Coming Soon: The Unreal Engine forums are leveling up!

I do see the theme revert if I click “save changes” twice, but they appear to persist if I only click it once. Will report it though to see what’s going on!

As said before, https://xenforo.com/ is MUCH BETTER platform, used on hundred of gaming forums and game dev communities out there.

OMG it is a nightmare… I didn’t even think of the lack of pages…

Please if you could also share this, I believe this is very important:

As you can see in the screenshot posted here: Coming Soon: The Unreal Engine forums are leveling up! - #39 by Arkiras the category titles are bolded and the subforums normal text. In the current UE4 forum list it’s the opposite, making the category listing look far more cluttered and busy than it actually is. I went ahead and made a quick edit on my end to see how it would look:

image1137×1149 106 KB

I think this, combined with the smaller padding on desktop as mentioned in the linked post would go a LONG way towards making it easier to navigate.

This is my opinion but this is the most awful forum script I’ve ever used. Discourse is garbage just look at it. I understand why you ditched vBulletin (only if it was because of constant security risks and getting exploited non-stop) but come on you should have just went with WordPress. It’s sad forums from the early 2000’s look and operate much more nicer/smoother than this ugly boxy nerfed down junk we are using now. Let us choose a white theme because this dark theme really hurts the eyes. And ditch the forever scroll feature because that is the most useless feature I ever heard of or used. Not Happy at all with this new forum.

It does look more modern and slick. It matches the unrealengine.com site style more. Some new features are cool.

But readability suffers heavily with the current design. It takes more mental load to navigate and read.

• Definitely need a light theme.

• Something to bring you with one click to the latest/last post of a topic (maybe this already exists?) In general optimizing for least amount of mouse clicks.

• Writing lists is not a nice workflow currently, i need to click the list button for each point instead of just having a new bullet point added automatically if i press enter

• It gives the vibe of being a mobile website that hasn’t been properly adjusted for desktop in terms of space use, spacing, font sizes, colors and so on

• The forum categories and also the topics are not sufficiently visually distinctive from one another. That makes it slower to tell them apart. Maybe try using brightness/color of the background a bit to separate categories and also topics.

• Icons were helpful in the old forums for quick readability ie for categories. Imagine an Unreal Engine UI without icons and only text. Same for here, it slows things down.

• Need to group all the subforum categories more somehow, at the moment it’s a few huge blocks. Colors and spacing would be helpful.

• Currently the Latest box on the right takes a lot of space, which is a bit overwhelming and makes it even harder to distinguish the subforum categories, which already suffered readability from before. Maybe shift it to a tab or to the bottom.

• One of the advantages of having a forum vs discord is things like signatures, roles, post count and all these other stats that people appreciate and care about. Try to embrace that and give it back to people. It’s one of the strength’s a forum has - play to them.

• Stickied threads suffered readability. As a user, I want to be able to quickly scan all the “Rendering” subcategory threads, but that’s really hard right now because it almost just looks
  like one big box of text, even though it is 5 or so separate threads. Thread title and subtext/preview text look extremely similar. A color distinction or a stronger size distinction would help. Also visually they merge together a bit too much, I would try to give them more separation, with border linings or via coloring the backgrounds differently.

• Try and use colors with symbols and icons too (ie the locks or pins next to threads)

• In General: More Icons, more color-use, more separation, more borders, use of background color for distinction , more spacing for separation etc

• It’s easy to go a bit too overboard with minimalism and slickness and I think that’s what partly has happened here. It doesn’t just have to look cool as a screenshot, it should be navigable as quickly as possible and use up the least amount of mental load to find what you are looking for

Those are just my first impressions quickly written as I see stuff. I could imagine this encapsulates part of what some people brought up in the thread.

Thanks for the detailed write-up! You’ve made lots of great points here. We’ll be digesting all the feedback over the next couple of days to see the best way to fold it in.

Looks like it’s defacto-dark.

Please add tagging with @customerSupport, etc. That bug submission form takes forever to fill out. Would be nice to have issues cross-linked with tags.

Check out the StockTwits app for research. They do social media right.

Please no overly-stringent mods, either. This ain’t Twitter! I posted a confident post once in a forum and saw that it seemed to be disappeared, later. If I’m good and I’m sharing valuable information (i.e… an answer to a question which took many people half a year and they still couldn’t figure it out), I deserve to be confident! Facebook, Discord, you, and other knowledge share platforms should technically be paying people for valuable posts, at the end of the day (It’s not like Epic employees are responding to bug requests very fast or replying to all of the Q’s on the answer hub). That’s the future.

Thanks for all that you do. Time to show Unity who’s boss (yet again).

Please remember to fund my Epic Mega Grant application for MOD Haus.
www.MODhaus.info

Top 10 worst places to plug in advertisement.

I agree with a number of posts here about readability. Need a UX designer to go over it. I also am missing the ‘mark all as read’ feature of the old forums, which I used daily after I read what was interesting to me, so that I wasn’t inundated with the same stuff I skipped on the next visit. I don’t necessarily want it to automatically mark all as read if I just visit a category, since I may not have time right then to go over the topics I am interested in. As for the ‘jump to bottom’ feature requested above, I see that if you click on the activity indicator at the bottom of the scroll indicator, it will jump directly to the end, so that works, if not obvious. I get it though that you are trying. And thanks for that.

Just check out the new forum,but it seems one of my post was missing,the post name is “node graph assistant”,please take a look and fix it or contact me.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/marketplace/1435240-node-graph-assistant

Okay, so new forums are live, all Private Messages are missing and this forum hijacks the CTRL+F function and has a minimum number of characters you can search for. Utterly annoying as it cannot be disabled by any means i have found. One can press CTRL-F x2 but that should not be needed. Get rid of it!

Oh great. Discourse. The forum software equivalent of an endless runner game.

If you’re on desktop, the blue bar on the right will allow you to skip to any post

I actually like the new forum style - yet I still believe it will have moderately significant negative long-term consequences for Unreal Engine developers. Let me explain what I mean by that:

It basically feels like this design is trying to imitate social media websites or applications. Now, on the one hand this is good, because these services are designed to be pleasant to use. But more importantly… these services are not designed to be useful tools! They are just designed to get people to spend as much time on social media as possible, because that is how social media companies earn revenue. And, this new forum style has introduces various features, which, while being “kind of nice”, are ultimately harmful for productivity:

• The like-button. From now on, posts will no longer be judged by their content, but simply by their popularity, because it is less effort to look at this number than to actual read some text
• As a consequence, posts will also be shorter and more emotional, because it is easier to get likes this way. Look at my second post below this one to illustrate my point
• People will also offer less help to others, because they can get a similar emotional reward by just pressing the like button
• Long complex technical explanations in particular will become a lot more rare, because the effort/reward ratio in terms of likes is very bad for these

Overall, by gamifying discussions, you are replacing peoples intrinsic motivations with extrinsic ones, and the latter are no longer connected to what this forum is actually supposed to achieve: Teach people how to use Unreal Engine.

Uh, you know you can click on the scrollbar on the right and it will skip you to the last post.

Oh great. This looks a like a social media platform.

Light theme hurts my eyes.

Markdown! Woohoooooooo! Thank you Epic Games. Here’s a piece of feedback, messages with small amounts of text take up too much space. I’d appreciate a more compact design.