Is there anything you wish the forum could do?

ladyceres

So, Vanilla forums are pretty...vanilla. The are great, in that they provide you with the very basic functions of a forum, which then opens up the potential for talented coders to write plugins to enhance it in almost any way possible. Some of the core functions are not perfect, as we saw with the inability to tag users with spaces in their names...but thankfully, there's a plugin for that! Two other excellent suggestions have come up for features, which are adding a members list and being able to restrict searches to specific forums.

Is there anything else you'd like to see here? Bear in mind, all the suggestions may not get implemented; not only is it a matter of locating and testing a plugin to do The Thing (and having the time to do so), but we might not want certain features here either. I do like the "clean" look of the place, personally, and would hate to see it start to look cluttered. But if there are a few things we can add that will make your community experience more pleasant, please do suggest some features that would help.

b3achy

I miss being able to have groups that could be public or private. Don't know if that is do-able on this site. But it cool if folks had specific topics they wanted to discuss or groups they wanted to form (though would be better once we can see who else is here if we want a private group that we'd have to invite people to). Also liked that if you belonged to a group, you got a private chat channel in game. Don't know if these forums and the game would be that closely linked, but it was neat feature of the old game.

Is there any way to have sub-categories? I think some of the threads get lost in such big categories. Maybe an alternate would be the ability to 'tag' threads when created with an option to filter on certain tags.

Just a couple thoughts, and thanks for asking!

Liza Throttlebottom

Seconding sub-categories. There will only be more going on in the future. I think it's been mentioned, but the same divisions as in the original Glitch would probably make sense. Especially an ideas section at this stage of development ! I'm sure we all have things we'd love to see added after what we know and love is patched together.

My biggest regret with Glitch was all the awesome content that I feel like we would have gotten in a world where money didn't matter and they didn't need the game to grow.

-Liza Throttlebottom-

ladyceres

Tagging is a default plugin so I just enabled that; let's see how useful that is. Group/private forums are on our radar but waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down the list of priorities.

I'll take a look at adding some subcategories too - it's not that it's a difficulty or anything but having too many categories can be problematic - although I have noticed a definite uptick in conversations here so maybe having them more spread out isn't a bad thing. We started small for obvious reasons.

If I may also ask - how many people are using "discussions" tab vs the categories section?

Sanotsuto

I personally would like to see a "Like" button (maybe not a dislike, if it's not really in the spirit of this community).

I would also like to see subcategories!

Liza Throttlebottom

Mmm, seconding the like button. It's very helpful to see what ideas are receiving traction and which aren't

gabi

@ladyceres I usually just use the Discussions tab to see what has been commented on most recently - but then again I check the forums often enough that there are usually only a few "orange" ones.
Otherwise agreeing with all above suggestions

ladyceres

@gabi I do as well. The default right now is set to the "Categories" screen, so when you push "home", that's where it goes. I was wondering if people would be happier in general to have the default be Dicussions. I would imagine people are using it both ways though and it would likely upset someone to change it from how it is now!

Sanotsuto

@ladyceres I'm happy with the way the set-up is now, I wouldn't mind an option to have all forums show a full list of discussions in a big long scroll page (or at least an option to show x discussions per forum in preview) if that wouldn't be too resource intensive, that way I can see if the "oranges" are making it off the topic page :P

Sanotsuto

@ladyceres Also, uploading forum profile pictures!

ladyceres

@sanotsuto Profile pictures are kind of tied up in the integration of the forum and the webapp. There are a lot of forum functions that will become superfluous and be disabled once the webapp is working properly. Profile pictures should be able to be sorted out with more relative ease than, say, integrating game messages to the webapp which will remove the need for Vanilla's messaging system. We want things to be as unified as possible, so that's why some features that would seem obvious are kind of missing for now. It's kind of like the private forums thing.

As for the default topics per page thing, it might be a global setting, but equally someone could have figured out how to push that to the account level. It's pretty standard in phpBB forums, so I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but definitely just a 'nice to have' rather than 'need to have' in the grand scheme. I'll add it to the list though.

Plez

A common forum tool I find useful is a "clicky thingie" that will take me directly to the first unread post in a thread.

There may be one already, but I haven't been able to find it.

gabi

@plez When the selected discussion opens it should open with the first unread post at the top of your screen - no scrolling required!

Plez

@gabi Well, it sure did! And without a "clicky thingie" too!! Thanx

ladyceres

You can now filter your searches by forum from the search results page.

I experimented with the members list but our custom CSS is just presenting a bit of a challenge to display it.

As far as subcategories - I added an Ideas section. Looking at the old Glitch forums, the only categories missing now are Bugs (which you guys aren't reporting yet), Marketplace (no one's selling anything yet) and Announcements and Events (which we could use now, but seems more likely to be useful later). So are there any categories aside from these that you feel we need now? I think those others will be added when we're in a more open beta.

awesomeavo

@ladyceres Someone might have said this but I didn't see it - a friend *thingy* would be cool!

ladyceres

@awesomeavo That sort of thing will come as the webapp is developed more! We'll have a unified friends system both in-game and out, just like it was before.

Faereluth

Perhaps not just yet but soon, could we have the Giant calendar/date ?

And also ummm

well

Game Closed Sign (ducks rotten veg )

awesomeavo

@ladyceres - That sounds great! The friend system in Glitch was awesome, to have the same sort of thing here would be really good.

b3achy

@Faereluth, you just want to be able to tear that sign down, don't you?! lol

Faereluth

@B3achy, yupp totally :DDDD

Liza Throttlebottom

@B3achy @Faereluth As sad as it was to see that sign way back in the beta days, it would certainly give me some pleasant nostalgia too : ) I remember when Ur was pretty dang simple honestly! No underwater worlds, or frozen expanses, or foxes and sloths, or enchanted forests : P Just good ol' Groddle and rocky Alakol and the arid Ancestrals, and running through all of them trying to hunt up piggies for meat money to buy that Alakol mansion we all had our eyes on!

Misha

Would love a way to see an avatar I like to make eye contact when talking lol
Just happy to have a forum again to be honest and see all the old names, missed you all even the ones I never liked xx edit I don't mean anyone above lol thank the Giants for adding an edit option

Harley Brett

I'd like to be able to "like" a comment or +1 something. It would be useful for new ideas for eleven, so the devs could see what we all really agree with. Like reddit does or something.

ladyceres

I find myself wanting to "like" comments too. As soon as I find a plugin that doesn't suck, I will probably add it.

Liza Throttlebottom

@lady

berylcrest

Personally, I would like to see a few handstand around here. Or wild jumping - these forums are hard for me to pin down!

Some sort of avatar, even a stock one, would be nice. And "liking". And maybe some Glitchy decor.

ladyceres

OK I actually found a decent plugin for likes. It includes dislikes, which I'm thinking of disabling unless people want to try it out. I don't want any buttons to foster hurt feelings. However I could change it to be an emo-hug button or something. There's also a promote button, which I don't think will be useful to us. So maybe I can make that do something else as well. Suggestions welcome, but I can't promise that I can make it work. The way I see it, we potentially can rename two of the buttons to something else that can be Glitchy if we want.

ETA: actually yeah, it will work the way I think it will. Hurrah!

Liza Throttlebottom

Yes yes yes! So glad to see this : ) Thanks ladyceres!

ladyceres

There's some other customization I can do to make it more glitchy, I think...give me a few days and hopefully I can add it.

Liza Throttlebottom

Take your time : )