"The New Forums Are Shit" Mk 2

Ormael

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2015
6,631
1,786
And most funny that person with best counter is...well little know outside RP section :D Same with 3rd one soon turning into 2nd one.

Well with giving people right to make custome ranks...oh well we already get back signatures to rule over...unless some jerks will abuse them and make majority loose them (again).
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
The AD styler should be showing up afaik, it shouldn't be an admin-only thing. I'll look at it later.

Post indexes/search should actually work now. XF didn't rebuild the indexes after importing all of the old forum data.
 

Hoboy

Well-Known Member
Mar 31, 2016
236
10
I'm having a problem figuring out how to add attachments to a PM. I sent one just before the change, the attachments got lost, now I'm trying to resend and can't see how to select and attach files. What icon does this? Am I blind?
 

Ethereal Dragon

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
2,005
560
more forum style options would be great... the default and the dark with yellow just aren't good nuff for me. Rather they're bland and boring.
 

karunama

Well-Known Member
Apr 17, 2016
443
222
I have to admit I'm not a huge fan. The biggest issue is that it isn't as obvious which threads have been updated as it used to be. I saw something about blue dots mentioned, but i hadn't even noticed them. I actually hit the 'mark all read' button in the hopes that it would make the new stuff more obvious afterwards.
 

Tinman

Well-Known Member
Aug 30, 2015
777
233
I have to admit I'm not a huge fan. The biggest issue is that it isn't as obvious which threads have been updated as it used to be. I saw something about blue dots mentioned, but i hadn't even noticed them. I actually hit the 'mark all read' button in the hopes that it would make the new stuff more obvious afterwards.

The blue dots are small, but you can find them right next to the thread's title. If you click on them directly, they also bring you straight to the latest unread post in a thread.
 

Ormael

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2015
6,631
1,786
I have to admit I'm not a huge fan. The biggest issue is that it isn't as obvious which threads have been updated as it used to be. I saw something about blue dots mentioned, but i hadn't even noticed them. I actually hit the 'mark all read' button in the hopes that it would make the new stuff more obvious afterwards.

Here I made SS with those blue dots so you would see where to look for them ^^

blue dots.jpg
 

Nik_van_Rijn

Well-Known Member
Sep 10, 2015
2,415
506
Moscow, RF
The biggest issue is that it isn't as obvious which threads have been updated as it used to be. I saw something about blue dots mentioned, but i hadn't even noticed them.
Those blue dots are pretty small, but the topic's title also becomes yellow, which should be hard to miss.
 

Coalsack

Well-Known Member
Aug 28, 2015
642
272
29
I kinda like this new forum. My only issue is the lack of a dislike option, to...balance things a little.
 

karunama

Well-Known Member
Apr 17, 2016
443
222
I did manage to get used to the new forum as far as seeing what I have and haven't read yet, so that's good, (and thanks to everyone that posted helpful messages) but the 'mark all read' is problematic. In particular, if you make a forum as read (like Other Adult Games) it also marks everything in the subforums as read as well (like Showcase). And before anyone asked, I made certain it was on Other Adult Games Only, and the stuff in this forum and others was untouched. That said, showcase, which had been unread was also marked as read anyway.
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
Turns out the AD styler added an extra permission set that needed to be enabled. So that should show up now.

I think I spied an option to change a bunch of stuff into icons somewhere, I'll see if it can do anything with the new-post icon thing and possible change its colour.
 

shadefalcon

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2015
1,661
983
Best way to get old forum color scheme back? Anyone know what shades I should use?
 

Couch

Scientist
Creator
Aug 26, 2015
1,626
922
One weird thing I've noticed is that when browsing on mobile, the page needs to be refreshed on first visit to actually update. I don't know if this is a fault on the forum's end or on Android's.
 

Tinman

Well-Known Member
Aug 30, 2015
777
233
One weird thing I've noticed is that when browsing on mobile, the page needs to be refreshed on first visit to actually update. I don't know if this is a fault on the forum's end or on Android's.

That's probably on Android's end. They updated Chrome a couple months ago and it's had a lot of similar issues ever since.
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
Couch inspired me to list off my grievances with the new forum. :p Sorry in advance for my whining.

Notifications are totally screwed. There's literally no point in following specific users, it does nothing other than make them slightly more prominent when they're online (EDIT: Scratch that, it seems to shovel all the activity of the users you follow into your "news feed" as opposed to giving you alerts/notifications like it did before. Still not as good, but it does have a purpose), and every single thread you reply to seems to be followed in a weird hit-and-miss way. Like it's followed for some nondescript period of time after a reply. Watched threads also only sometimes send me alerts, and, for some reason, they also send me emails. But only sometimes.

E-Mail alerts are an option. Alerts in general are designed to be less granular than IPB ever was, and is imo a good thing; you'll only be alerted to the first new thing that happens to anything watched until you go look at that thing- it won't tell you more new things have happened in the interim.

I always thought following users was something orthogonal to the purpose of a forum in the first place, and the only reason IPB could do it is because IPB wasn't really a forum suite.

Also, alerts no longer have an audio cue, and aren't tied into the Google notification system like they were before. Add that to the fact that they're also hit-and-miss in terms of actually updating on their own, and I'm forced to constantly refresh the page to see any activity whatsoever.

If this is because of some kind of setting I need to go fix, I'd love to know. I went and looked, but I couldn't find anything that looked like it would solve my problems.

The sounds and desktop notifications were an additional plugin for IPB. In practice it didn't work as well as you think it probably did; the system had a habit of losing sync and at some point you'd have to refresh the page to get new notifications anyway.

Also, transparent background avatars have said transparency force-filled by one of the color presets for some reason, and that bugs the crap out of me. Weh.

Part of the display options for the theme is to force avatars into shapes (like circles etc). I presume the fill colour is a part of that.

PM conversations are jacked up as well, allowing editing of PM's only immediately after posting it and only the most recent PM. If you navigate away and come back, you have no editing options. Also, all of my conversations are listed as being "With: IVIysterious Person" for some reason, and I can't see who else is part of it unless I go in and look, which makes sorting my various conversations from the drop down menu impossible (admittedly, it's mostly my fault for titling almost all of my conversations some variant of "Hi!" but that wasn't a problem on the old forums, when I titled them).

imo Conversations are not general forum posts, and giving people the ability to edit a direct conversation message long after the fact is a mistake. The settings right now are XF defaults; you have 5 minutes to edit a conversation message, and that seems fair to me. You get 5 minutes to fix a fuckup after you smash send, but after that it's set in stone.

The title issue could simply be related to importing old data from IPB. Mine all seem fine though so.

The layout it also much less space efficient, with a lot of thread titles being cut off, and the prominence of the New Posts sidebar has been greatly diminished (why is the members box above it? There's a bunch of empty space below the forum listings, it should go back down there). I don't get why there's so much empty space between subforum titles and the latest posts other than I assume the latest posts thing was right-justified by default without any margins or padding.

The old layout was fucked, XF is actually making far better use of my screen space. Titles being cut off tells me you're either using massive zoom or a tiny screen. I'd say this is more a you-problem than an XF-problem; I can't see a single title being cut off when using a 960 px wide browser window at default zoom.

There are very few options for the sidebar layout. I can turn things on or off easily, that's about it. I'll have to edit the actual raw templates to change the order of things, and I've simply not got around to doing it. I'd prefer the old kind of layout back for new posts and such, but I don't care enough to spend multiple hours hackjobbing the templates to make it happen.

The one thing I really want to sort is the subforum category listing. It does take up too much space, but right now the only option will change the layout of those things across the entire forum. I want to mix and match and use a traditional list for the main index, but use a dynamic grid for the subcategories once looking inside a category.

Also, there seems to be no option to mark individual subforums as read, only the entirety of the site, which is a feature I really miss. I used that a lot.

You can do everything below your current view of the forums. If you're sat in the TiTS subcategory and then smash mark forums as read in the menu, then you'll get an option to do the current subcategory or the entire forum. At any rate its kind of irrelevent as XF only tracks viewed threads for 30 days- anything older than that will be automatically marked as read.

I've seen a few people mention problems with signatures, which is kind of a big deal for this kind of forum, where most Creators have a signature that points to a content thread or something similar. Having those disabled by default is pretty shitty.

The default setting was to hide signatures entirely for guests. As far as I'm aware everything else should be working???

There's probably more, but that's all I could list off the top of my head. All in all, my experience with the new forums has been terrible in comparison to the old one. Everything about the new stuff seems significantly less intuitive and user-friendly.

lol, these forums are about 8x less bullshit than IPB, just because it doesn't have the exact feature set you care about doesn't make them terrible come the fuck on
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
lol, these forums are about 8x less bullshit than IPB, just because it doesn't have the exact feature set you care about doesn't make them terrible come the fuck on

*tries to quote post, doesn't end up with 17 nested quote blocks that refuse to be deleted* GUYS XENFORO IS TERRIBLE FUCK THIS
 

Etis

Well-Known Member
Creator
Aug 26, 2015
2,500
257
BTW, about avatars. The auto-resize messes them up badly. Browser-resized into 96x96 and converted to 96x96 by forum are dramatically different.
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
I didn't mean the forum itself was terrible, I meant that my personal experience with it has been terrible, which could be for a number of reasons (like the potential hardware issue mentioned above or my own brainfarts). That statement probably came off stronger than I intended, sorry.

Seriously though, it took a lot of fucking about to get IPB into the state it was, and it had a lot of problems although granted many of them were away from the public eye so to speak.

IPB itself is actually designed to be used as a collection of different applications, the forum being only one aspect of that. The driving force behind them dropping the wysiwyg editor was to support rich text pastes from different parts of the system; you could copy text directly from another post and the idea was it would carry the information required to be turned into a quote when you pasted it into the message box, but this applied to many different components of the system. If the rich text editor wasn't a sack of shit, it would have been one thing, but the system actually had about 8 or 9 times as many templates & style settings required for a forum because sub-portions of the forum had to be displayable outside of the context of the forum itself.

In a similar fashion to copying a part of a post as pasting it into the forum message box would give you a post-quote, you could also paste it into a blog post in the CMS-portion of IPB and get a direct, formatted quote that would open a flyout tab, the style of which was controlled by the forum in your blog post. Those same templates got used in a lot of places, and none of the style and theme settings were really very good at handling changes across all of them. For a good while there were flyouts and popovers that were still the default IPB forum style even though the rest of the forum was the dark-gray/orange.

The text format was used everywhere though; including in the fucking admin panel, and I never bothered to actually try and sort that out. So for the entire time we were using IPB, anything in the admin panel was barely readable because it was a default-white background with light-gray text :negativeman:

So far I've basically done nothing to XF short of slamming a theme on it and changing a few colour settings quickly, and it's about 90% as "good" right now as IPB was after I spent probably a months worth of spare time fiddling all the templates and modifying stuff.
 

Void Director

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2015
198
6
The new forum software won't let me edit my Index of Game's in development post anymore because it is too long. Anyway to get around that limit?
 

Noob Salad

Captain Shitpost
Aug 26, 2015
4,374
1,560
Should have used vBulletin, lol.

I'll show myself out.

EDIT: Do you think we could get the ability to edit thread titles?
 
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poiuygtyu

Member
Mar 26, 2016
24
2
Not sure if you can do anything about this, but it seems like when i search for something on here, which I do because looking is work, google still tries to send me to the old site. Kinda annoying but not that big of a deal, to me at least.
 

Gedan

BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS
Staff member
Aug 26, 2015
8,008,896
8,008,326
Search engine results will eventually sort themselves out, there isn't much I can realistically do about it other than to wait.
 
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