Official: Forum Revamp

[Wrathbringer]

Category consolidation basically. There's maybe 1/3 of the categories still on the forums now.

Not impressed.

[Donquix]

it doesn't even seem like that many less topics. they just added another top layer of categorization? Great use of time guys.

[khorpulent]

Right now it just looks like they deleted all historical posts so that nobody can see what a lousy job they do with development and customer feedback. The only conclusion I can draw is that Alastir is now the moderator over there.

[gilchristr]

Forum consolidation would have been good back in AOL days. At $3.50 an hour, you needed to be careful.

[Taernath]

Some extra insight as to why the officials are so shitty:

>>I hope the forum revamp doesn't entail losing history of old messages. The loss of thousands of ideas (good or bad) and questions (answered or otherwise) and great stories posted by players would be tragic.

All those posts are still there. Nothing was "deleted", per say. Just out of view without having a certain account access.

On that note, or at least very related to it, there's a hard-coded part of the forum software where messages already "decay" after X amount of time and are no longer view-able by customers. This decay timer used to be changeable for each category/topic, and then there was an update--that was quite a few years ago--where it was no longer possible to change it from the default. It's actually been so long ago that I forget what the default timer was; my best guess is ~900 days.

So even if the forums hadn't gone through a revamp, eventually there would have been a time where messages would have decayed and been lost from view. This is why we've always tried to recommend saving messages to other areas, such as the wiki.

One of the major concerns that sparked the need for a forum revamp was already complaints/concerns from brand new, returning, or current players that information wasn't easily found on the forums in its previous state. Too much time was spent, and frustration generated, from having to wade through thousands of posts to find useful information in a timely manner.


~Aulis
Platinum Co-Guru
Forums Manager
QC'er

Once messages hit the ~2.5 year mark, they're hidden and even the GMs can't figure out how to stop it. What an absolute joke.

[Viekn]

Once messages hit the ~2.5 year mark, they're hidden and even the GMs can't figure out how to stop it. What an absolute joke.

I get they've got their own issues with how big a deal it would be for them to have to change the officials because of legacy systems they're tied to, but at this point they probably need to consider taking that project on, no matter how big a headache it is for them. You can say what you want about development, but the official forums are an embarrassment. I get the game is from the late 80's, it doesn't mean your forums should still be.

[Gelston]

They should just update to newer software. They won't because it is so important that it interfaces with billing for some reason.

[Taernath]

They should just update to newer software. They won't because it is so important that it interfaces with billing for some reason.

It's about control, and I get it. If someone has a meltdown and violates TOS by, say, impersonating people and calling everyone a cunt, you want to be able to handle that guy at the source. Or if someone has a billing issue the GM can just glance at their username and know know which account to look up.

There HAS to be a way to have that control and use a new/updated system that has basic forum features. Use vBulletin and make people register with play.net addresses, I dunno. Fuck.

[Gelston]

It's about control, and I get it. If someone has a meltdown and violates TOS by, say, impersonating people and calling everyone a cunt, you want to be able to handle that guy at the source. Or if someone has a billing issue the GM can just glance at their username and know know which account to look up.

There HAS to be a way to have that control and use a new/updated system that has basic forum features. Use vBulletin and make people register with play.net addresses, I dunno. Fuck.

I mean, ESO manages it just fine. I imagine they aren't spending millions of dollars on their forums. Simu is just being super, duper cheap.

[Mikalmas]

This just doesn't make sense or add up. I was on the Simutronics folder last week (one I never read), and there were still readable posts from as far back as 2001 on there. I read a bunch of them. So yeah, that excuse just doesn't fly.