Site update discussion. NEW 11/30; Display first post on all pages + classic forum category layout

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  • edited October 2017

    Getting used to iit, depends on your posting habits really. If you're one of those people whom likes to come by and chime in on 10 topics, then no, this forum layout isn't for you. If you just want to pop by and hang out, shooting the shit, then this layout works well.

    It's like messaging/emailing vs actually hanging out with your friends. The social situation has changed. Scattered conversations vs focused conversations.

  • I can't see why you couldn't message your friends while you actually hang out with other friends as well. That's what I do and feel comfortable with.

    Johro posted: »

    Getting used to iit, depends on your posting habits really. If you're one of those people whom likes to come by and chime in on 10 topics,

  • Also, to add to that. No, to chime in on 10 topics doesn't work fantastically on this new design, but it did before, just as you said. If however, you happen to pop by once in a while to hang out, then this design is okay of course, but it also worked okay on the old forums. That leaves 2 - 1 to the old forums. Both worked there. I still see no reason for this 'update'. There are quite too many big errors and just confusing shit to see the positive things (There were positive things as well, mind you.).

    Johro posted: »

    Getting used to iit, depends on your posting habits really. If you're one of those people whom likes to come by and chime in on 10 topics,

  • I still see no reason for this 'update'.

    The Vanilla forum software was not intended for nested/threaded comments. They forced it to work and this caused the forum to break little by little with every update. "So don't update it, it worked fine" folks said. Well, websites have to update, a company has to have that ability. If Telltale had the mindset of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it", there wouldn't have been a threaded forum to begin with(it was changed in 2013). The threaded forum also handcuffed moderators and staff with what they were and not able to do. Just simple things, like separating replies from the original post, were not possible.

    Also, to add to that. No, to chime in on 10 topics doesn't work fantastically on this new design, but it did before, just as you said. If ho

  • Don't worry it sucks on mobile too.

    Seems pretty swell on Xbox One :p

    Don't worry it sucks on mobile too

  • You wanna know how you can make this community so bad no one would want to visit?

    Add MICROTRANSACTIONS!!!!

  • Blind SniperBlind Sniper Moderator
    edited October 2017

    Johro said:
    The Vanilla forum software was not intended for nested/threaded comments. They forced it to work and this caused the forum to break little by little with every update.

    I just want to vouch for what Johro was getting at here. You guys may have thought things were fine with the old forums/that this current forum update is merely aesthetic, but behind the curtains with the Fall 2013 - Summer 2017 forum, several features (including important mod tools) had to be disabled to accommodate for the threaded software, some of the backend features got buggy with updates over time due to custom software, and various parts of the site were open to abuse (such as profile feeds with notifications you could not remove).

    The massive leg up we've received in mod tool improvements and general back-end stability will help us improve our moderation and ideally curate better discussions.

    Johro posted: »

    I still see no reason for this 'update'. The Vanilla forum software was not intended for nested/threaded comments. They forced it t

  • For users (including @MetallicaRules ) who were reporting getting notifications that you didn't enable in Preferences, a fix should be coming within the next day or two.

  • It's odd because it doesn't actually notify you but it appears in your notifications. What I mean is no numbers appear over the notification icon but if you click it, you'll see 'This guy commented on this discussion'

    For users (including @MetallicaRules ) who were reporting getting notifications that you didn't enable in Preferences, a fix should be coming within the next day or two.

  • This update sucks so much ass for people who actually had discussions in the TWD forum...It was not broken...this uses wordpress...which offers threaded forums...so there was no reason to go linear bullshit.

  • They chose the Vanilla forum and forced it to be threaded. Now they chose to stick with Vanilla and change the layout rather than use different software. There's probably a good reason they like Vanilla so much. Pretty sure they didn't decide to do everything the hard way just for the laughs and I can say with fair confidence that it wasn't "no reason".

    This update sucks so much ass for people who actually had discussions in the TWD forum...It was not broken...this uses wordpress...which offers threaded forums...so there was no reason to go linear bullshit.

  • It was not broken...this uses wordpress...which offers threaded forums...so there was no reason to go linear bullshit.

    1) It uses Vanilla, not Wordpress
    2) I'd put a big asterisk behind "it was not broken"; there were back end issues caused by the custom modifications (and exacerbated by years of updates since Fall 2013) that are no longer an issue.

    This update sucks so much ass for people who actually had discussions in the TWD forum...It was not broken...this uses wordpress...which offers threaded forums...so there was no reason to go linear bullshit.

  • edited October 2017

    ...this uses wordpress

    1) It uses Vanilla, not Wordpress

    I think they mean the actual website. A large number of professional websites use it, but Telltale doesn't.

  • edited October 2017

    So the Vanilla forums do have a stable (reply with)quote plugin available. The "Quotes" plugin appears to be something that can be implemented easily. When you click "quote" you get:

    @Johro said:
    So the Vanilla forums do have a stable (reply with)quote plugin available.

    I hope they add this. I think iit would help a lot of people.
    I'm done with the topic. Promise.

  • edited October 2017

    Going to take some getting used to but I guess the new layout if more clean and tidy a guess.(Notice that you can save post as draft just incase you close your tab or something while typing, which is nice).

  • They did say that some of the plug ins can be used now but could use some polish, so I guess that is the hold up.

    Johro posted: »

    So the Vanilla forums do have a stable (reply with)quote plugin available. The "Quotes" plugin appears to be something that can be implemen

  • edited October 2017

    Probably. They do add a bit of their own flare to the design and that could be an issue.

  • Waitaminute, you actually use the forums on the Xbox? I would never think anyone would, but I suppose you might have one of these chat things that makes typing easier.

    AgentZ46 posted: »

    Don't worry it sucks on mobile too. Seems pretty swell on Xbox One

  • Waitaminute, you actually use the forums on the Xbox? I would never think anyone would, but I suppose you might have one of these chat things that makes typing easier.

    If only but no, I don't have one of those chat things. It's not as convenient but it isn't that difficult typing with a controller. The only thing that really bothers me about using the forums on my Xbox is that I can't copy and paste, but that's a minor issue. It's just convenient to use the forums on my Xbox. Like I'll be playing a game then pause it to see if anything's going on with the forums.

    Waitaminute, you actually use the forums on the Xbox? I would never think anyone would, but I suppose you might have one of these chat things that makes typing easier.

  • I'm not used to this shit at all. Before this, I used to visit all the current Discussion Sections by using the "community" button from the menu above. The only one that I'm visiting the most after this is the general chat. What if there are news of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Batman posted in their respective sections and I know nothing about it?

  • It’s easier to reach the walking dead section now though ?

    AronDracula posted: »

    I'm not used to this shit at all. Before this, I used to visit all the current Discussion Sections by using the "community" button from the

  • What if there are news of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Batman posted in their respective sections and I know nothing about it?

    That's what Twitter and https://telltale.com/news/ are for! :p

    AronDracula posted: »

    I'm not used to this shit at all. Before this, I used to visit all the current Discussion Sections by using the "community" button from the

  • Is the new “visits” things that shows up on my wall the number of times I have visited the forums or how many times people have viewed my wall?

  • Total profile visits maybe? Mine's in the 500s which is lower than my site visits should be, but has to be much higher than number of people. ^.-

    Melton23 posted: »

    Is the new “visits” things that shows up on my wall the number of times I have visited the forums or how many times people have viewed my wall?

  • OzzyUKOzzyUK Moderator

    @AronDracula said:
    What if there are news of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Batman posted in their respective sections and I know nothing about it?


    @Blind Sniper said:
    That's what Twitter and https://telltale.com/news/ are for! :p


    Recent Discussions is also useful to see what is happening across multiple sections :)

  • I'm not someone who is a fan of Twitter or even that goddamn "news" button.

    What if there are news of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Batman posted in their respective sections and I know nothing about it? That's what Twitter and https://telltale.com/news/ are for!

  • It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling around...you knew immediately about new posts. The way it is now...you have to click into each section just to see if there are new posts. They should bring that back.

    OzzyUK posted: »

    @AronDracula said: What if there are news of The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Batman posted in their respective sections and I kno

  • My thoughts exactly.

    It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling around...you knew immediately

  • Is the new “visits” things that shows up on my wall the number of times I have visited the forums or how many times people have viewed my wall?

    I just visited your profile twice, and the number did not increment, so it's probably the number of times you have visited the forums. I wouldn't take it literally, though. It might not include visits form previous forum software versions, and I don't know what constitutes a "visit." (If you leave a forums window open, go out for a road trip, then come back later and use the same window, is that still a single visit?)

    Melton23 posted: »

    Is the new “visits” things that shows up on my wall the number of times I have visited the forums or how many times people have viewed my wall?

  • Man this site is hurting my eyes even if I try to live with it

  • Has been since July 2016.

    Man this site is hurting my eyes even if I try to live with it

  • Kennyshouladiedins1 said:
    It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling around...you knew immediately about new posts. The way it is now...you have to click into each section just to see if there are new posts. They should bring that back.

    Definitely agreed!

    This design may look more "egalitarian" at first glance, but it does very little to motivate members to visit subforums they don't usually visit.

    For example, say, before the update, you liked being active in the The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us boards, though you also played Game Of Thrones and Tales From The Borderlands once each. You might be scrolling down from the Walking Dead to the Wolf board, and, unexpectedly, a Thrones discussion catches your eye. Even though you mostly reside in Walking Dead and Wolf, the design made it possible for you to, by chance, find a fun topic to talk about at Thrones; same thing might happen with Tales.

    This can't happen anymore. The subforums are contained in unrelated boxes, with the threads completely segregated from one another. Since you're only active in the Walking Dead and Wolf boards, and you don't have to scroll between them to switch from one to the other, you'll never know about the Thrones thread that could've interested you so much.

    As a result, all that sporadical forum activity is negated, which is why you might see the same 5–10 users being the only active ones in any given board.

    It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling around...you knew immediately

  • This design may look more "egalitarian" at first glance, but it does very little to motivate members to visit subforums they don't usually visit.

    This is how most forums are laid out; most forums are segregated into separate pages for each section. It also created unnecessary scrolling for trying to reach your favorite subforum if it wasn't in the top two.

    Imagine how exacerbated the layout would be into the future when Telltale had announced several more IP, and you had to scroll down past 10 boards to get to Walking Dead.

    Kennyshouladiedins1 said: It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling a

  • See? This is what I mean, goddammit. That's the main reasons why the game discussion sections are being inactive, even the current ones like Batman, Guardians and Minecraft. Stupid update.

    Kennyshouladiedins1 said: It was better when you just clicked community and you saw the first few posts for each game just by scrolling a

  • That's the main reasons why the game discussion sections are being inactive, even the current ones like Batman, Guardians and Minecraft. Stupid update.

    This happened for a few weeks with the Fall 2013 update too, even in the highly popular Walking Dead section when Season 2 was otherwise less than a few months before release when hype was otherwise extremely high.

    AronDracula posted: »

    See? This is what I mean, goddammit. That's the main reasons why the game discussion sections are being inactive, even the current ones like Batman, Guardians and Minecraft. Stupid update.

  • Blind Sniper said:
    This is how most forums are laid out; most forums are segregated into separate pages for each section.

    I've seen you bring this up for several aspects, Blind.

    Maybe it is true, maybe most forums are like this. But there's a reason why others and I decided to join this website and not other websites—maybe it's not just because this is the official forum. There are some qualities that set every website in existence apart from the rest. It can't be denied that it's a dangerous move to abruptly change these qualities and not expect to lose visitors, especially when Telltale's image is at a peak low.

    It also created unnecessary scrolling for trying to reach your favorite subforum if it wasn't in the top two. Imagine how exacerbated the layout would be into the future when Telltale had announced several more IP, and you had to scroll down past 10 boards to get to Walking Dead.

    It seems to me like they sacrificed a piece of forum activity for reduced scrolling time.

    This design may look more "egalitarian" at first glance, but it does very little to motivate members to visit subforums they don't usually v

  • That is a bullshit answer and you know it...most forums you go to will have the subforums listed with the top post in each so that you can go to the one that catches your eye. If more IPs drop then they just lower the amount of the top posts are shown for each game...and then a person can click to go explore the subforum in more detail as needed.

    This design may look more "egalitarian" at first glance, but it does very little to motivate members to visit subforums they don't usually v

  • Could you please stop using 'most forums looks like this' argument.

    And now it creates unnecessary clicking instead, I don't see your point. I understand that users can't choose between linear or threaded discussion, but maybe we at least can choose to have embedded subforums or like we had before. That is not much work to do.

    This design may look more "egalitarian" at first glance, but it does very little to motivate members to visit subforums they don't usually v

  • Blind SniperBlind Sniper Moderator
    edited October 2017

    Recent Discussions: https://telltale.com/community/discussions

    If you all are concerned about missing threads from other subforums ( @BetterToSleep , @Kennyshouladiedins1 , @captainivy1 ), the Recent Discussions page linked above lists all the recent threads from multiple forums on one page, and before you ask - yes, it does show which subforum each thread is from.

  • Does complaining about the same things really make you feel better or make a difference?

    AronDracula posted: »

    See? This is what I mean, goddammit. That's the main reasons why the game discussion sections are being inactive, even the current ones like Batman, Guardians and Minecraft. Stupid update.

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