PlaneShift
Support => Forum and Website Discussions => Topic started by: PClark on December 02, 2005, 09:37:58 am
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My Suggestion, take it as a suggestion:
Get rid of the Subject Icons. Honestly no one looks at them, and it just adds more clutter to the forum listings. One is good, to provide status of the post, but a little subject icon is not nessecary.
Suggestion: Remove small subject icon, and have status icon twice as large, and fill up the space.
Servers Up/Downtime
Servers or mirrors availability announcements
That doesn\'t seem like a very good title for a forum.
How about
Server Support?
The forum doesn\'t seem like it is just a simple place where users can see the CURRENT server up/downtimes. If your going to make it a server announcement, then it should just be a forum for only moderators to post the server status at the time. This would make it very easy to see the server status. The top post would just be the newest status.Good place to post maintiance schedules and avalibility.
What else...
There should be a space between Mac OSX. It\'s not one word.
I think you can remove the \"EXPERIMENTAL\" from the off-topic forum, seeing how it has about 1000 posts.
Comments like these \" If you ask a question that has already been answered 100 times, be prepared to be ignored.\" in the description are not helpful, and don\'t give the forum a professional look.
Please report bugs to http://planeshift3d.com/bugtracker/
This should be an annoucement in the forum. I had to really look to find this. It should be an annoucement at the top so that people can easily find it. You\'d be surprised how many people don\'t read the description on forums.
There is no need to have UPDATER capitalized in the first Tech forum description.
I think that\'s enough commenting. I really don\'t mean to sound like a bitch about the nit picky stuff, but this can make the difference whether your program gets a second look. Most people will check out the website first to see how maintained it is, is it worth my time, and is the program still alive. These few suggestions might help the community display a more professional attitude.
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In all honesty, we don\'t want the BugTracker page to be any easyer to find... I\'d much rather have the messy, poorly informed, panic attacks here than on BugTracker. :/
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I don\'t really mind most of the suggestions, except the BT one DaveG has commented on already, and the \"be prepared to be ignored\". This should not only stay there, but be made an EULA-like thing that people have to agree to. Stay a while and see for yourself how valuable the 100th re-post of the same old, beaten-to-death topic is, simply because yet another person thinks that they were the first to ever think of something ridiculously obvious like having armor show on the char...
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Originally posted by PClark
Get rid of the Subject Icons. Honestly no one looks at them, and it just adds more clutter to the forum listings. One is good, to provide status of the post, but a little subject icon is not nessecary.
Suggestion: Remove small subject icon, and have status icon twice as large, and fill up the space.
Yeah, especially the angry faces. As if caps-ridden posts coming from unsatisfied player weren\'t annoying enough, you have the angst smiley there to boost up the mood ;)
I think during my stay here, I used one of those icons only once.
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It\'s true, the website is the first thing I check. If it looks dead, I\'m more likely to assume the rest of the stuff is.
And to me, updating the forum titles is very important, else it looks like the Admins don\'t care about upkeep, which makes me wonder how wild the board is.
I won\'t miss the graphic smilies by the topic, never use them ;). Except for that axe one you guys have.
This is not nit-picking, it\'s as you say, making the board look more professional, which in turn would spark intrest in the game.
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Originally posted by Seytra
I don\'t really mind most of the suggestions, except the BT one DaveG has commented on already, and the \"be prepared to be ignored\". This should not only stay there, but be made an EULA-like thing that people have to agree to. Stay a while and see for yourself how valuable the 100th re-post of the same old, beaten-to-death topic is, simply because yet another person thinks that they were the first to ever think of something ridiculously obvious like having armor show on the char...
That is what moderators are for. It still doesn\'t justify loosing the proffesionalism of the forum. Moderators are supposed to be actively informing a person. You say that you have 100 posts of the same stuff...Why not merge them all together. Another simple tool is just be helpful. There are going to be dumb people on the forum, that simlpy would like help.
Here\'s example
-How do you kill monster in this game?
The Response should either be a link to another intelligent post, or to a SECTION in the users manual to where it states information. The worst thing you can do is yell at the guy about not searching the forum. Searching the forum is sometimes hard, depending on your search methods.
If your going to have a forum, your going to have the same problems as all the other forums.
Take for example. forums.gentoo.org.
They have millions of posts, and tens of thousands of people on it, and it still manages to be one of the best linux support forums around.
Forums can get messy, but thats why moderators organize things.
I count 8 \"Importants\" in each support forum. I understand the need for \"sticky\" posts but 8 is a tremendous amount.
Oh a solution to your \"have them search first problem\". Put a search bar on every single screen. Even a simple \"Search First:\" will remind users to search. Leaving a little button for searching, makes it a option..you want it to be so avaliable that people will use it alot.
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I don\'t really mind most of the suggestions, except the BT one DaveG has commented on already, and the \"be prepared to be ignored\". This should not only stay there, but be made an EULA-like thing that people have to agree to. Stay a while and see for yourself how valuable the 100th re-post of the same old, beaten-to-death topic is, simply because yet another person thinks that they were the first to ever think of something ridiculously obvious like having armor show on the char...
OK then why is it called Newbie Help?
The message you are getting at is that if someone else has had the same trouble before, a new person should either wait to post a question till he/she has been around long enough to figure out how the forum works, or figure it out yourself. If a person stays around and figures out the forums he/she is no longer a newbie. What about the just regular people? I understand that it would take a patient person to moderate those forums, someone who doesnt mind answering the same question several times, but that is no reason to deny help to someone just because 30 other people have already had the same trouble.
In short don\'t call something newbie help unless the moderators of the forum are prepared to deal with newbies.
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Originally posted by Induane
I don\'t really mind most of the suggestions, except the BT one DaveG has commented on already, and the \"be prepared to be ignored\". This should not only stay there, but be made an EULA-like thing that people have to agree to. Stay a while and see for yourself how valuable the 100th re-post of the same old, beaten-to-death topic is, simply because yet another person thinks that they were the first to ever think of something ridiculously obvious like having armor show on the char...
OK then why is it called Newbie Help?
The message you are getting at is that if someone else has had the same trouble before, a new person should either wait to post a question till he/she has been around long enough to figure out how the forum works, or figure it out yourself. If a person stays around and figures out the forums he/she is no longer a newbie. What about the just regular people? I understand that it would take a patient person to moderate those forums, someone who doesnt mind answering the same question several times, but that is no reason to deny help to someone just because 30 other people have already had the same trouble.
In short don\'t call something newbie help unless the moderators of the forum are prepared to deal with newbies.
Agreed.....
Maybe a forum overhaul is in order? Moderators need to be a little bit more progessive when it comes to forum changes and evolution. There are irrelavent sticky posts, that clog up the top of some of the forums. I have already reported one to the moderators, even though \"reporting\" is stated for spam and other stuff....
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If you can offer suggestions to \"modernize\" the forums, they all deserve to be heard :) And the reported sticky has been taken care of. These boards do not allow thread merging however, so the only solution for thread repeats is a link to a previously made and expanded upon thread, and a close, which is what is done more often than not.
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Request to change title of post to more relevant title.
I.E. Forum Suggestions?
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*edit* Misread and misunderstood :) Changed.
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Originally posted by PClark
Get rid of the Subject Icons. Honestly no one looks at them, and it just adds more clutter to the forum listings. One is good, to provide status of the post, but a little subject icon is not nessecary.
Suggestion: Remove small subject icon, and have status icon twice as large, and fill up the space.
A bit tricky since will require some code changes. Will check it out.
Servers Up/Downtime
Servers or mirrors availability announcements
That doesn\'t seem like a very good title for a forum.
How about
Server Support?
Renamed.
There should be a space between Mac OSX. It\'s not one word.
I think you can remove the \"EXPERIMENTAL\" from the off-topic forum, seeing how it has about 1000 posts.
There is no need to have UPDATER capitalized in the first Tech forum description.
Fixed
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Originally posted by Karyuu
These boards do not allow thread merging however
I know this software does, so either an upgrade is needed or it\'s disabled for one reason or another. Getting this feature working might be a good idea.
Here\'s an idea: Automatically delete all threads created using the angry face smiley... They\'re always completely useless... :rolleyes:
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The boards used at the moment are a 1.2 version, while a 2.1 (and possibly even newer) should be available.
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Yep. I\'m just too lazy to check what version the merge feature was added. ;)
no longer an issue since we are using new forums for awhile now. -- neko
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I\'ve talked about this with acraig. To get the new version requires the shelling out of some serious cash which I\'m not sure the PS team is interested in. I personally would love to see the upgrade, but I understand that the PS team isn\'t made of money.
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Yep, not the biggest of deals.
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Well, how much cash are we talking about? If it isn\'t really that much couldn\'t we hold a drive to get the money? Something with paypal as donation method - I\'d donate what I could though I\'m poor and it wouldn\'t be much :(
Also, I was spending some time thinking about the Newbie Help Forum board and didn\'t really know who to ask, but if it would help I would be more than happy to help moderate that forum. I try to check in there from time to time, but if I were a mod there that would motivate me to spend some time htere every day, and help where I could. But if I\'m not wanted :( ..... ;) Just my 2.37 Cents.
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No, we don\'t need to raise money for this thing. An open-source/freeware solution could be found, or we can just keep what\'s here now. It works quite fine, as-is.
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Burning Board 2.3.3 license prices start with 25 Euro (29$) and end with 199 Euro (233$). The cheapest one does not give access to future updates and the most expensive one gives lifetime access to any updates.
What if the community buys a license and donates it to the Planeshift development team?
An open source alternative would be phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com). It is known as a popular target for hackers (I know it from my own experiences), but otherwise does the same than Burning Board.
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PS isn\'t changing boards. That\'s been pretty much decided and I understand why; it would be a colossal effort and a mess to boot. I\'d love to see an update, but I don\'t know if the team would even accept donations of $233 (they\'d probably want life-time updates...).