A question that I doubt we'll get answered is when will features such as PM/contact other users be back? Any forum software in the past 10 years has more than this forum does by a mile in way of feature set. Marimaccadmin I appreciate what you do to answer questions in the FB group (Gencon Indy) but so far these new forums are a dud.
Perhaps we should start a change.org petition to getthe old forums back :)
I'm kidding!
I think it's an awful decision since there are "off the shelf" forum solutions available. The costs involved in developing and supporting a custom solution is going to dwarf the cost of buying an already available option.
You know, like that part in Peter Pan when Tinkerbell dies and you have to keep saying how you believe in fairies so she'll come back to life... it's like that.... just keep telling yourself how awesome these are until you actually buy it.
Well, at least they are like the old forums, in one key respect; you can always count on dballing to be a smart ass. :)
As I've said in several places, features such as PMs, avatars, and others are being worked on. I'm going to be honest; I did not expect as many people to be upset about not having avatars at first as we have, but apparently people used those to quickly ID certain posters. So I had initially said that I didn't think that was a huge priority. Clearly I was wrong about that, and I asked for it to be moved up in priority, but I really don't know when that can be completed. I'm not a programmer. I will say that the past few weeks the Dev team has been concerned with making sure housing was stable, and I absolutely think that was a success, and agree completely that issue is a higher priority than the forums.
I can certainly add that to this list, I would imagine that's a pretty simple fix, but again, I'm not a programmer.
I wouldn't gripe about these nearly so much if I could just keep using the other ones to at least contact people. Yes, I have a dozen other complaints about these forums.
Complaints:
1) Cannot contact people via the forums itself 2) Cannot list unread posts 3) Don't see a way to put in tags 4) Can't stay logged in 5) No faces to names 6) No group forums 7) No way to email people 8) I have an older computer, and the other forums worked just fine on my little itty bitty vista computer. These do not work at all. Yes, this one is minor, but just sayin 9) There was a way there to hop to last unread in a post don't see it here. And yes, that is different than just having a list of posts that contain unread postings.
Likes: 1) It's on the site itself.
Additional problems: 1) Username seems to accept anything 3-40 chars. (Entering 40 chars or Arabic chars distresses marimaccadmin :) ) 2) The focus on the search box at page load messes up using the arrows keys on a desktop, and scrolls to the search box on android Firefox even when the last post link is used. 3) The new post text area captures the right click and also prevents the spell check built into the Firefox and Chrome browsers.
Just noticed: 1) After updating a post, that page loads the first post it the thread. I'd be more intuitive to load the post that was updated.
Anyone with bugs/requests/suggestions should go create threads in the Tech Support forum, since that's where they've asked us to put them. Hopefully it will also help folks chime in on how they use the forums, as we all use a different set of features.
I also reported the bug for editing a post returning you to the first page; ran into it a week and change ago. At first I thought it ate my edit. :)
I ended up hiding the thread search box with custom CSS. It doesn't need to be there all the time and, as mentioned, it messes up keyboard scrolling. I rarely need to search a single thread vs. searching a forum/multiple forums (another thing that isn't implemented).
I really think it's funny that they're using Unicode user names but are calling strtolower/tolower/lcase/etc. on them without a comprehensive locale, leaving characters outside the Basic Latin block uppercase. My guess is that it's a buggy attempt to prevent duplicate names that are different by only case; it should use the lowercase version for the compare but store the name as given. You can work around it using higher characters if you really care. In any event, I think it's good that they accept characters outside 7-bit ASCII.
Edit: Posted my custom CSS at userstyles.org: Gen Con Forums (2015) Cleanup.
This is my first Gencon and my first time in the Gencon forums....I honestly thought they just hadnt updated the forums in 10 years along with the color scheme. Is there no way to contact someone directly in these forums?
Perfect! You are awesome!!!
Thanks Parody! Works like a charm.
Lots of good suggestions here - but it is shocking that anyone would attempt to write forum software from scratch when there are off the shelf products, both free and commercial.
There is no nice way to say this, but I'm trying to be constructuve. As an IT professional and web developer, I consider building a forum from scratch to be grave professional malpractice. There is simply no way it can be cost effective or lead to a superior result to build forum software from scratch.
Please reconsider this approach, and implement an off the shelf forum with entry stakes features like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
You know what? You guys are more than welcome to apply:
https://www.glassdoor.com/Job/information-technology-director-jobs-SRCH_KO0,31.htm