinion, colors similar to the ones used for the old forums would match better.
I feel that an attempt to echo some of the colors in the background image, would tie the forum to the background well. Also, I think using blues and reds would be more 'COX colors' and echo the game better.

Summary:

In my opinion: Beautiful Background!
In my opinion: The forum colors don't appear to match background.

I bookmarked http://boards.cityofheroes.com/forumdisplay.php?f=547 to expand the forums and... well, I can see now why they did what they did with the default non-expanded version.

I scroll and scroll and then scroll some more, and the list of forum subsections goes on forever. The dumbo-sized statesman star icon makes the listing of forums 3x as long as it has to be.

Reminds me of one of the million bad console-> PC game ports. The ones where the interface is so comically big that a fat kid with walrus hands could mash their way through it.

Objective Feedback:
* I subscribed to a couple of threads yesterday and they appeared on my user cp but this morning they are now gone? Not sure if this is a bug or I am doing it wrong.

Subjective Feedback:
* Please bring back the View All feature for threads. I found this particularly useful when reading longer threads
* It all seems a bit to busy, the increaded number of graphics (e.g. the Statesman Star) means scrolling through all the expanded boards to time consuming and everything takes longer to load.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger Quote: 16. Has Paragon Studios redefined "player" to require your mouse to subscribe separately from your keyboard? If your mouse has greater processing power than your gfx card, the answer is yes.

How do you even give someone negative reputation? All I see is "add to XX's reputation."

Quote:

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.

Objective:
1. Statesman Star is too big, making a two line title take up the same amount of space as a four line title.
--1a. Villain skin needs Arachnos symbol instead.
2. Gradients make it hard to read the text.
3. "Show All" option missing. 100 posts per page is a decent amount, though...I do not *REQUIRE* "show all".
4. Need an easier way to ignore users, it's currently hidden under the unintuitive "USER LISTS" option in their profile. (Subjective: "User Lists"? Really? What a ghastly name for a menu.)

Subjective:
1. "Reputation" is the same thing as "stars" from the old forum. Nearly everyone will gravitate toward mediocrity, and reputation will be meaningless. Just remove it.

Extremely subjective:
1. Need a way to turn off JUST signature images. I want to see what people put in their posts. I don't care about their signature images. Right now, I'm forced to adblock, which means I miss out on people's links after I've adblocked the images.
2. Colors are extremely bland. Additionally, the red "New Reply" button doesn't look good against the slate-blue Hero scheme.

That being said, I really love the expanded functionality. And I love, love, LOVE that we have what looks like a never-expiring edit window for our posts. I went back and edited a REALLY old post of mine from 2006. BRILLIANT.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Woooah, Okay. Just noticed somethign else. The text for editing/deleting a post (at least on the Villain) theme, is practically invisible - White on gray!

OK, I didn't see the "disapprove" radio button. Yeah, turn it off. Reputation is best saved for the REAL thing.

Quote:

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.

Personally I don't like how when you first arrive at the forum everything is locked away under subtitles. I prefer it all to just be on show.

Darn kids and their fancy new technologies! *shakes fist*

new board is way too complicated. can't find anything. stuff doesn't work. took me twenty minutes just to find this thread and figure out how to post.
no thank you!
this will be my one and only post on these new forums forever. bye.

It's hard to see new threads, threads with new answers, etc...

The old forums were easier for the eyes.


Though it's good to be able to have signatures (even if it won't let me) and to post pictures.

Another thing to tack on:

Were the old forums a set pixel width? Could have sworn they were. I play at 1920x1200 resolution and it's annoying to have the forum's 3 columns spread across a 1920 width.

That combined with the huge statesman star, the bad background/text contrast, and the small post font size make everything a real eye sore.

These posts in this feedback discussion have been my only posts at all since the change. I can't bring myself to a) scroll through endlessly to find my previously favorite forums, and b) to deal with the bad color contrast.

To address some legibility issues with the forum, I have written a small style file to be used with the Stylish Firefox extension (it can probably be adapted for other browsers that allow user-defined CSS styles, such as Opera).

The style file does the following:

1. Remove underlining from title and date links in thread lists, and author links next to posts. Underlining is a form of emphasis, when you emphasize everything, nothing is emphasized. Excessive underlining hurts legibility because it obscures descenders.

2. Thread titles and dates have been recolored in a light yellow. This color choice attempts a compromise between good contrast and reduction of halation (halation is the effect of white letters "glowing" against a dark background, which is often assumed to reduce legibility). The author names (except rednames) and titles of individual posts are similarly colored for visual uniformity.

3. Author names in thread lists are colored a dark gold. I chose a muted color to make it easier for the reader who is scanning the thread list for a specific thread title to skip over superfluous information.

4. Gradient backgrounds were largely replaced with uniformly colored background. Gradients may be pretty, but they don't provide the eye with a visually stable backdrop. The background color was chosen to both be an approximation of the gradient colors and to contrast well with the font colors.

5. The default font is Arial, which was designed for printed matter. The style file substitutes Verdana, which was specifically designed for high on-screen legibility. (Note to the designers: The fallback option in the default font-family CSS entry has a superfluous space, "sans- serif" instead of "sans-serif").

6. An extra separator has been inserted between the forum title and forum description so that they aren't smushed together.

Note: I do not intend to maintain this style file. It is primarily intended as feedback for the forum designers (and my own use), and while others are welcome to use it, too, it is very unlikely that I will publish updates if changes to the forum break it.

Another major problem:

Clicking on a thread that has new posts no longer takes you to the new posts, it takes you to the first post on the thread. You lose your place in the thread.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!