Official Forum Feedback Thread
By
8_Ball,
Posted on: 2009-07-31 13:32 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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You're a little late there, Goat.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
Take the law into your own hands.
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Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
Looks like I'll just be having to use AdBlock on these forums, a lot.
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It appears that my humor detector is a little broken today... |
Originally Posted by CaptainMoodswing
That's cool. Please don't take my "humor" as serious condescension.
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This in spades and with sparklies (oooh, sparklies). I'll only add that the search user feature is also pretty useless (at least in my so far limited experience), since the resulting links do not lead to the post but only to the thread. |
Originally Posted by Serva_Obscura
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.
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Overall, I must say the new forum are really disappointing.
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The more the merrier!|
Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
You're a little late there, Goat.
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You can never have too many Adblock evangelists singing its praises!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I have a work-in-progress mod for Firefox to tone down certain signatures.
Forum mod: less obtrusive signatures
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Sig images ROCK. And FYI, going through this entire thread, there really isn't a lot of people who have them, and there are almost NONE that have any sort of "advertisement" quality to them. I particularly liked the "Chill" one that showcased that user's hero flying across the bottom of their post. That looked amazing. I'm not sure why exactly you're so pissed about it... |
Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
We're not talking about disabling signatures. Heck, I'm using one myself so why would I want to disable them? We're talking about disabling sig IMAGES.
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"The One"
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Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades
The way you play changes your IO slotting..
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76 characters and Twenty-four 50s later, I still love this game.
AlienOne's Human-Form Warshade Guide (Old guide+New guide = 12,000+ views!)
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Originally Posted by HurlyBurly
This in spades and with sparklies (oooh, sparklies). I'll only add that the search user feature is also pretty useless (at least in my so far limited experience), since the resulting links do not lead to the post but only to the thread.
Overall, I must say the new forum are really disappointing. |
I only use the Advanced Search, and I set it to show Posts instead of Threads. I get two links in each area, and the second link is to the post itself. The first post of course goes to the thread.
You can see it here.
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.
I'm on Firefox and I have the forum almost completely reskinned (no gradients, selectable colors), bigger jump-to-first-unread icon, larger font, and all images and colored font turned off just for signatures.
See my sig for the add-on for reskinning and Sharrow's GreaseMonkey script for stripping down the sigs.
Speeding Through New DA Repeatables || Spreadsheet o' Enhancements || Zombie Skins: better skins for these forums || Guide to Guides
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Considering that this forum move was supposedly long-planned, I am kind of surprised and disappointed that such a useful feature was not tested before turning off the old message boards. |
Originally Posted by Manoa
TheOcho indicated in a post last week that they're working on bringing the Dev and Community Digests back and anticipate to have them back soon.
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It seems to be happening in ie8s compatibility view too, as well as older versions of ie (at least ie6). Apparently ie doesn't fall back on the alt text when it encounters a missing image.|
Originally Posted by Obscure_Blade
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This seems like something that would affect a lot of people then, so the missing http://boards.cityofheroes.com/style...s/viewpost.png image should probably be fixed (or the reference to it removed) ASAP.
On a side note, I wonder what the browser distribution of the CoH forum users looks like.
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The old boards worked that way - the forums have never hosted the image. That's why those of us with a rotating avatar HAVE rotating avatars.|
Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
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. |
THIS JUST IN : Rotating sigs now possible!
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Originally Posted by Serva_Obscura
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.
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Originally Posted by Creole_Ned
I still think the overall size of images in signatures should be reduced. I've seen several that are fairly svelte and get the point across. I don't block those. The giant ones that dwarf the actual message they're attached to -- I don't really see the point. Less is more, as they say.
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Originally Posted by Siergen
Considering that this forum move was supposedly long-planned, I am kind of surprised and disappointed that such a useful feature was not tested before turning off the old message boards.
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Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
www.repeat-offenders.net
Negaduck: I see you found the crumb. I knew you'd never notice the huge flag.
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Adblock Plus *is* pretty darn great.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
You can never have too many Adblock evangelists singing its praises!
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I'd recommend any Firefox user to install it, not because of signature images, but to block ads (something it does without any need to manually tag every ad I should add).
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I noticed that earlier, and it looks great. I'm considering using a modified version (removing the sig images entirely instead of replacing them with links).|
Originally Posted by Sharrow
I have a work-in-progress mod for Firefox to tone down certain signatures.
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It's limited to a minority of users though (because of browser/addon requirements, knowledge of how to use it, and awareness of its existence), and since a bunch of us here appear to feel rather strongly about signature images, I'm assuming that there'll also be a large number of users that would also prefer to see them gone, but are not in a position to use tools like Greasemonkey/Adblock Plus to get rid of them.
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I'd surmise that it's because of a difference in taste/preference.
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Originally Posted by AlienOne
Sig images ROCK. And FYI, going through this entire thread, there really isn't a lot of people who have them, and there are almost NONE that have any sort of "advertisement" quality to them. I particularly liked the "Chill" one that showcased that user's hero flying across the bottom of their post. That looked amazing. I'm not sure why exactly you're so pissed about it...
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That would have been preferable.|
Originally Posted by Siergen
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First impressions are important, and having taken care of some of the bigger issues *before* the switch would have probably gone a long way to improve the reception of the new forums.
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This.|
Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan_NA
Are we likely to get any answers to what exactrly is going to be changed and what definitely isnt? I'm most concerned with the forum password, tbh, i think. everything else is annoying, but that's serious.
I don't want my forum password to be the same as my game account password. Eco. |
Forum password the same as game account is just bad security. Very bad security.
Could we get feedback if this is going to be fixed?
I don't suffer from altitis, I enjoy every minute of it.
Thank you Devs & Community people for a great game.
So sad to be ending ):
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I have to ask this.... Why do the users need to come up with their own mods and addons in order to make their board usable for them? It seems absurd, to say the least, that the people on the forums should be doing all the work in order to adjust what is obviously a bad choice to suit their needs.|
Originally Posted by Sharrow
I have a work-in-progress mod for Firefox to tone down certain signatures.
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I am also highly disappointed by the lack of redname response (barring one) to this thread. that gives me serious doubts as to how this matter will be handled. To wit: that this entire thread is more likely than not to be dismissed.
Cynics of the world, unite!
Taking Care of the Multiverse
Can the length of time the boards use to mark posts as read be changed on vBulletin?
I've come to the boards this morning as usual and even though I haven't been reading all night, any post more than an hour old is deemed to have been read.
The old boards didn't mark posts as read until you had actually visited that section. Now it seems if you don't view a post within an hour of it going up it will be marked as read 
My preference would be that posts are not marked as read unless
a) I've actually read them
b) I use the forum tools menu and select "Mark this Forum Read"
I've looked down the Servers section and half of them are greyed out indicating no new posts when I know there are because I can see the last post listed was only a couple of hours ago.....not helpful.
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Thanks TJ! That solved one of my problems with the new forums.
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Originally Posted by Texas_Justice
I only use the Advanced Search, and I set it to show Posts instead of Threads. I get two links in each area, and the second link is to the post itself. The first post of course goes to the thread.
You can see it here. |
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Then something else is making a bottleneck 'cause I never had issues on the old boards of avatars loading sometimes and not other times. It's not just one or two posters, it's an entire page of posts simply lacking avatars one time you look at it, then they're all there, then they're all gone, then...
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Originally Posted by Rajani_Isa
The old boards worked that way - the forums have never hosted the image. That's why those of us with a rotating avatar HAVE rotating avatars.
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Gremlins in the internet |
Originally Posted by Lazarus_NA
Then something else is making a bottleneck 'cause I never had issues on the old boards of avatars loading sometimes and not other times. It's not just one or two posters, it's an entire page of posts simply lacking avatars one time you look at it, then they're all there, then they're all gone, then...
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Nothing man makes is perfect, so it's to be expected for anything to goof sometimes. I had that happen to me once so far. I have a few strange things happen since the new boards, but whatever has happened seems to have fixed it's self.
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Because you can't expect -everybody's- individual "needs" to be catered for, and humans by nature are resourceful enough to solve their own problems anyway, in turn potentially helping those with similar problems in the process.|
Originally Posted by Genia
I have to ask this.... Why do the users need to come up with their own mods and addons in order to make their board usable for them? It seems absurd, to say the least, that the people on the forums should be doing all the work in order to adjust what is obviously a bad choice to suit their needs.
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As much as I'd welcome the option to disable the likes of sig images and all that from within the forum itself, I don't except nor demand it, and I don't find a problem with peeps resorting banging out their own mods either. In fact, anyone who visits more than one vB forum might possibly find Sharrow's script killing several birds with one stone. Maybe.
Sam: "My mind is a swirling miasma of scintillating thoughts and turgid ideas."
Max: "Me too."
Stuff
The biggest downside to using AdBlock, having to do it on every single computer you access the forums on. Even more annoying that the lab computers I sometimes use during the day don't have it either.
We can only have a maximum of 4 images in any one post - this is fair enough, but - smileys count as images. So no more than 4 smileys. I guess now my reviews will come in multiple posts
Not brilliant at reducing the traffic, are they these new forums?
It'll get me in the Forum Cartel quicker I guess.
Eco.
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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vBulletin has no native way to discretely allow sig images to be disabled, unfortunately, so we'd be looking at a mod or altering the CSS to make it happen and I suspect the community reps are reluctant to do either.
As Nethergoat (and Lazarus and probably a few others I missed) mentions above, Adblock will allow people to selectively block any image so it works as a decent workaround (I use it myself).
I still think the overall size of images in signatures should be reduced. I've seen several that are fairly svelte and get the point across. I don't block those. The giant ones that dwarf the actual message they're attached to -- I don't really see the point. Less is more, as they say.