Hi,

While I appreciate all the hard work that goes into redesigning a new website from scracth, and that you can't possibly please everyone, a quick survey over the foruns is enough to realize the new design has a fair share a problems and is, at best, hardly consensual. No point in repeating all the negative issues here, they have been already clearly pointed out by a lot of people. IMO, the new website feels quite sub-par when compared to the previous one.

I therefore humbly suggest bringing back the old design and refocusing your efforts on trying to implement the novel things (friend lists, library, etc) you have brought into the old format. As an IT specialist (albeit not a webdesign specialist), I don't believe that would be so complicated at all.

If you're not willing to do so, then please at the very least:

-loose the animations

-cut back on the ads

-change the color profile, or make it configurable

Thanks and keep up the good work

tibor

I second this.

Sorry, guys and girls from FFG, but this new forum was not your best idea.

It's tempting to look back on the Old Forums are remember only there good points, rather than the millions of complaints that where made against them by both forums users and on occasiona FFG staff.

jadrax said:

Name some, please.

In the old forum I never had any problems. It was fast, I found any article I wanted to reread, whatever...

Here I really dislike to post anything. The layout is grey on grey, the forum is slow, too much things I do not even know or understand what they are for (e.g. this strange point system).

Sometimes less is more. Sorry, my english is not the best so I have problems to really explain the whole problem.

Isilvar said:

jadrax said:

No offense, but you completely dodged the question. Which was: What was complained about on the old forums? I wasn't around for the first switch, so I don't know. Maybe there were complaints.

The only real problem with the old forums (aside from being coded in Javascript) was that the search feature didn't work if you had more then one page of results. You could get around it if you knew what your were doing.

Oh and sometimes locking/moving threads would cause a whole section of the forums to disappear.

As bad as they were, they were a **** sight better then what we've got now.

Joram said:

Don't hold your breath. FFG probably spent somewhere between 2-8 grand on this POS website/forum thing. If they did waste a bunch of money on this, chances are good they're going to just throw more money at the developers to try and get it to be "fixed" rather then try and find an alternative, better solution.

jadrax said:

Where were these complaints made? I was a regular forum user for the TI3, Descent, and StarCraft forums, and an occasion user for many of the other forums, and I can't recall a months worth of complaints.

Or were the complaints limited only to the BattleLore forums?

Regardless, this forum is a big step BACKWARDS in functionality, forum-wise. This forum is painful to use, and I avoid coming here because I hate the slowness, the clutter, the complete lack of functionality to do what I wish it would do.

The old forums were head-and-shoulders above this one. This forum smacks of cubic zirconium. Looks pretty, but worthless when you realize it's not the real thing (in that there's so many functionality problems that it's virtually worthless in my opinion).

sigmazero13 said:

I suppose asking which part of 'In WFRP terms' was not clear is somewhat redundent here.

Sorry, I misunderstood your post.

I thought you were saying that we have complained about all these things on this forum, and that it is being fixed.

Joram said:

No; the list of complaints on this site is actually pretty different.

aslum said:

Well, in the place I work they changed also the system. They bought a very expensive system (SAP), programmed it like idiots, and now they do not spent any money to get it fixed except by their own IT people, who also must fix the regular problems.

I hope FFG has not made the same mistake by paying for some "great" system which is just junk, and now they try to fix it with no extra costs.

jadrax said:

Actually, until this post, I'd never even heard of the acronym WFRP. In the original post, I just glossed over the term.

So in response, the part of "In WFRP terms" that wasn't clear was "what does WFRP mean?" (I looked it up so I *DO* know now).

Buy WFRP, it's good for you!

The new forums aren't incredible, but they're not that bad. My only gripes are the excessively large UI and the lack of custom avatars. A lot of the community-related features are nice, though, so I don't really mind if it stays.

Personally I think that the new site is a step in the right direction in terms of creating an online community . It's a bit in-your-face with regards to product pushing, but I think that is understandable given the fact that they are a games company with a product range. There are a whole slew of issues, for sure, including the deploring slowness, but when all is said and done... It's not that bad. That and I doubt that anyone would produce for free what I would consider a true community site (which is less about the message or product, and more about giving people the ability to express themselves creatively and in numerous ways; a combination of Wordpress, Photobucket, Facebook, and a whole lot more...)

Perhaps that's just me, though.

Kage

Kage2020 said:

I agree with this, almost. This site is definitely more community oriented. But in my opinion, it comes at the expense, in many cases, of the previous, already-established community. Take the Twilight Imperium community, for example. FFG dropped the ball with them, as many (most?) of the veteran TI3 players have decided not even to bother coming to this site anymore, in favor of a fan-run site. Why? Because there, they are assured that their hard work in terms of thread development won't be thrown away. That's more than FFG will commit. In fact, they've already said that the content on the old forum is basically doomed at this point, and they have no intention of trying to preserve it. That doesn't build community - that alienates community. I know it wouldn't be simple to archive that stuff, but would the effort build goodwill towards those who are embittered due to their forum problems? Absolutely.

Kage2020 said:

True... but it's not that GOOD, either. This site is flashy, yes. But flashy is not what I came to this site to experience. I wanted function, and this forum is SEVERELY lacking.

Advertising your own products isn't bad, when done in moderation. With custom avatars, it would feel less like an advertisement with, oh, let's throw some forums in there too. And smaller ad banners. I don't mind seeing their products, but to be fair, when I come to the forum, I come to read content. Smaller ads would still serve their purpose.

This site has the POTENTIAL to be good. But so far, it's failed miserably at living up to it.

sigmazero13 said:

I was trying to be constructive for once. It's a very pretty site, but overall one has to wonder whether they might not have had a better time of it had they just hired a Drupal developer and gone with that. Much of what is offered on this site seems to come with that software, and it has the added advantage of having a huge community of people to draw from...

Of course, with that said, what do I know?

sigmazero13 said:

To be fair, if they stripped out the personal information, the relevant database could be made available rather quickly.

sigmazero13 said:

Well, that's fair enough. A quick counter-question, though: Is a part of the reason that you're arguing a lack of function due to getting used to the new site, or is it because it truly lacks function. After all, the Jscript forum wasn't exactly the be-all-and-end-all of forum software...

sigmazero13 said:

Well, you definitely got me there. The product-push is a bit too strong for my liking.

sigmazero13 said:

Well, hopefully the web designers are "on it," though I guess that we might have to face up to the idea that what they're willing to produce and what we might want are two separate things.

Kage

Kage2020 said:

To answer the counter-question, here are the "functionality" things that this site lacks.

• PM functionality. Not just a "nice to have", but a REQUIREMENT for any useful forum, especially a "community-building" one.
• Custom Avatars. Without them, everyone looks the same; not only that, but we all look like FFG Billboards in a way. It's hard to tell who's who when people select the same icon.
• Jump To Forum. It's a pain in the rear that it takes two to three page jumps to get to a new forum. In the old forum, there was a dropdown bar at the bottom which made this MUCH easier.
• Jump To Game. In the old site, there was an easy way to jump directly to your game of choice from the home page. Now you have to click through several pages.
• Rules Questions. I know they are on the site, but they aren't nearly as easy to find as they used to be.
• Edit Functionality. The loss of the ability to edit my posts (more than just the first 5 minutes) means I'm not going to bother posting any custom stuff here, because such things are often works-in-progress, and updating the first thread (and sometimes other threads) is often necessary to keep the thread clean and easy to keep up with.
• Editor Functionality. It's a pain in the rear to add smileys, formatting, and other nifty stuff while writing posts. In the old forum, you could use BB code, if you knew it. Now, you CAN go to HTML mode, but it's not well documented how, and if you tab back, you have to tab back to the editor page if you have multiple tabs in your browser open. And HTML mode is much more of a pain. Smileys can't be simply added - you have to use the stupid image icons instead.
• Speed. While the fix they did was SIGNIFICANTLY better, it still feels a bit clunkier than the old site. Can't put a finger on why, but it doesn't seem quite as smooth.
• Longevity. This is similar to the old forum, too, but FFG seems to have no commitment to preserving information. If information is lost during a crash, oh well. Who cares that the fans put a lot of time into it. I've been burned by that twice now. I'm reluctant to trust my "hard work" (mostly custom content and PBeMs) to FFGs forums again.

If these issues can be addressed, I'd probably have much less to gripe about. But while the old forum wasn't perfect, all but the last point above WAS available in the previous site, and is not available now.

In addition to the points raised by sigmazero13, I'd like to add - as other have - please let the user customise, or at least have choices of, how the page is presented. Being mildly colourblind, I don't think too highly of pale grey text on grey backgrounds, and it took me a long time to find the 'search' function, cunningly hidden away at the top of the screen where you're least likely to look, labelled in mid grey text on a darker grey background atop a darker grey bar!

Even with those problems set aside, washed out greys and blues are not a particularly inspiring range of colours.....

Was this thing designed on an old green-screen monitor?

sigmazero13 said:

Well, that answered that question! Guess I cannot disagree with you on most of those points, if any.

Kage

Kage2020 said:

My biggest gripe with this new software is that it feels like a step backwards in functionality from the old forum. Removing featuers to move "forward" just didn't seem very "forward" to me

I could probably add a whole bunch more features that would be nice, but the old forum wouldn't have had them either so I couldn't really use them as "justification" for not liking this forum

I guess it just all boils down to this: I can't easily do many of the things in this software that used to be relatively simple tasks in the old forum.

Right, we have lost a lot of functionality and navigability with this new site. It took me forever to find the UFS tourney software because it's so cleverly hidden. I have to click Catalog - Collectible Card Games - UFS to even SEE the support tab that I need to click to have the link I need to click to get to the software. That's 5 clicks to get to it. That's ridiculously bad design. You should be able to get to 60% of a website in 1 click from ANY page. 95% in 2 clicks, and you should not have to click more then 3 times to get ANYWHERE on ANY website. EVER. If you can bump both of those two percentages up you'll have a) higher user retention b) higher customer satisfaction c) more repeat views.

As it stands I suspect I'm going to have to add EVERY person who plays any FFG game I like to my friends list, just so if I want to communicate privatly with them I can send them an email. And to be completely honest, I don't really want all these random people seeing my email, but I don't see an alternative.

And the colors still leave much to be desired as many have pointed out.

And no EDIT? WTF are they smoking? It'd be nice to have if we played a lot of Mafia but that's about it. There is no reason edit shouldn't be enabled ALL of the time, unless it's a security concern in which case GET SOME NEW SOFTWARE YOU CRAZED MONKEYS! If it's a security concern for five minutes, that's four minutes and sixty seconds too long!