25 réponses à ce sujet

[henesua]

Hello people.

 

First I want to say "DON"T PANIC!!!!!!" in a frightfully loud voice.

 

OK, good. Now that that is taken care of, I want to share a little experiment that the good people of the Neverwinter Vault have organized.

 

Testing a new look at the Vault for discussions

 

Make an account. Test it out. Let us know what you think.

 

This is a sign of things coming soon. We want our discussions over at the Vault to be better organized and prettier. Its a different paradigm than we are used to, but I believe that once you get used to it, you will like it.

[niv]

Please note that we're currently having some email-related issues. Some jokester put us on a lot of spam blacklists. You might not receive signup/confirm notifications because of that; I'm working on it!

[dunahan_schwerterkueste_de]

*grabs a towel and walks towards this new land*

[icywind1980]

Is the login the same as the one used on the original neverwintervault.org forums?

[henesua]

this is a beta for testing and feedback. It is not the new forums yet.

 

When we actually migrate to a new forum we will do everything we can to ensure one log in.

 

Right now we are asking that people check this out, try it, make comments etc... But this is not the new forum. Its a mock up.

[Tarot Redhand]

Quick look. It just looks like a common or garden web page. No division of user's making it difficult to discern who is actually talking. No PMs - you gotta be kidding me. They are essential. A future release is not good enough. It is needed from the get-go.

 

Question just what (other than that misbegotten editor) is considered broken with the current vault forums? I only ask 'cause I lean towards the old saying - "If it aint broke..."

 

TR

[henesua]

The vault has PMs. We are not dumping the vault. Only talking about dumping the vault's forum. Vault PMs will remain functional.

 

Since that is the only substantial criticism from your post that I am able to understand , I am unable to respond further with specifics. You'll have to explain what you meant by garden variety forum and being unable to discern divisions between users etc... I suspect that you don't understand how the beta forum works. If you'd like, I could explain it to you, but first if you prefer to explain what you mean, I'm listening.

 

 

With regards to your general dislike, you and a handful of people may like the vault's forum, but most people do not. These comments have come up frequently even in this forum, in IRC and elsewhere, when this wasn't even the subject being discussed. PHoD being a recent example. And he's decided to just go home rather than deal with it. So already the current vault is a barrier not only to expanding the vault community, but to retaining what we have here. I see that as a far bigger problem than the shock of the new causing some distaste amongst us.

 

Another point, we need to keep developing the vault. Drupal - the tech that the vault is currently built on - has been a severe barrier to that. Of all the people that are capable of adding features to our vault and fixing things, only one of them likes it. Thats a really big problem. This is a step towards solving it.

 

Lastly, the NWN community is not a relic community that isn't going to continue to grow and develop. We've seen new people come in via GOG and even find the bioware forum. This is going to continue and possibly accelerate. But not if we lack a place to gather that doesn't immediately turn them off as the Vault's forum currently does.

[MagicalMaster]

Apparently the forum account is a different account than the main vault account? Shouldn't they be one and the same?

[henesua]

Yes it should. This is a mock up. It is not the new forum. We are showing what it could be like.

 

I've had to say this more than once so maybe I should explain.

 

 

We will be changing the forums at the vault. But we have not done so yet. This is an example, a mock up, a beta. It is your opportunity to take a look and comment. To get a feel for what is to come, and to ask for features. We may not be able to deliver on these features but who knows. It can't hurt to put it out there and solicit feedback and see how we can make this thing work for our needs. Thats the point of this.

 

After a couple weeks pass and we talk more about this and comment and so on, we will implement it. Then we will have a single log in. But that is a royal PITA to do with the Drupal system. So we aren't going to do all the work for a mock up. What if tomorrow we decide to stand up a different piece of software instead? Would be a total waste of time to do all the work to get user accounts to work across both.

 

So anyway, yes, the intention is to have a single login. But we have not replaced the forum yet. When it is replaced we'll handle it. This is just a beta, a mockup, a taste.

 

And for what it is worth, Niv is doing almost all of the work. 99% of it. I'm just handling the outreach because its a PITA and I felt like it. But I like the software and am motivated to work on it too based on what I have seen. So... I think this thing has legs.

[Gruftlord]

Seems to be super quick and responsive, also touch friendly.
The design itself is a bit too barebones for my liking imho. It's just text with icons on a white background with little clear lines that could guide the eye. The system with the tags takes some getting used to, but speaking of lines: when denoting the section a thread appears in (e.g. in the all discussions view) the top level should always start at the same position. Currently it's defined by the amount of subforums that follow. Know what i mean?
There are colors with grading to go by, sure. But it takes some getting used to looking at the right-aligned markers and going by color vs the old trusty and expected simply left aligned markers (which can still be colored on top of being more clear even with out the added information of wavelength).
This whole design is not really helping the eye in quickly seeing which thread is in which subforum.

That's the criticism that i had after a quick look. Keep it up, i think you're on to something. Glad to see the forum getting a revamp for the community migration/exodus.

[meaglyn]

Fwiw, it takes a couple of seconds to create the new account to test drive it with.

 

Also, the title of this thread should maybe be "neverwinter vault forums" or something to make it clearer that this is not a replacement for the whole thing.

[henesua]

Didn't want to do include forums in the title because I don't want the thread getting locked. Community efforts like this are explicitly why Bioware is shutting the legacy stuff down.

[henesua]

Gruftlord, you are saying that you'd prefer the tags to be all properly justified to their left so they line up sharply?

 

I think we could CSS that.

 

We've done no CSS work yet. But maybe that would be fun to play with.

[Tarot Redhand]

explain what you meant by garden variety forum

 

Reread what I actually said. I likened it to any one of millions of ordinary web pages not forums. It has no visible structure. There are not even lines to separate one post from another. If you must go down the "fashionable" route what is wrong with doing something like what you get with text messaging on a smart phone? In other words give each post a pale coloured background with black text so as to separate each post visually.

 

With regards to PHOD's departure, as I understand it he left because of his inability to get the god awful editor to accept images and not the general state of the forums themselves. Whatever you come up with make sure the editor works 100% with whatever actually displays what you enter into it. 

 

TR

[Squatting Monk]

It has no visible structure. There are not even lines to separate one post from another. If you must go down the "fashionable" route what is wrong with doing something like what you get with text messaging on a smart phone? In other words give each post a pale coloured background with black text so as to separate each post visually.

As henesua said:
 

we could CSS that.

We've done no CSS work yet. But maybe that would be fun to play with.

Cosmetics are not the issue. That stuff can be easily done. The real question is functionality. Does this forum do what we need it to do? Can we live without the features it lacks, or should we pick a different forum with other features?

[henesua]

Tarot, thank you. I needed to confirm that my assumption was correct. What you wrote may seem clear to you, but it was not to me because you don't understand what you are seeing yet and so were not speaking with specifics.

 

That's fine. I didn't understand this forum the first time I looked at it either.

 

The forum as we've currently implemented it actually has more structure than Bioware's currently offers and the beauty of it is that the presentation doesn't focus on the structure so you can focus on collections of threads, and posts, and more fluidly navigate between them.

 

This forum software uses tags to organize the forum structure. This has a number of advantages, most especially that the structure of the forum is really malleable by mods so non-technical users can quickly adapt it to our needs as those change. The use of tags also makes it easy to identify what posts you actually want to view. Want to view all posts where users are looking for missing files? Check. Easy. Want to knock such threads off your radar after you solve the problem. Check. A mod or the original poster adds the Solved tag to the thread. Done. Need to add a similar feature in the future? Check, and you don't need a programmer to do it.

 

In order to maximize this feature I intend to write an extension (or download one) which allows selecting all threads/posts which have one or more tags of your choosing. That would be really nice. And given the speed of the forum software, much more painless than the same feature on the vault. I think we need it so that we could for example allow users to focus the all posts digest to only exactly what they are looking for and leave these settings on by default for them.

 

So that is the mile up explanation for what this software offers.

 

What we have right now is a structure of tags on the left hand side of the page which act as subforum links to topics that we are all familiar with here. You simply click on one just like you do here to see the digest of the latest threads NWN1 > Custom Content for example.

 

As far as your disagreement with our lack of styling for any of this so far. Sure. That will come. And it will be much easier to do than the Vault. Thats easy. No big deal. But its still gonna look "fashionable" as you disapprovingly mentioned. Why? Because what you call fashionable is easy to read, and has less visible noise to distract from what we want to get at. Nevertheless I get tht you want to have some guide for tracking from left to right. No problem. When we get to styling we can work on that.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

It's too white. I don't like bright light and glaring things... but I'm sure it'll gather a bit of dirt and fluff and darken down soon enough...

 

It all seems to work fine, so far as I can see. I can post, edit, place links, place images and even make very silly noises at the screen... well, admittedly I could do the latter anyway, even without turning the computer on...

 

The only thing I CAN'T get it to do is allow me to edit my Profile for some inexplicable reason... Don't like those circular things, by the way, but having been given a huge, green, circular P - no vegetable references intended - I tried to alter it to something a little more "me". Yes, a Demoness with big boobs, you know the sort of thing... The little pencil appears over the portrait circle, it opens a window to seek out a picture, you select a picture and NOTHING HAPPENS! So, do the pictures have to be in some specific format, size, etc... or do we have to make them circular first?!

 

Anyway, everything else works, so not much to whinge about.

It could benefit from a clearer/bolder dividing line between posts, but that's cosmetic and can be hit with a big brick some time.

 

Have some small reservations about the Tag system. It seems simple enough but I can see an awful lot of people not bothering with any of the secondary Tags and thus the Forum ending up with massive gluts of posts under the main Tags. (I saw this was being muttered darkly about).

If it can be implemented on that infrastructure, I think a smallish series of Subforums under the main Tags for "Custom Content" "Scripting" etc, and no free floating secondary Tags, would make things clearer for those who weren't paying attention or just had some rabid Tagphobia etc.

[henesua]

I had the same problem with posting pictures the first time too because I had an out of date browser. Worked for me on Mac and PC and linux after that when I used a up to date browser. I admit this is a PITA.

 

all whiteness is a CSS fix. We can get to theming I suppose sooner than we have been saying. It seems to be the biggest complaint.

 

People may have issues with tagging properly. We'll see how that goes. But given that the tags automatically populate when you post in a category, I suspect it won't be too much of a problem. We have not been carefully placing tags so far. Just clicking post and then writing the post.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Hm. I can put images in posts fine, it's only the actual Profile picture that brainsucks itself for no easily explicable reason.

[niv]

Hm. I can put images in posts fine, it's only the actual Profile picture that brainsucks itself for no easily explicable reason.

 

Can you send me the actual file you tried to set as an avatar, so I can look into the problem?

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

Niv:- I tried five different images - all JPEGs, some 200x200 pixels, some 400x400 pixels, nothing extravagant or abnormally shaped... NONE of them worked.

 

I can send you one or all, if you like, but it tends to suggest the problem isn't with the images. One of them is the current avatar I have on the Vault, which works fine... others include the avatar I have here and the one I previously used on the Vault.

 

Is it a major issue? If, when the new Forums are sorted out and hit with bricks to your satisfaction, we'll only be requiring the one existing Vault account anyway, all should be well.

[niv]

I checked back with hen and he said it was a browser issue with him. What's your OS and browser? Also, if you are technically inclined, try opening the dev tools and see if the request is sent properly, and/or if there are any errors in the JS console popping up.

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

I'm as technically inclined as a dead mollusc... I mostly just know about examining predatory animals from unsafe proximity.

 

Er... and this isn't my computer. I have to use the internet via someone else's machine. If, in my woefully limited comprehension of computer matters I'm getting this right, the OS is Windows 7 and the Browser is Internet Explorer. Can't get it to tell me what Version it is, but then, I'm probably looking in the wrong place.

 

EDIT:- I was looking in the wrong place... Internet Explorer Version 11.

[Gruftlord]

Search for the portable version of firefox. That should do the trick on your friends computer. There's little reason to back-implement ie compatibility in modern websites these days.

I had issues with ie on modern forum software for quite some time (switched to edge now thanks to ad blockers being available). What did usually work was switching of the wysiwyg html render and go back to the bb code fallback posting.
It was a pain to find out the right codes for each site though especially for image implementation.
It helps to quote other posts with images to see if the bb code looks there

[PLUSH HYENA of DOOM]

My molluscly useless technical knowledge went into complete shutdown reading that advice... and I thought Firefox was something Clint Eastwood flew out of Russia...

 

But it's appreciated nonetheless...

 

Hopefully, when these new Forums are integrated with the Vault and we don't NEED a new ID, it won't be an issue anyway.

And IE probably is a pile of pants, 'cause my mother's had other trouble with it before, compatability-wise, but she keeps it on a "better the devil you know..." sort of basis. Same reason she still talks to me, I guess.