New Overwatch Forum FAQ

General Discussion
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New Forum FAQ

Since the weekend is coming around a lot of us are just getting off work with a couple day’s respite from daily work, school, or whatever your obligations are, and so I’m sure that there will be a large influx of new folks who want to get their post on without the hassle of learning it all themselves.

Hi, I’m linkdude, by the way. I’m going to try and help everyone a little bit here and hopefully we can all clear up each other’s questions and make better forum content as a result.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I would like to ask everyone reading this to read “Welcome to General Discussion!” and the “Code of Conduct” as some rules have changed.

To view the quoted post without leaving this topic, click the expand button. This will allow you to preview the quoted text in this thread.

To leave this thread and visit the topic directly, just click the “Welcome to General Discussion - Please Read!”, and it will jump you to the topic.

Below are some Q and A styled items that you can expand by clicking the “>” (play) button.

Q. What is this place?

A. This is the new Overwatch forum, obviously. There are a lot of improvements to the system as a whole so hopefully you like it!

Q. Why did they make a new forum?

A. The previous forum was highly restrictive in what it could do. On the old platform there really wasn’t much short of a complete overhaul that was going to get us a better system. The new system is based off of Discourse as far as anyone can tell, and it’s got several features that put it ahead of the curve in regards to the old forum.

Q. What are some of the new features?

A. Because this a Discourse based, there is a lot of social connectivity. I’d like to go over some of the basics. (Continued below)


Notifications

This is a big one we were really missing out on in the old system.

Basically in the old forum, we really didn’t get anything saying “hey somebody likes what you said” or “somebody replied to you”, so there wasn’t ever a sense of being connected to the content.

What the Overwatch team has done is, with the Discourse system, basically made it so that anything that happens on the forum related to you or something that you posted (for instance, we’re supposed to have @name-mentions so if I said something like @RichC it would notify him that he has been mentioned in my post).

So people can reply to you, quote your post, or like your post and you will be notified. I think likes are only the first person to like your post notifies you. That’s what I’ve experienced anyways.

The short list of notifications is available by clicking your portrait in the top right of the window, and a list of notifications will be presented via dropdown window.

A longer list is present either by clicking the Cog/Gear icon in the same dropdown and going to your “Activity” page or by going to the front page of General Discussion and using the categories present there (Unread, New should be pretty obvious what that means)

Pinning

We can pin posts now for our own viewing purposes.

Pinned topics appear at the top of the discussion pile.

Newcomers have the developer announcements pinned by default.

As a default setting (at least starting out, someone may correct me on this), pinned topics become un-pinned when you read the full discussion.

For instance if you were to pin a topic, then scroll to the bottom, it would actually un-pin from there.

This is a user setting and can be turned off by clicking on your Portrait in the upper right (mine is Cute Mercy ATM), then clicking on the Cog/Gear icon that appears in the top-right of the dropdown.

This will take you to your user preferences page. You can then go into the “Interface” category and manually uncheck “Automatically unpin topics when I reach the bottom”. This setting my be a stumbling block for newcomers.

Bookmarking

You can also bookmark posts too.

This will allow you quick (well, sorta) access to posts of interest at any time.

If you find a post that you want to bookmark, you can do that by clicking the dropdown arrow at the upper right of the post (for instance, this one if you just want to try it out). Then, you click Bookmark.

What this does is (obviously) bookmarks the post. To get back to it, you select your portrait at the top right and click the Bookmark icon (next to the Cog/Gear icon) in the dropdown.

This will take you to a list of your bookmarks where you can click on the post you want to view again, reference back to, or whatever.

It’s not as immediate as pinning, which is always on the front page of General Discussion unless it gets un-pinned, but it is more or less permanent, for those of you who want to keep the “Automatically unpin topics when I reach the bottom” setting on.

Trust System

You may hear people talking about the trust system from time to time while on the new forum.

Basically Discourse (at base), keeps track of your community standing and gives you incremental rewards and features that you can unlock as you become an upstanding member of the community.

If you behave, and post quality content, you progress to new levels of authority in the forum community. For instance, a Novice (someone completely new to the forum) might only be able to like 10 times a day, but a Regular (someone who has read and posted enough to be upgraded to the next level) may be able to like up to 15 times a day. (Yes, a likes limit is a thing)

For more information regarding the Discourse trust system, I highly reccomend checking out @Rico’s post, which contains a full link to the Discourse meta wiki:

So basically, we get rewarded for being good to one another. Exciting!

It may also be possible to check your trust level, as shown in this informative post by Clumsy:

Markdown

For users who want to post more advanced content, Markdown formatting is supported.

This lets us create tables and headers in our posts as well as creating lists et cetera.

You could just look it up yourself, but for those so inclined I have also put together a copy and paste set of source code for placing Markdown formatted code in your posts.

Use at your leisure:

HTML

Much like Markdown, a small subset HTML is also supported.

I assume (?) that eventually some of us who gain more trust will be able to post in a richer subset of HTML, but for now, you can refer to the cheat sheet of HTML that a fellow poster by the name of Dr4gon97 made (below)

Click the “>” (play) button to expand the list of HTML elements.

Emoji

You can quickly type in Emoji using autocompletion by encapsulating a word in colons.

For instance

:wink:

is simply

:wink:

Those are just some of the new features, feel free to add if you can remember some.

Q. How do I quote?

A. You can quote multiple ways.

You can click the reply button, and in the comment editor at the top-left there will be a quote bubble. That is a quick way to quote a full post which I honestly don’t reccomend.

To quickly quote just a section of a post (highly reccomended, faster for me on both mobile and PC!) highlight a section of a post and click the “Quote” window that pops up.

This will automatically place the quote code into the comment editor window. This also saves some space in your post because if you only partially quote a post, it will only put the text that you are quoting in your post, and users visiting your post can expand the quote to see the full text, OR they can navigate to the thread you are quoting, much like I have done here.

This makes for a cleaner forum experience overall.

To get this to another topic, the most reliable way that I have found is to directly cut the entire quote text code to my clipboard and paste the code in the other thread.

This will also place a link in the thread you place the quote in which notifies people that the contents of that post have been source to another topic.

This is illustrated by the “Chain link” icon that is seen just after the first post in a topic. (Hopefully that all makes sense!)

You can see this more on developer threads, they’re more fluent than the populous here, but we’ll get there!

Q. Can we post links?

A. We can post links to other discussions internal to the Overwatch forums by quoting a post, and pasting the quote in another thread (see: “How do I quote?”)

For external links, that is a trust privilage (see New Features → Trust System)

You can, post a non-clickable link by either prepending 4 spaces to the line the link is on

https://www.google.com

Or in the comment editor window clicking the “Preformatted Text” </> button

There is a workaround currently (credit, @Jamster Profile - Jamster-1142 - Overwatch Forums), which allows you to post links embedded in an HTML <code></code> tag, like this:

https://www.google.com

Source:

<code>https://www.google.com</code>
Q. How do I post an image?

A. That is a trust privilage (see New Features → Trust System)

For those of you who were here day one… we lost the site-wide privilage a few hours in.

Related post by @ClumsyLee:

Actually, in yet another workaround described by @Jamster Profile - Jamster-1142 - Overwatch Forums, we are seemingly able to post most images inside of <code></code> blocks. The implication is that if you don’t have the trust to post something, seemingly the code block circumvents that.

Example:
alt text

Q. No Dislikes?

A. Please instead of posting here, or creating a new topic, just go to the Mega below (I don’t want this to be shut down)

Suffice to say that it was partly due to toxicity, partly due to the migration to Discourse, more information here:

Hopefully that clears up some of the basic questions for newcomers.

I’m sure there will still be some but I hope to get the basic questions down to a minimum.

Have a great night!

29 Likes
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Thank you so much for your effort! I have also dug into the trust levels a little bit (deeper than the post you mentioned):

Edit: @linkdude240 Thanks for the suggestion, I cleared it up a little bit!

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Wow, Clumsy, you’ve outdone yourself!

If you don’t mind though, could I ask you to shorten up the quoted text a little bit (sorry!) maybe to just the first four or so lines?

That way people coming into here don’t have to read it entirely to get to the rest of the discussion?

EDIT: Looks great :heart_eyes:

You’ve been a huge help so far, and I thank you for the effort in answering the questions! This really will clear a lot up for people wondering what their current trust level is!

Well done!

Edit:

I also edited my post to add your trust system checking; let me know if you want me to remove it!

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I never would have found that setting about pinned topics, because it never would have occurred to me to look. Thank you!

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Glad to be of help! :smile:

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Wait you need to give likes to gain trust?

I’m normally less inclined to give likes… Ah well no time like the present to start now

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Also quick question how did you do the Q&A dropdown thingy

1 Like
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It depends on how the forum has been set up. That’s a benchmark that Blizzard could employ if they wanted to. It doesn’t mean they’ve used it, though.

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Not taking any chances, have a like…

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You should also mention that we can reply to individual posts now, notifying the user and creating an expandable view of their post - this is what makes fully quoting obsolete.

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Doc, Please read this!

Hi there, Doc!

[details="Doc, Please read this!"]
Hi there, Doc!
[/details]

That was partly there in the quote section, but I have elaborated on the quoting navigation and expanding per your request!

Thanks for the idea!

2 Likes
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Thank you for making this. This is very helpful.

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Not at all a problem.

I’m adding to it all the time… hopefully it helps!

:blush:

1 Like
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Wow, great job consolidating most of our new forum FAQs in a post, I also wanted to notify you that I tried to make a better list than the one on your thread you can find it @ https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/forum-html-tutorial/7399

2 Likes
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Cool, thanks!

I would like to quote that in the post, in place of the quote I’m currently using, if I may have your permission?

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Yeah, no problem! 

1 Like
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Edited, thanks!

Great post by the way!

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How do I know I’m eligible for the forum perks? Do I just quietly and suddenly become able to post links and images? Do I get a pop up message saying “Congratulations, you can now include videos in your posts”? Do I get all perks once I meet a certain threshold or do I unlock them one by one? Or is it all classified information? And how do I see one’s trust level? I’m actually very confused about the forum perks.

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Currently, the only way to view (what we presume is) your trust level, you have to manually view the database record by requesting your profile’s .json dump, and searching for the keyword “trust” in that document. (See: “Trust System” and @ClumsyLee 's related post [below])

Much like @ClumsyLee 's topic title, you have to take this all with a grain of salt.

We’re all just forumgoers like you!

However, we can make informed inferences based on the platform this forum is based off of (Discourse) as well as some of the investigations that posters like @Dr4gon97 and @ClumsyLee have presented.

Be patient! Some of these features may be a few months out.

I imagine that they’ll start giving us sneak peeks sometime, but no guarantees!

I’m just in the dark as you are, but hopefully that patches some holes of information that weren’t filled during the migration!

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Also shameless Plugin to my thread.
Which details how to post images and do markdown tables

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/public-service-announcements/715
Can use mark down? Linkdude420 Doc
Yes X
No X

Shameless copy paste to let me study how it works.