Minecraft Forum Beta Ending Soon - Help Us Test It!
Try Out the New Forum!
If you recall, we have been hard at work getting the new, improved Minecraft Forum up and ready to go! Loaded with improvements - ranging from post editors that don't eat your formatting anymore, to improved load times, layouts, and more - we think you will really enjoy them! However, we need your help putting the final touches on everything.
Ideally, we want the new forum format to go live next week, but just to be sure everything is in order, we would like you to help us test everything out! Make posts! Edit posts! Report me, and everyone else you see on the beta forum! Anything and everything you can think of to help us make it the very best it can be when it goes live is greatly appreciated. Even better, constructive feedback (positive or negative) could earn you a custom title on the new forum!
I can't wait for the new forum to be implemented as default. It's indeed faster and looks simplier, more organized. Also I sent a feedback with something missing on the new forum
*Reports Sacheverell for...uhh...being a content admin*
(JK)
Also, the spoiler tags don't work. Like, at all. The ugly new "spoiler click here" button changes when you click on it, but nothing is every actually hidden (except for everything that isn't supposed to be hidden).
Also also, whether or not text formatting actually happens when requested is wildly inconsistent, user signatures don't appear on their posts about half the time, the information typically found under the user avatar is missing, outbound links (such as mediafire) just redirect back to the page you're already on instead of leading where they're told to, and there's this weird, useless little button green dot in the corner of the avatar picture that doesn't appear to actually do anything besides look horribly out of place.
Also also also, I was unable to find any noticeable improvements. Load times are exactly the same as they already were and the "improved layout" is, as previously specified, exactly the opposite.
Moral of the story: If it ain't broke, don't break it. Please. That's the one lesson you corporate fools never seem to learn.
But... But... JS makes things sexy!
But not quite as sexy as NoScript
For some reason, I thought the site had already gone live when I logged on a few days ago and I thought, "wow, it looks great!" Then I saw this post, and was reminded of the atrocious green nav bar that is to come... other than that, I'm a big fan of the fixed post editing and other features, but the color scheme and general look of it just don't appeal to me at all.
Has post editing really been fixed? I've only tested the new site a little, but I haven't been able to confirm that. Considering the host of new problems with formatting posts, I can't see how it could be.
Either way, its too great a sacrifice for too miniscule a payoff. Even if that one tiny problem has been solved (which I've seen no indication of), it's only been replaced with numerous other problems that are equally crippling, if not more so, which really defeats the purpose. It simply wouldn't be worth it.
The editor is 100% fixed, so it shouldn't eat your posts anymore.
As part of any software engineering, you cannot control everything. Nor does creating a new forum insure complete support of everything. Even a small change can have drastic changes to something you never realized. It is just part of software engineering.
If something does not work, that is why you report it, so that it can be fixed.
Yes, I understand where bugs come from, and I have reported them (that is, after all, what this thread is here for), but I was actually referring to the "small changes" in the site design that (as an equally unfortunate result) caused them. While the garish new design is completely unnecessary, very ill-conceived and quite unpleasant, it is not a bug. Someone actually did that deliberately.
Bugs that are a result of making improvements to the site I can and will readily forgive, but there's really no excuse for bugs that result from someone trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken in the first place.
First Google, then Windows, then iTunes, then deviantArt, then Twitter and now this site as well. I suppose it was naïve of me to expect any better.
Well, it's something I suppose, but it's still too great a sacrifice for too miniscule a payoff. Surely that could have been fixed without implementing such an unsightly design?
That's a grand theory and all, except it's blatantly not doing any good to point out things like:
1) Childish eyesore icons are bad. I don't care whose ego this crushes, everybody hates them. We told you so when you first invited people to view the 'improved' forum. They should have been reverted by now, and maybe somebody with some competence at art could have made you new ones if you absolutely needed to change something which was in no way deficient.
2) Forum themes are a default expected of modern forums. Where the age of this forum excuses that's missing options which are considered standard, this lack on the new forum - and the response that you should get third-party software to fix it - is unacceptable. I helped mod a small forum using free software on a free host years ago, and even that had themes. After weeks on end of telling people that bright, 'cheerful' colors are an eyesore, we've barely managed to step away from all-white for the only theme that team has any intention of putting together.
3) Features pointed out as missing, such as previewing a thread, are still missing. Again, it seems there's very little effort to make this new site better based on the feedback that was requested, so it's likely that the request for feedback was largely a PR stunt that failed. People who gave feedback largely saw themselves dismissed and their interest in making the forum you expect us to use actually viable ignored.
4) This new, 'improved' site is so unprofessional that I have to lower my Internet security to use it. It's coded in such a way that the text-box to respond to a topic registers as suspect javascript and is blocked by default. I don't have that problem here, nor on any forum that I consider worth visiting.
Honestly, this new and 'improved' forum isn't even up to the sub-par standard set by the one we're currently on, and it seems pretty clear that the team setting it up isn't actually interested in feedback other than hollow ego-stroking. And you reverted to an even cruder setup for... it to work better on smartphones? I've not seen a single element of the new forum function faster or better on my PC.
[font=georgia,serif]I'm sorry, could you rephrase that, because I'm not entirely sure what you mean? Does it tell me whether whichever user who's post I'm currently looking at is online, or just whether I'm online?[/font]
[font=georgia,serif]I agree with you, sir, except for the point about forum themes. I can't know of a single "modern forum" that offers that feature, and I would hardly call them "default" or "expected". They would, of course, be an excellent solution to the problem of the eyesore design, and I would approve of that, but I do not believe that they're something all forums are expected to have.[/font]