Coming Soon: The Unreal Engine forums are leveling up!

1. Unreal Engine 4 was released for free on March 2, 2015: If You Love Something, Set It Free - Unreal Engine
2. You need an account to use Unreal Engine 4.
3. I created my account on June 21, 2015 to use Unreal Engine 4.
4. I never made that statement. This is the exact statement I made:

Why are @midgunner66 flagged and hidden? He seems have quite reasonable tone in his posts while MostHost_LA seems to be the one with aggressive attitude… ? I am confused about this? Are there some double standards when it comes to moderation of this forum? Or is this something automated?

Midgunner is just expressing his frustration with the forum while MostHost_LA always keeps bending the discussion towards ad hominem, discussing the person, rather than the ideas about the inanimate object (the forum).

I’m just as off topic as he is. No more no less.

Honestly, its been at least 20 posts since anything relevant to the forum’s need for improvement has been brought up.

It would indeed be nice if the discussion were to stay on topic, but that’s essentially impossible when at every turn someone says “that’s not a missing feature, that’s user error” or other similar and utterly unhelpful BS.

Currently the forum hasn’t seen a functionality upgrade, the performance has degraded further, and apparently having a YouTube link on a thread locks the page up across at least 2 mobile browsers…
I’m not even sure why, nor do I care. Epic surely doesn’t seem to either.

You can bet that the discussion will degenerate again in short order…

Forums aren’t something that should require effort to use. If I am working for 12 hours straight on a project and I need some piece if vital info I have 0 tolerance for friction in the process of obtaining that infornation. Sure you can scroll through the infinite scroll to find the info you need etc. but why turn a 2 click process into a 5 click process for the sake of aesthetics? It’s dumb and no professional users appreciate it.

Your public profile is hidden… can’t even try to send you a PM XD
Oh, and reply didn’t tag you. So…
@UnrealEnterprise let’s see if this notifies you.

I doubt it would be that easy.
Discourse seems to use all the absolute worse tecnologies out there by design.
The core issue is that its badly coded Ruby. With ruby you can only expect so much performance when it comes to integrating 100 different things.

Lazy loading just needs a once over by someone competent to create some call aggregation.

Easier said than done, because the code is a bit of a mess. But being open source anyone can tinker with it (again, ask the blender folks how much time it took em)

With regards to the PM system.

It’s not a “forum” feature. Basically it’s an email system that’s locked (tight) and can only be accessed by the forum itself.
The lack of notifications is probably due to the licensing of whatever system is in use or an issue with the specific service.

… there’s more than 1 reason why phpBB is ranked as the most used “free” forum…

All of that aside.
Performance took another turn for the worse today. I’m even having issues getting likes to trigger - slow database issues again…

Thanks for the reports:

Could you add more detail, please? Are they arriving only intermittently?

Will report to Discourse—to confirm, the post you linked you had deleted, but not it’s showing again?

I’ll connect with Discourse on performance issues. There might be optimizations they can make. I’m not seeing perf issues here, but would you mind sharing any specs, what browser you’re using, etc.? Is it generally long topics you’re seeing issues with?

@MostHost_LA anything you can share on your perf experience would be good to know too!

I know you didn’t ask me, but I’ll share my specs & performance to help:

Without giving specifics, my PC was built in 2013, and since then, only the PSU & CPU fan have been replaced. The internet connection uses a wireless usb adapter. When running Google’s speed test, my download speed gets to about 27mbps, but usually is moderately lower. For comparison, my phone (which is newer) can reach that same speed constantly, so my phone performs better on average than my PC.

For me, in terms of performance, I have never had a problem with the forum. The performance is noticeably better than the old forum. For reference, here’s a video of me scrolling through this entire thread, post-after-post, in 44 seconds (I made sure to clear cache, cookies, etc., to have a “fresh” run):
https://streamable.com/3nyq9s

For comparison to the old forum, with 261 posts (as of this post) at 10 posts per page, this is the equivalent of clicking through 27 pages.

I prefer the infinite scroll approach to the page-clicking approach. For me, that’s a positive change from the old forum.

I did notice this though (note: I scrolled the entire thread first):
https://streamable.com/8cjcou
I’m no HTML expert, but it appears that posts that aren’t close to where you’re reading aren’t rendered (or whatever “cloaked-post” means); also: notice the arrow beside each line to see their children goes away, which means they’re being removed from the page.
Reminds me of culling objects in a game engine.

I tested that myself and it’s all there, lol. I agree, there should be an option for that, especially if it’s already there.

There’s so many issues that I’m not sure where to start…

1st. Yes. I’m not receiving any mail from the forum anymore. Not for a PM nor for anything else.
It used to be PMs would also send me an email.

2nd.
Performance is worse on mobile as a whole.

Across several browsers. The one I use the most being AdBlock browser.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://play.google.com/store/apps/details%3Fid%3Dorg.adblockplus.browser

Firefox, Chrome, and the built in Samsung browser also all have the same issues (not a browser thing).

Specifically.
Load times for actions can some times be either really fast, or really laggy.
Leading me to think of it as an infrastructure issue (the database is lagging or concurrent calls are causing the lag).

It is not an “internet speed” issue, as I’m connected via wifi 99% of the day and pretty much always when visiting the forums.

The issue is usually most noticeable as you scroll long discussions, just because the posts literally start to take more time to load up and the page stutters (some of that is to be expected because of how lazy loading works. The DB response time however is not consistent, leading to the issues being more noticeable).

Why is it a problem?
It’s particularly pesky when it comes to creating responses and needing to re-read the thread from mobile.

You have to close out the response (back arrow) in order to do this.
This causes the posts to load which takes a bit.
If you touched the screen in the meantime. Which almost always happens, you are very likely to have hit one of the many links found after the topic.
At which point the browser just starts to load a new page.

That’s the worst thing I have been running into over and over - to the point if I have trouble loading posts while scrolling I won’t even start to post a reply.

3rd thing.
YouTube videos will literally just lock up the browsers (adblock at least. Haven’t come across a YouTube link yet using the stock Samsung).
I very much doubt this is an issue with just the one browser though. Even if it can be because of the nature of the browser (block anything that generates ads).
It just isn’t very common behavior for the page to be locked up - which leads me to think it’s not related.

4th thing.
Based on the video posted above: why?

You loaded the data. There’s no limit to how much data a web page can hold.
Why would they dump older data and have you load it again as you scroll back up? It makes 0 logical sense…
Even with a billion images in a single thread, A browser on 512MB of ram is more than capable of handling the cached/load visible not visible portion based on the scroll.

Dumping out data that was fetched makes absolutely no sense.
AND, if you think about it, it would cause my problem 2 not to exist.

If when I close the response the messages are just there, loaded and not dumped out, I wouldn’t need to physically wait for anything at all…

I believe it’s not an isolated issue. I’ve had threads where posts by spam bots that were flagged and deleted a couple of years ago had resurfaced after the forum update. And there was at least one case where a post by an MP customer that had glitched out (he contacted me via mail due to that) at the time of posting, became visible after the forum update.

I had noticed both these cases right after the change to discourse. Since it was just a handful of posts, I deleted the irrelevant ones manually. But I’m guessing it’s the same issue that you encountered here.

I show the option on the post right above.
Perhaps its disabled over time?

Press the three dots by the reply button to access the delete button.

I tested it on my oldest post and it works, but that’s only 3 months ago, so can’t be sure.

Had another mobile issue where once starting to reply to a new topic you can’t back out of the reply to re-read the message.
Had to type the forum url in and return to the main page that way.

Weirdest thing is its not a consistent bug. I believe it was the first post by the user or something similar.
Doesn’t seem to work on other “fresh” topics currently.

Think we could get this patched and fixed at some point?
All it would take is to not unload the previous post data when the reply is initialized.

Had my thread in the VR subforum deleted randomly, been around for 4 years or so and it made it through the migration intact (though with about 2 years of posts missing).

Now links to some random post in the forums, its also non existent in my personal post history.

Also seems that just in the last couple days, the activity tracker is all messed up. When I come back, my “new since last visit” indicator is all wonky and showing me stuff days and days ago when I have actually visited like 12 hours ago. I kind of grew to like this feature as a replacement for the old “view message from last day” or “view messages from last week” filtering.

We can’t edit posts anymore?

edit: We can’t edit old posts anymore?

So has there been any progress on fixing editing?

Looks like it’s been fixed. My oldest post is from March 13 and I can edit it now (which I couldn’t before).

@Amanda.Schade Also, there’s a bug with hidden posts & the activity feed: when signed in, I can’t scroll my entire activity feed anymore because it stops just before a hidden post; it stops at this post: Coming Soon: The Unreal Engine forums are leveling up! - #255 by midgunner66, where my post before it is hidden. When signed out, I can scroll the entire thing, so it only happens on the user’s account.