No one cares about the preview pane, use a WYSIWYG FFS. It’s 2019.
Typography is bad. Thin fonts are 2012, fix it.
And so on.
In case you don’t know what I’m getting at, the new forums are just using Discourse forum software that has been reskinned with a few bells/whistles for Blue tracking and adds some good modern features but removes core Forum conventions and features from the old. Basically, it’s a lazy way for the web team to “update” their old forums.
try[dot]discourse[dot]org
EDIT: Check replies before asking questions on this, FFS. Also, all the issues listed can be fixed. Ignoring them does nothing be promote “Blizzard is infallible and you have no right to disagree”
I agree, it’s incredibly lazy for blizzard to outsource their website code to someone else. You run into pretty large problems like not being able to tweek the service how you want it (blizzard expresso g interest in an ignore feature for example…cant do that unless the discourse guys program it first).
Navigation is combersome. I would love the option to go back to pages. I hate infinite scroll.
Forum rep is incredibly stupid (I am level 3, so I’m allowed to call it stupid).
What took 1 or 2 clicks before now takes 3 or 4. It’s dumb.
I could go on and on if I wanted. But the bottom line is this. The forums have some useful features, but it would have been a lot better if blizzard designed them from the ground up.
Right. The good new features could have easily been added to the old software. It’s not THAT big of a leap. Some new layout changes here and there too, if needed. But the old forums was better in many ways that the new one screws over.
What do you mean by that? Aesthetically, I assume?
What do you mean by that? Quoting multiple snippets from a single post?
I disagree there. Being anywhere in the forums and having the ability to jump to any other via the dropdowns is much nicer. The profile section could use some navigation work though.
No one? That’s a bit audacious. I often look to see how the markdown is rendering. If one isn’t a big into using formatting, I can see it not being overly useful, but there are those that do.
Ignore is obvious. But it’s on the wish list. What are the others?
No, they edited that to mimic the old forums, but the categories have been rearranged. General Discussion isn’t it’s own top level category anymore, it’s under Community. Trying to find it in a dropdown is annoying as all hell.
Oh, right, you have to select text and click “quote”. This isn’t intuitive AT ALL. Medium does fine with selection options because it’s in an editor. This isn’t. You wouldn’t think to just highlight another’s text that you can’t edit.
So super long dropdowns that include realm names and loading the page at the bottom of a infinite scroll list that keeps filling each “page” is better? Oh that slider on the right? Yeah, I too like going back to click on a scroll bar instead of using my mouse wheel just to skip posts.
And so you don’t understand what a WYSIWYG editor is? Visual formatting should happen within the editor, not in some 2nd pane, and WYSIWYG editor use is like 2003 forum tech. Hell, Invision Community Board’s WYSIWYG editor can render quote blocks!
Using a preview pane is wasteful, cluttersome, and a terrible “solution”.
The old forums had…
Pagination, less overloading on scroll.
Whole post quote button
Better category hierarchy
No annoying auto draft saving that persists outside of the topic.
Better visual design (that is, no large thin fonts and overall better typography)
Simple, less confusing, topic flow. The meta info under the first post is nonsensical/unecessary. The arrow moving the user avatars is terribly useless.
Less repetition (e.g. replies to posts show via “View Replies” and in the list of topic replies. Two places…)
Undo didn’t undo one character at a time (try it).
The good this new forum brings is notifications, more formatting options, and better search, merely cause a 3rd party did it. These features are trivial and could have been easily added to the old forum.* Everything else feels like a clunky stuffed mess for what these forums are used for.
-* I say this as someone who designs and engineers web apps. Schema for notifications is simple (as well as adding triggers to multiple actions), built-in SQL search solves most needs, and format options can easily be added via parser logic. The features that this forum software has isn’t bad in concept, just not good in implementation. It’s for a tech community, not gaming.
I didn’t. But it sounds like a good idea from what you say here.
If I’m understanding you right, that’s how it was on the old forums.
I’m not a fan either. However, I do like being able to search the whole thread rather than searching in every page.
That’s here too. It’s the chat bubble icon in the tool bar.
All the forums were divided up in to the same categories on the old forums, including GD being under Community. Some forums were moved around (like Support now including the web and mobile forums, and Guides and Gameplay now being split).
I don’t find it annoying. But if it is to some, it can be prevented by cancelling the reply.
That’d I put under aesthetics, not a feature that’s ingrained in any particular forum software.
That falls under something that the new forum has that the old doesn’t. (I was asking about your statements on these forums missing things the old forums had.) And I agree with you here. All that is massive clutter.
Same as above. And I agree on the extraneousness of many UI elements.
I haven’t tried that. I’m on a phone atm so I can’t but you have me curious for when I get home.
The new clutter you bring up actually aligns with a long feedback thread I made back when the new forums went live. They were included in decent list of UI elements that were redundant or not particularly useful in a forum that turns over as fast as a popular game forum does. But all that was what the new forums had over the old, instead of vice versa.
It’s definitely much better. Non-technical users shouldn’t expect to deal with any sort of markup and the two panes (one for editor and one for preview) just isn’t a real solution.
Naw, you’d click a quote button and copy/paste the markup (bbcode) with the proper edits, so that it used properly formatted quote (with author info). Copy/pasting directly from the post doesn’t provide that.
There’s benefits in not having to click “next” every time, but it’s the trade off that’s the issue. When you need pages or otherwise don’t want all replies, too bad. As for searching, not exactly. You’d need to load all replies for the browser’s “Find” function to work, if that’s what you meant. Otherwise, searching in threads is trivial functionality to add.
Similar hierarchy but still visually different. GD used to have it’s own big clickable box, now it feels hidden under “Community” box. Community looks like a forum, not a category. Check the old one out for comparison: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/
Also, the dropdown includes every forum, forcing you to scroll through realms.
The issue is that closing the reply window doesn’t do it nor does manually clearing out the editor. Going to a different topic doesn’t clear it out either and it’s still locked to the reply destination. Auto save is helpful to prevent losing stuff from an accidental refresh or browser crash but this one dismisses the actual usefulness/intent.
Introducing a UX problem that makes the text seem faint and fragile (less legible) that didn’t exist before is a problem. Thin fonts should be used for headers only, but even that trend has passed.
But yes, it’s style and not forum software specific.
Wait what? The 2nd part talks about the new forums, the first (simple less confusing, topic flow) is about the old forums. I’m merely saying the older one was simpler while the new one is generic “social media” vibe feature set with too much to look at still. So, going back to a more focused, simple topic flow is what should be done.
Same as in it’s massive clutter? It’s less that there’s a “View Replies” option (which I kinda like) and more that it’s repetitive when those same replies show up later in the thread. It should just show something a bit separate, like filtering the topic view with just those replies, instead of nested comments feel.
Yep, each character including spacing. So, it would take 8 undo commands to undo the word “annoying”, 2 more if including spaces.
Most of that is opinion. Pagination and quote button aren’t. I use a delete key or I highlight. Undo seems worthless.
So you’ve got two or three things there. I hated pagination. I like scrolling. Nothing gets lost on other pages. Quote button is minimal to me. I’m capable of highlighting. Even on a phone. And undo isn’t a big deal.
Fonts at least are dead easy to fix. I use a custom stylesheet to change the fonts to a smaller non-thin system font (San Francisco on Mac, Calibri on Windows) and to change the background from the poopy brown to something more interesting.
Here’s how it looks: https://imgur.com/a/zAngz7h
You can do this too with the browser extension Stylus (not to be confused with Stylish, which is closed source and slurps up your browser history).
Here’s the CSS. If you don’t like the Caverns of Time background check the commented out URLs for a few other options.
Your whole post ignores literally all the answers to these questions you gave in the post right before you posted. But sure, this software is “easy”.
And yet you still don’t see my reply talking in depth about the stuff you white knighted on. Cause no, it’s not constructive to be dismissal. That solves nothing.
Seems to me like you white knight everything with “I can learn it so who cares” while still ignoring the points I actually brought up. I’m a designer, I embrace MEANINGFUL change, not half baked ideas.
Yes, you can change it using a browser hack (extension). But that isn’t what this post is about.
Oh I know, but any kind of changes being made probably aren’t going to happen quickly - even simple appearance changes, let alone migration to different forum software. I’m aware it’s not a real solution. I just wanted to provide a bandaid to use in the meantime for anybody interested.
what really annoys me is on mobile, there is a “forums” link at the top thats always visible… but to link back to the forum category i was previously in i have to scroll to the very bottom
and because its infinitely scrolling, it wont load the complete page, so you can’t just flick to get to the bottom.
it drives me nuts when viewing the forum on mobile.
First of all, I addressed all parts of your original post. It’s on you if you didn’t choose to read it.
Secondly, just because I find this system more intuitive doesn’t mean I’m “white knighting.” It means I have a different opinion of the system. But thanks for the insults.
Clearly if someone doesn’t agree with you, the only course of action you take is snark and insults. Being a developer means nothing. So you might want to stop with the “I know more than you” attitude. Doesn’t matter what you develop. Each person who uses this system will either like the changes or have to get used to them. Because not everyone liked the old system and not everyone is you.
God forbid a different side to the opinions on this forum exist.
What they forgot was to add our battle tags to our avatars to cut off some of this anonymous trolling our users love to do.
Which does nothing for the real issues but add white noise and hinder communication.
Also rep and stats should be account wide and not character specific.
Edit:Oh and a pop up that tells you that you have leveled up your rep, Thanks.
If your mobile browser allows you to disable JavaScript, turning it off and reloading the forum thread will force it to load the whole thread. It also makes the page render in a way that’s a bit 1996, but it works.
![:face_with_raised_eyebrow:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/face_with_raised_eyebrow.png?v=6" ":face_with_raised_eyebrow:")
Youre nitpicking a font? Seriously?![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")