What do you guys think of the new forums? It is nice that it is no longer a separate login but I miss being able to see who is currently on, the avatars, and how much someone has posted.
The new forums are missing almost all of the features you'd expect in a forum software from 10 years ago: any sort of user information or user-to-user communication, non-WYSIWYG posting, links with link text, uppercase letters in user names, and a whole host of others. I don't know what things look like on the management side, but as we can't report posts (another missing feature) and a post in the VIG discussion implies they cannot group accounts yet I'm going to guess it's just as bad.
I wouldn't have moved to this software in this state, and I wouldn't recommend writing your own forum software at all. Find something that you can integrate (to whatever degree) with your own logins or suffer with Community Server 2007.1 one more year while getting this ready. But it's not my website, so here we are. :)
Also, I have to log in every time I visit. (Yes, I've checked Remember Me. Have tried using current versions of both Opera and Firefox.) I don't visit the Gen Con site that often so it's probably been an issue for a while.
Gotta agree with parody. These forums are not ready for prime time, and I miss a lot of the features that are just standard/basic for forum software. With so many off-the-shelf customizable options, I'm surprised they went with 'build our own' instead of something like VBulletin, which is very dynamic and could allow them to create all the forums we're used to with member limiting, signatures, avatars, etc.
Hoping they'll improve before GenCon. :)
Not sure if this is related to the new forums or not, but so far this week I've had to accept the site terms of service three times now, and each time results in getting an email of them sent to me as well. Not a very good customer experience.
And houseing is about a month away..... this will be so enjoyable.
This might be =11pxinteresting =14pxif it works. Custom javascript can restore various CKEditor editing features. But what gets saved to the server?
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Edit: Heh, not much of what I tried. Still, interesting. And probably a good reason to not use an editor folks can reconfigure on the client side.
Ok, good to know it's not just me having to check those boxes every time. Could not figure out what setting I might have been missing.
I like that the forums are less separated now, and the matching color scheme is nice. Although, I agree that some features are missing. I would like to see better indication for who is posting than the small lowercase print of their name.
This is a test of adding line breaks from within Google Chrome. If this works without me having to manually add HTML code, I'll be a happy panda. Edit: It does! :D
<p>This is a test of me adding HTML code. <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google.</a> Hopefully <b>this</b> works too.</p> Edit: It doesn't! D: (Definiately safer this way. :p)
One of the functions i seem to no longer see, is in the old forums, i could click on a user, and send them an email.. Don't see that anymore.
I for one do NOT like these new forums, and have no idea why they closed the old ones.
I miss the dice. I was on the D10 people!
Hi cbudrois,
I'm sorry you're unhappy with the new forums. I can assure you that it was a very, very, good decision to switch the forums. The old software that we were using for the old forums was no longer supported, and essentially, very broken. Regular users will remember constant problems with HTML not working correctly, or at all, on most browsers, and notifications of things like PMs working, at best, intermittently. Every time browsers were updated, the forums were less and less functional. I agree that these forums don't yet have all the functionality that the old forums were supposed to have, but they're a lot less broken already, and we have full control over the development of them.
So, thanks for your input, but dropping that old forum software was a very smart move and we will NOT be returning to it. It was not a mistake to leave it.
marimacc Forum Coordinator
Switching the forums is fine, but switch to something that actually implements the features you and your users want. For example, you could have switched to the current version of the software used by the old forums. You'd have to pay for it, of course, and there might not have been a good upgrade path given that you hadn't kept up with versions for 8 years, but it'd have actual forum features. :/
As it is, now you (well, Gen Con LLC) gets to keep up with browser changes. Yuck.
Addition: Don't get me wrong, Telligent Community 9 (the current name and version for what was Community Server, after being sold off again) may not be the greatest choice, but it's probably better than what's here so far.
Also a very tiny "for what it's worth": if you turned off the WYSIWYG editor in your user settings, you could write posts using the allowed subset of HTML just fine in Community Server 2007.1. I doubt many folks wanted to do that, but I used the forums that way the entire time as the WYSIWYG editor from that version never worked in Opera.
Do you have the resources you need to continue your development work on these forums, or should we expect to wait until after this year's GenCon to see new features?
Usability question here.
Is it possible to sort thread views to "newest first"? If yes, can you tell me how to do it? Thanks!
Not that I'm aware of, but if you click on the Last Post link in the thread list, it jumps you to the end of the conversation. I'm using that a fair bit to keep it manageable. Don't want to read eight pages of stuff to find the reply. :)
If I read somewhere correctly the new forums are being developed in house? Why? With all the available free and paid forum options out there this seems like a very odd choice. The interface, like many have noted, is lacking in so many features it should have been developed more before being rolled out. It is very stale, and unfriendly and again, lacks the basic features as far as what a forum needs in establishing a community.