Official Forum Feedback Thread

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Gave it a few days before I commented on it. I could go for them adding some more customization and maybe getting a few of the more popular vbullet addons. Those things would fix the gripes I have about the new forums. Mainly colors and layouts. Other than that this is way better than the old forums to me.

I noticed we lost the ability to see the most active threads that is something I would like to see again that is where I would start my day going through the most active topics......
I am not sure I am liking the new format.....However it is new.......But again we no longer have access to the current running active threads

Now that I've had a chance to get my feet wet in the new forums, I have to say that overall, I am very happy and impressed with the new forums. As I spend more time on the boards, it's becoming increasingly evident that there is a lot more options and customization that can be done with the new software compared to the old...and for me, more options is definitely a good thing. My general likes and dislikes are as follows:

LIKES

• The forums look and feel far more modern than the old boards. The background image ties in well with the game's overhauled main web page. And no more moving images at the top (characters bobbing up and down always bugged me).

• I actually really like the nested forum format, as it enables me to click on exactly what I want to look at without having to scroll through a bunch of stuff that I don't want to look at. But I also like that that an expanded version of the forum is available for those who want the expanded forum and for times that I feel like browsing.

• The forum expands to widescreen! No more black along the sides of my screen anymore...yay!

• The private message summary at the top of the forum. It gives great information and is non-invasive (that blinking red envelope drove me mad).

• The search function! It's so much more efficient that the search function from the old boards! Lots of stuff I can tweak to get the results that I want. And it's really handy that it tells you exactly how much time you have to wait until you can perform another search.

• Social groups, as it gives subgroups that do not have their own forum (like supergroups) a place to mingle and plan events.

• The ability to finally include images in your post! It's nice to not have to click on a bunch of links to see our players' creativity. Plus, I think this will help take some of the burden off of our online community reps from having to post event flyers and such for posters. If someone posts an image that's against the forum rules...well, that's what the report post function is for!

• Speaking of the report post function, it's really nice being able to include an explaination of exactly why we are reporting a post

• I actually think the reputation system is pretty neat, as it's nice to see actual feedback on my posts (whether positive or negative).

• The full WYSIWYG editor is far more intuitive than the post editor in the old forums.

• I've mentioned this before, but I'll include it again so everything is consolidated...my major complaint with the new forums is that there is just not enough contrast between text and the skins. It's very fatiguing on the eyes and after awhile, everything starts to just blur together. And as a person who is migraine-prone, it's no fun when you get a headache after reading the forums for an extended period.

• The smilies! The ones available don't mesh well with the skin due to their white outlines. And I really miss the old smilies (most especially petulant mad-face ). I know this is something in the pipeline to get fixed, but still wanted to included it in my feedback.

• The grey background on the avatars. Those of us who are still using our 80 x 80s have that ugly grey bar at the top of their avatar. And those with transparent avatars (like Altoholic_Monkey's avie) are in an even worse situation.

• Signature images...just don't like them (particularly when someone with a sig image posts a one line post). I'm among those who would like the option to turn off signature images while keeping images in the body of the post turned on.

• The full WYSIWYG editor is not set as the default. There's a lot of posters who are not fully versed in BB code and the WYSIWYG editor is really great in helping them format their posts. These are likely going to be the same folks who will not know what options are available and how to change them. I think it'd be better to have the WYSIWYG editor as the default and should any posters wish to simplify their editor, the option is still there.

• There's no way to change date formatting. I'd really like to see an option added to our CP so our European players can change their date format from MM-DD-YYYY to DD-MM-YYYY.

If people have their rep turned off they should no longer be given the ability to hand rep out to others.

The word filter is just taking the Michael. There's just no need whatsoever to censor the word for a stupid person, honestly.

(I'll give you a hint. Begins with Id, ends with iot. Overboard, along with any other sub-U-rated terms that might have added to that list in the switchover. >.>)

view post image needs to be fixed when you quote a message (link to image is http://boards.cityofheroes.com/style...s/viewpost.png) comes up as a red x. Or drop adding the link to the quoted message.

sure this one is been asked..
hope someone has the daunting task of fixing all of the broken links for guides and how to's.

edit: The little triangle nest to the post name that lets us go to 1st unread post is really hard to click and worse when I VPN into my home computer.

The default setting for PMs is "off" - I really think it should be "on", as not everyone will know they're set to not receive them.

This forum is EVIL... I can barely post anything because anything I type is responded to with a "Bad Input" message. I can't even find what's wrong with my post, because I've looked at the suggestions and none of them fit the bill.

And before you ask, while yes the post was indeed longer than this one it wasn't nearly as long as some of the other posts I've already seen.

Not many people are using them yet, but I'm already wishing for a feature to disable non-standard fonts in posts. Some people for whatever reason insist on using fonts that just make their posts annoying to read. I guess I'm just going to have to skip those posts because I'm not going put in extra effort to find out what you're saying just because you have to be fancy with orange cursive font on a red background.

The color thing is a whole 'nother issue. Really, why do we allow certain font colors if they're going to be unreadable with the board's color themes?

And down with the friggin' signature images! Either disable them or turn the size limits way down as I'm getting sick of seeing so many posts where the sig is taller than the actual content of the post.

I haven't read through all of this, and I posted this in another thread, so I'm sorry if it's repetetive, but my biggest gripe about these boards is that if I just come in to check out one section, say guides, and have it up for a significant amount of time, then the next time I come back the "contains new posts" in all of the other sections will reflect that time that I was on, but not in those sections. On the old boards it would reflect that for the guides section, but the other sections would not change until I went into them specifically. Does anyone know if there's a way to change that here?

Looks like I'll just be having to use AdBlock on these forums, a lot. It works but I have to do it for every single sig and if the sig is changed it has to be blocked again. I know I block using a wildcard but I just want the annoying sigs gone, not every damn image that is hosted from that location.

Also it turns out that avatars are being loaded from the location you grabbed them from in your settings every time the page loads rather than being stored locally on the board's server. Found that out when I blocked an entire domain and the poster's avatar also vanished with the sig. That explains why avatars are often failing to load, the burden is being shifted to the original host site.

Without the Dev digest working, or the ability to "show all" for a given thread, I'm afraid the new forums are pretty useless to me. Still, I'm happy that these should require less maintainance for you.