Forum Avatars would be wonderful :)

I know that Avatars are currently disabled and I assume there’s a reason why, but I’d argue that it allows you to quickly identify somebody you’re speaking to, it gives everybody here a sense of community and highlights individual members.

Often in the past I would recognize forum members from their avatars more than their username. I’d be interested to know why they’re disabled and if they’ll be enabled in the future… Thanks :slight_smile:

I agree, I think it would benefit the community.

They weren’t disabled per se, but rather not enabled due to time pressure leading up to release. We nowadays have someone working on the backend aspect of the forums and he is churning through a wishlist that contains avatars. I don’t know what the timeline is, but I shall inform myself about our plans in this area =) Ideally we’d share our roadmap for forums on the trello board (https://trello/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap) as well.

I would like to see avatars also, I find it just makes identifying people much quicker.

Another thing I would really like to see is a dark/night skin for the forums. I work/browse at night often, and the white of most of the Internet makes my eyes lament.

Looking forward to new forum features, thanks

These two features are what am looking forward too. Avatars and Dark theme.

+1 for avatars :slight_smile:

Personally I slowly get used to this bright forum theme. After some time I will even like it :wink:

Yeeeeah, I definitely agree with this! Forum avatars would be amazing… please Epic Games do that! The UE4 and the general UE forums are amazing though.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Hey Epic, any news on this badboy? I know a few new features are in private testing for the forums.

Was just chatting with Chance about this yesterday in fact. Agreed we want this sooner than later, and I’ll leave it to him to commit on the timeline. :slight_smile:

I’ve been discussing avatars with a few parties internally for a few weeks now, we really want this feature to be well thought out and well received. I’m in the process of talking through the logistics with our web team.

As for the dark theme - I’m currently working on getting one made for you guys, will be a drop-down option in your user settings.

Chance

_ Thanks, you are the best!

Great news Chance, thanks and looking forward to the changes.

Hello,

Last time I heard anything on Avatars was that an Epic staff mentioned they’re being worked on for both forums AND launcher which is why it can take a bit long but I can’t find the same thread. Any news on that?

Very funny :).

Once I released one post about same subject (Dup post) :/. And many criticized Avatars saying more or less: - Allowing anyone to create a highlight for himself would go overlap with the fanboy badges style in the personal profile. It would not give the right spotlight for your achievements here. And could mess with the forum aesthetics. So to avoid more conflicts about something highly cosmetic seems that was almost decided that this matter should be closed with the proposal with avatars in the Launcher only. Since this Launcher is more and more like a Steam social network and content delivery system.

With Avatars in forum maybe Will only be missing Leaderboards proposal in the Epic Launcher resizing the badges again :wink:

Nope, it wouldn’t mess with the aestethics. This forum style is clean. GOG forums look lovely: minimal style + avatars as only graphical element.

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Avatars are great because allows you identify people who often participate in discussion. It’s part of building identity in community. I don’t use Launcher for any social purposes, I use forum often. And you know what’s funny? AnswerHub always allowed avatars :wink:

BTW, you got huuuge banners in your signature and you don’t complain :wink: :wink:

Although profile part in thread view isn’t too readable. “Join Date” is not needed at all.
Post counter? Someone could have doubts why is here? So we can think “this guy write lot of posts, he’s experienced”. We know such statement isn’t true in internets. Statues like “Champion” or “Mythic” doesn’t tell anything useful to others, it’s childish stuff.

Having an avatar is an standard feature and let people recognize who they’re talking to instead of reading the usernames on every single post in a discussion. And it actually wouldn’t hurt the design. Worth mentioning, this forum doesn’t have any modern or appealing design. It’s very generic and boring. Speaking of badges, I actually find them more unnecessary than anything. Someone’s work has once been shown in a twitch stream. So what? Someone has participated in Beta. So what? Someone is doing well on AnswerHub. So what? Someone has 3000 posts. So what? Badges and post counts don’t add anything to the forums. Maybe a simple forum reputation system could do a lot better when it comes to identifying who is a valuable member of community. So yeah, all those badges and giant signature images/fonts do actually hurt the visuals, but avatars are something useful.

To get back on topic, any news on the avatars? :smiley:

It’s been 3 years and we still don’t have avatars. Why would you still have hope :smiley:

I like the look of the forum tbh, especially with the dark theme. Keeping forums basic is far preferable to having loads of features. There are some seriously ugly looking forums out there, one of the ugliest of them all being this one IMO. Injecting too many features or messing with the look stops the forum serving it’s purpose.

I find stats next to usernames useful tbh, makes me think about how seriously to take someone’s answer based on how much they engage with the community (and it helps me as a mod too). Signatures are good for networking / minor advertisement / self-promotion without being intrusive, and even if we didn’t have signatures people would start adding them to the end of their posts anyway. We have some basic rules on signature sizes.

Personally after spending so much time here, I recognise people more by their names now anyway.

Some forums solve this very easily. I’d like to continue using screenshot from GOG :wink:

  1. They hide some stats from basic view. There’s avatar and you need hover it, if want more info on the user. It’s awesome, it makes thread layout a lot simpler. And you don’t loose any “advanced” functionality. It’s also great place for “Send PM” button.

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  1. What’s also great on GOG forums - these extra information is less visible. It doesn’t draw your attention.

Layout of UE4 forums doesn’t care what’s more important. Profile part is much more… mhm… prominent?
All these “join date”, “posts” should be smaller, use Regular font instead of bold, probably greyed out.
Time of posting should be displayed immediately above content of post, not above profile part.

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You are our moderator. Why would you say that? You do know experienced and busy people who know what they’re talking about, usually tend to spend less time in forums or try to get badges after badges right? For example… Koola.

We have some signature rules. But they are not being enforced. It says:

You as the moderator are breaking the rule by using larger font sizes than forum default font size. And you have already seen a lot of people having large fonts and images in signatures but didn’t do anything about it either i.e lunyBunny in this same thread. Problem with writing rules is in a dusty thread is, people don’t follows them. Most of them don’t know any signature rules exists to begin with.

These forums have fundamental problems. From not being able to edit your own thread title to distracting signatures and absence of avatars etc. Why go far? Polycount by far has better design and avatars help a ton when you’re scrolling through the replies. i.e here. Signature rules are applied on the website i.e it won’t allow you to put an image in your signature. That’s the proper way of enforcing the rules instead of trying to micro manage every single user etc.

To get back on topic, any news on the avatars? :stuck_out_tongue:

@kjustynski, Your attachments don’t seem to be showing up for us.