Forum Upgrade - What do you want to see?

[Pickysaurus]

We're in the process of doing a major upgrade which will update the forums to the latest version of Invision Community and as part of that we thought now is a good time to really look at the structure/layout of the forums to see if there's anywhere we can improve them. The structure of the board has been pretty static since they first opened and it may be time to retire/merge/rearrange some things. It's definitely quite intimidating as a new user to be dropped into the forums and know where to post.

 

Here are a few changes we're thinking of making:

 

Game Communities using Clubs

 

Invision Community comes with a feature called "Clubs". We think this will be a great addition to the site and will allow discussion about specific games within a siloed environment, somewhat like a Reddit sub. This separation will also allow us to empower volunteer Community Champions to give them more influence over how these clubs are moderated and allow them to promote relevant content to their audience. (More on Community Champions in the future!)

 

Smaller communities will start out using a shared modding discussion section that uses tags to allow for better searching/filtering of the topics but can be spun off into new club if there's a enough enthusiasm around the game or members of the community come forward as champions.

 

Due to the update, a new forum will no longer be automatically created when a game is approved on the website.

 

 

Reshuffle the board index

 

There will be some consideration around simplifying the board index to have less options visible at the top level. This may involve merging redundant/inactive forums. What that looks like can be guided by your feedback. We're hoping to have the index feature a clear distinction between 3 types of chat: Support with Nexus Mods (website and applications), Modding Chat and general social discussion.

 

 

Featuring the best content

 

Conversations that are particularly positive or relevant will be featured on the site making them easier to discover. We hope this empowers users to post more and get involved in topics that interest them.

 

 

Better Theme

 

We've put together a new theme for the forums to make it fit in with our website and branding. This old forum skin has it's charm but making it look like part of the website seems like a win for everyone.

 

 

A clean separation

 

As the veterans on the site may know, the current forums and website are tied together in some ancient, spaghetti coding that is a large source of technical debt for us. With the upgrade, we'll be cutting all direct ties between the website and the forums. Anywhere the two services share the same databases or infrastructure. In the short terms this means some of the social features of the website may be temporarily unavailable, but in the long time it allows us to innovate both the forum and the website more quickly without worrying about a change to one part of the system causing a cascade that degrades the other.

 

 

There are a few more benefits that you may be interested in too:

• No more BBCode - The new forum features a much more powerful editor.
• More secure - Having the latest version of the software means we're always up to date with the latest security patches and have the most modern protection against spammers or other malicious actors.
• Better search - The new search will be more robust and produce more relevant results.

 

So my question to you all is this "What do you like or dislike about the current forums? If you could change anything about the layout or features what would it be?"

 

[showler]

I like the collapsing threads featured in the Collections comments sections. Much less scrolling.

 

I've seen requests before regarding auto-spoilering/collapsing overly long posts which would be amazing when people forget to spoiler comment their mod lists.

 

Actually, a dedicated code of some sort for posting mod lists (and a proper export function from Vortex) might be helpful as well. The cleaner the information we get, the more helpful we can be.

 

Since forums for new games won't be automatically created that might eliminate one of my major annoyances. Which is that the new forums get dumped into the "Game Specific Forums" category rather than into the correct letter sub-forum and make it overly long and slow on mobile.

 

I'm not sure if your new search will help with things like searching for "VR" due to being below three letters, but it would be nice.

[Pagafyr]

I know it wouldn't likely be possible to make it so the views number of visits to a thread is reduced so when I return and edit or add to a post in one thread my return to that thread isn't counted as another visit to my thread.

 

Just to realize how many actual views are other peoples I started accounting for my additions to see how many visitors viewed my thread's posts.

 

The numbers of actual visits from different individuals may not be accurate since the visitors too could be returning and re-reading posts at different times. Or the visitors could be reading one post, rebounding from another thread back to my thread there and reading more of the posts I have there.

 

I feel like a donor since so many views make it seem like my threads have some popularity. It would be neat if the readers could leave a message without interrupting a thread posts at the end of one page to a story is set to be continued in the next post on my threads posts to another page which I am writing on my computer and is in development.

 

Maharg47, many others, and I have had occasions where nice thoughts someone shared cut into the flow of the story branching off from a previous post did upset the story too dramatically. While the others would have liked to have had the view count not add to our views count so we would be able to see that the views were other people's.

[Pagafyr]

Here's a thought. In the area of the threads put the visitors settings like our profile's so their avatar pix shows as visited. And remove the last 5 visitors from the Profile accounts.

 

I have had more visits then just 5; some days. They don't post anything, so it leaves me with a visitor who may have read one of my threads posts and not thought to PM me.

 

No point in have a PM set up if the visitors to my posts and my profile by no means intend to say anything. It's like they think people can read their minds. LOL

[Pagafyr]

Just a thought

[showler]

I suppose we are still lacking the technology to make the computers of the worst spammers explode?

[TheVampireDante]

I suppose we are still lacking the technology to make the computers of the worst spammers explode?

Unfortunately...

 

Still, something to look forward to.

[Pagafyr]

deleted

[Guest deleted34304850]

i would like the abilty to block as in - never see - ever under any circumstances - users and their content that i dont want to interact with on any level, ever.

[showler]

i would like the abilty to block as in - never see - ever under any circumstances - users and their content that i dont want to interact with on any level, ever.

+1