This is some high tier trolling.

Then doesnt that already imply its a waste of resources?

This forum is sending me emails about “likes” even though I’ve disabled these notifications.
Also when I click the “Heart” icon to see the list of users, sometimes it adds myself as a user who gave a like… which is bizarre.

I don’t understand the thought process behind this update. Was there testing and feedback? Did we ask users what they wanted or needed or didn’t like? What happened? I’m even having trouble reading the main font being used. The font is actually called “Brutal”? (For some reason I find that hilarious.)

There’s no “latest post” under each post category which gave you an immediate idea of what was being talked about in each section. Post count, badges and sigs are not upfront which gave an immediate idea of someone’s credibility, now it’s like three clicks deep. If you want to hide that info, maybe show it on hover of the avatar? This and a lot more has already been said multiple times in this thread. I just hope they’re taking the feedback and complaints seriously and not just looking at it as “Well some people don’t like change.”, it’s hard to even come here now with this new format. I like minimalism, but I feel like too much “quick glance” info has been removed.

One thing I really wonder, was it a conscious decision to remove sigs? Like “We don’t want people to advertise in that way.” Or was it more like, “This new forum software doesn’t have sigs and we may or may not implement it in the future depending on user demand.”?

I prefer custom avatars too. Hard to know whos posting what, as the images have replaced names and there is a limited number of them. It was just an idea to have give them meaningful ‘group’ association as more users would be sharing them.

On the contrary, it implies an alternative ‘use’ for Avatars within the current limitations.

I find the “brutal” font for post content particularly difficult to read. Way too bold.

I don’t like the new forums at all, I feel like looking at a wall of text on the start page. I might eventually get used to it but since I joined the Unreal community recently, I want to say I did not at all feel lost in the old style forums when I visited first.

I think it is a step backwards in terms of usability, even though I understand the technical reasons to migrate away from the old style forums.

For me, the only thing I really mind is the bloated posts. Ironically, the design can be reverted back to the old forum design by just zooming out to 80%:

zoom-801920×1080 166 KB

The only other two problems I have is:

1. There’s no scrollbar or pages on the topics, so there’s no way to jump to threads (e.g. to find an old thread, you have to scroll all the way to it with the mouse wheel).
2. Besides bold and italics, there are no formatting tools like font, size, color, or even underline.

Everything else is ok:

Infinite scroll:
Imo it’s actually better than pages. If you need to go to a post, you scroll straight to the post using the forum scrollbar instead of having to figure out which it was on. You only need to use the mouse (no keyboard) and the number of operations is reduced:

1. Click and hold the scrollbar
2. Move the scrollbar up or down to post number
3. Release

Also, you can type the post in the url and it will go to it as well.

Replies:
Great feature. Though, there should be an option to hide replies to a post from the main thread if you’ve already read them at the post. It’s constant deja-vu reading replies twice.

Fast & easy structuring:

• Play around with with star (*);
• • it does
• • • a lot
• • of
• things,

as well as other symbols.

With the bugs:
They already acknowledged bugs could happen in the first post of this thread, so there’s no surprise there. The bugs will eventually get fixed.

With the signatures:
There’s technically already a place for signatures: where the “Marketplace Creator/Rocket Beta Users” is. They can just put the signature there. Make it a signature “title” which fits on top, and when you click it, the full one pops up, just like when clicking the profile pick. Or even better: it can replace the post itself with the signature, so you would switch between the post and the signature. And, since you only view one at a time, this would allow you to have big signatures without taking up extra space.

But, for the time being, you can emulate signatures by using a

bar to separate text, which is done by typing (***) on a single line. Alternatively, if you want to be considerate and save space, you can hide it like this:

I always liked the one-liner signatures.
The ones with LARGE images are the ones that always bothered me and I never clicked any of them…

The line sequence of links were useful to me, to have quick and easy visual recognition of when a post ended, because of speed reading.
I usually don’t read the posts, I look at shapes until I identify what I actually should pay attention to.

This forum is hard to detect distinct shapes and forms, it’s like learning to read again, so it’s fair to see why so many people are mad about the upgrade.

Looking forward to cashing in on my 28k AH karma. Shouldn’t have spent any of it on regularly downvoting low quality stuff. ;p

These are wicked ideas; sounds too good to be true, though, ha. I was happy with a badge.

Also +1 for one-line sigs, I redirected people to specific posts before, suggesting they investigate this and that person’s signature.

There’s also this brand new [deal]!(Sony invests another $200 million in Epic Games). Good for @anonymous_user_03e3761b1!

Perhaps some of it can be converted into badges and signatures. And if Dogecoin keeps skyrocketing, we’ll get twice as many forum avatars to choose from. Mark my words.

edit: I meant the Tim, sorry other Tim that apparently is in the system already.

A nice theme for Discourse to make it more like the old forums … although this theme code needs some tweaking to make it work perfectly Sam's personal "minimal" topic list design - theme - Discourse Meta

And what about this other Discourse theme that seems just ready to be installed?

Moonclaw Theme
A Moonclaw theme for Discourse, ported from PHPBB

1289×220 27 KB

901×313 34.3 KB

1341×413 30 KB

Clicking on the title ideally should take you right to the latest post and NOT the first. I find myself constantly scrolling down.

What if it’s my first visit to the thread?

Maybe there’s a way to recognize if that’s the case and bring you to the according post (first or last).

There is. This forum uses more cookies than a cookie factory… which is actually also anther reason as a software it really sucks.

@AntiGravity
You should know by now that epic regards you (and probably me) as a negative nelly who’s “radical” ideas don’t count for since we openly tell them how badly they up. EVERY ■■■■ TIME

On their part, it’s not like they ever make an effort not to up. In fact, I think it’s quite the opposite.
At this point it seems to me like they strive to up so they have more work to do later.
As a developer who’s often left with “nothing more to do” over having done too good of a job I can relate to that

@Everynone
If it was you complaining about formatting? Probably wasn’t.
whoever it was
*the formatting is just not the BCC standard, but it should be is all there.

H1 included

Take the advanced user tutorials to find more info on that.

Re the answer hub.

1. I’m not too keen on sifting through the mass of cry baby posts that oversaturate it.

2. the only reason the answer hub still exists is basically you, @ClockworkOcean and @Shadowriver.

3. if you stopped to pray for an answer you’d have more chance of getting one of the many otherwise fake deities to answer you over having an actual epic employee address your concern.
   Even when filing a bug report …

4. they aren’t even advertising your games despite them building a billion dollar industry basically on your shoulders…
   When you Google for an answer and end up on answer hub who do you think the right post is from?
   It’s not the staff if the post is less than 4 years old…

However,
all of those issues about the community don’t particularly relate to the topic at hand…

The topic at hand should be
why does epic insist on ing up instead of hiring professionals to do a professional job?

Location. Location, location, location… as goes the cliche.

Epic has become a gigantic corporation;
When corps grow like this, basically any and all little problem is very hard to identify who is responsible for whatever it is.

And basically it’s what these forums are, little problems to solve, with even smaller problems within. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s only 1 or 2 person assigned to run these forums and the entire website as well… Because they are so big now that all the big boys are out there solving something else that might be any “real problem”.

I understand that’s how the world is, so I just chew up and accept the status quo.

People are causing problems in the Marketplace?
Too bad, that’s even smaller of a problem.

Patience is a must have in this era of social media, but it’s exactly what everybody ran out of already lol
I for one deleted my facebook long ago because it was driving me to a point of permanent irritation, hopefully these forums don’t go the same route.

You could always do this. The old forum had a link to take you to the latest post, and if you clicked the title it would just go to the first. Using a gazillion cookies to keep a read history to make it “smart” is just obnoxiously overengineering it. I feel like the new paradigm of reinventing the traditional vBulletin / BB forum format has been a step back every single time it’s been attempted. If I wanted to have discussions that are hard to follow, flowing like a river of bricks I’d go read twitter threads.