BETA-TEST THE NEW MINECRAFT FORUM
Today is a very special day, Minecrafters! We are very excited to invite you to beta-test the new, improved Minecraft Forum! This beta is the final step in moving Minecraft Forum onto the Cobalt community platform, an in-house platform that provides an improved forum experience, a full suite of content management tools, and faster loading times!
So, what does this mean for you? Well, we would like your input! Head over to the beta forum, give it a spin, and let us know what you think! Try out post formatting, searching around, anything you can think of! Upvote your friends! Report me for rule infractions! Test everything! If you would like to leave us feedback - good, bad, anything at all - see below!
FEEDBACK
If you have feedback to provide, a feature request, or you have found a bug please see the following threads: Every user that provides valuable feedback during the beta will be given an exclusive forum title to use once the site is live!
FEATURES:
Cobalt provides a number of new and improved features, this includes - but is not limited to - the following:
- Member Titles: Earn new member titles and select your member title of choice via My Account > Titles!
- New Content: Watch as new posts and threads are created with the automatically refreshing New Content feed.
- Email Digests: Notification spam no more! Notification digests are now available, receive emails only when is most convenient for you, set up your notifications settings via My Account > Notification Settings. Note: during the beta emails are disabled.
- Follow your favourite content creators and get notified when they make new posts! Keep up with your favourite mod fixes and texture pack updates with ease. Visit My Account > My Subscriptions > Users to manage who you're following.
Do you mean Chrome crashes?
If you do, what do you mean from it crashes?
Does it close?
Do you get a purple page with white text?
http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/1337-
The icons are also hard to figure out. What is what?
Sarcasm is "a sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt."
Hmm, that's odd, no where does it say that jokes in question form are always sarcasm. Which you were implying.
Websites that offer the choice of a dark theme get my respect because it is not only a preference issue but an accessibility one. I and many other people around the world physically can not use any interface that is brightly lit without some serious squinting and headaches. I need dark high contrast to be able to do anything on a computer, basically. Of course I use the OS dark theme to forcibly turn everything dark (including all websites) (excluding Chrome whose idea of accessibility is to kill disabled people) but whenever a stylish dark theme is available I always choose that instead of the butt-ugly generic one rendered by the browser or OS.
It is disappointing that you are not willing to offer the option of an alternate theme, stating only the reason "because we want to avoid multiple themes". What is so difficult or time-consuming about adding a theme selector to user profiles and mock up a quick css or template with slightly different icons and new colour values?
1) you guys removed Unicode and Alt code support... that really removes the capability for people to get creative with their topic titles and posts.
2)I could just be missing it but I couldn't find a way that you can even post images or videos on topics in the server category. There have been some great discussion topics on the old forum all because players had the freedom to 'customize' each post with active links to images and media content. removing these capabilities may make it clean but people don't come to a forum for being "clean": they come to a forum for the community. removing community freedoms that drive discussions will kill the forum community.
3) The server section seems much less personal and feels more like a blog post where you aren't part of a discussion but simply you are there to post replies to the blog post. And when you reply to someone else' reply, it doesn't even say that you replied to anyone in your actual post. It just shows up at the bottom and because it's out of context, it makes you look silly. I Like to have a more personal connection with my players so that I can communicate that their ideas and concerns are a #1 priority. I really hate this disconnect everyone has adapted between server admins and the players and I feel the server section of the forum encourages that ideal even more. Planet Minecraft does something like this too. But there is a reason why our server forums have more activity than Planet Minecraft.
4) Maybe this is just because the forum is still in beta but I think you guys should keep avatars and signatures even in the server section. This is not a professional forum for business discussion. This is supposed to be a casual forum where server fans have the freedom to talk about the things they love and express themselves in their posts. Most of your audience are kids. Removing things like signature use (image signature use) can be a bad thing.
Synopsis:
In the server section of the site:
• Bring back alt code and Unicode use
• Do not remove Image and media embed compatibility. These are essential elements to a successful forum. Removing them will kill this forum community.
• Don't sacrifice freedom for a more clean looking forum. Stay far away from the blog design; keep the forums personal where the community can express themselves.
• Where are the avatars and signatures?
I even pointed them at a forum with a nice, standard, dark theme, so they wouldn't have to strain the creativity that gave us hideous cube-icons - no luck.
This wasn't the only topic where I saw a response that reads a lot like "it's your responsibility to make our 'forum' tolerable by adding third-party mods." Well, thank you for telling me that I should have an ad-blocker running so that you at least don't get paid for me to look at this mess, but I don't feel like installing additional layers of software on my PC because you're too lazy to provide what is considered so basic that it's on freeware forums.
Having seen plenty of attempted discussions on the beta end with "ain't nobody got time for that - LOCKED", I'm done with the new forums before they're truly launched. It makes you wonder if the 'new and improved' is improved for them instead of their users. Faults that might be excused here by the age of the forum are glaring laziness on a new forum. Maybe we should marvel at the foolishness of reinventing the wheel when there's so many versions of forum software out there which already outperform what is being presented. Or perhaps we should wonder why they're putting up a joke instead of simply redirecting to reddit - where members of this community can sometimes be admitting you should go if you actually want somebody working on the game to maybe notice you.
That's probably giving them too much credit, though. It's more likely that the site is just bad, and that they've decided they don't need to make it good because you can download further programs and make it better yourself. The way it comes across, they're working on the assumption that everybody re-skins and selectively blocks elements of their forum anyways, so they should just throw everything out there with a half-baked theme and make you do all the filtering on your end. It's simply convenient that said assumption also means they can put less work into their forum.
However, it seems that external links (e.g. to Dropbox) are not working. If I post a link to another topic inside the forum, it works fine, but if I post an external one, it simply points to the page that it's embedded in. Is this on purpose, or a bug?
I went to check the beta forums and noticed the following (note: I'm not sure if all of them have been listed already.)
1. Signatures: Signatures don't show in the posts, as of yet, of course. But one thing I must say, I like how user-friendly the beta forum is.
2. Text formatting: As of now, there isn't much text formatting in the beta forums, especially the missing of the oh-so-popular BB code button. Some things like Twitter button, finding, replacing and going to is missing in the text formatting!
3. Some little confusion with the comment system: I mean, the UI is great and whatnot but one thing that stood out the most was upvoting and downvoting, I think reputation mode is better (I think I'm biased though).
Yeah, that's it. Great job with the beta forums! It will take quiet a while to get used to it though!
Cheers, Sach!