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[wobbly]

Dear Gwarl,

Forum is rotten to navigate, if you are not looking for something posted in the last couple of days. Not necessarily a judgement, so much as a statement of fact.

I know I usually use it sarcastically/as a "meme", but realistically state of forum is ...terrible

[Gwarl]

Can you be more specific?

[Nick]

My take is that this version of vBulletin is less usable than the old one, which is not something I expected. Particular gripes include:

• Use of default avatars if one isn't set, plus the facebook/twitter buttons mean posts take up more vertical space (I have blocked the buttons with my adblocker, and turned off avatars)
• Reduction in customisation - for example the setting to display threads with most recent post at the top is gone (and the latest activity mode is not a good substitute)

I'm sure others have their own complaints

[MITZE]

I too have been annoyed by things in general being bigger/less compact than they were.

I also was having issues where the forum just would not display using readable colors for me (I believe there was a previous thread about it before, I was getting like light blue font on white background or something for posts, only while logged in), but having logged in just now it seems to have gone away with me having done nothing on my end that I hadn't already tried.

EDIT: And now I'm getting errors when trying to make new posts or edit something I just did :/

[Nick]

Yes, the errors when posting are also a thing - usually, but not always, the post is made, but the error tells you it isn't. I also sometimes am unable to delete spam posts.

[Gwarl]

So the spam issue happened more or less the moment our license expired. It's $100 or so for another year.

Thoughts on just archiving this whole thing and using some other software?

The main reason for not having done that in the past is the link between the forum and ladder. It's possible I could hack together something similar with a new forum, or hack together something similar with the .live section of the website. The errors are some arcance issue I can't quite figure out but is probably to do with not hosting the forum on the root domain but instead at a /forum url

Or I could hack together a minimal set of layout changes to this software.

Thoughts?

[wobbly]

Wrote a lot of stuff, that the internet ate. Long of the short was I was not sure how much wa general and how much was accessing the site via mobile. I can not check (currently). My laptop is broken and needs replacing.

[wobbly]

Maybe simplist summary of what I wrote is, ...

If there's a recent topiic I can find it and commeny/reply to it, if it's not recent I have buckleys. I know there's a music thread in idle chatter. I know the thing exists. I do not know if it's a phone thing or a forum thing or just a thing. At my end it simply.just does not exist, along with other stuff in that thread,... I can not tell you what doesn't exist exist, b because if it wasn't recent I can not see, what I can not see, you Ken?

[MITZE]

To my understanding, it doesn't exist, because Idle Chatter and Site Discussion were cleaned out because of ???

[fruviad]

Which software was used for the forums when they were hosted at oook.cz? Is the current platform an "upgrade" of that, or is it a completely different application?

[MITZE]

Going by Nick's first comment, my takeaway is that it was an old old version of vBulletin, and what's being currently used is the current-ish version.

[Gwarl]

Which software was used for the forums when they were hosted at oook.cz? Is the current platform an "upgrade" of that, or is it a completely different application?

Yeah this is the newest version. Couldn't simply run the older version because that relied on a similarly ancient version of PHP. The fact that this is the same software is the only reason we carried over the old content.

And yes, a couple of forums were lost because of an out of memory error.

[wobbly]

Double checked, and yeah some old threads disappearing, was what I was running into in this specific case.

In a more general sense, I do find this site generally awkward to navigate and to quick check.

Not sure how easy that is to change? Sounds like you are using software to match up with the old forum?

I generally find the forum software used by say bay12games or freeorion much simpler/more intuitive. I find most sites have a better set up, I'm just giving examples from places I'm familiar with.