Mod Browsing Overhaul Discussion

[HadToRegister]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:12 PM, Glitchfinder said:

If I were to sum it up more concisely: I use quick search when I already know what mod I want. I use full search when I am trying to find a mod I hope might exist.

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I used to use Quicksearch in both instances, because it returned far more accurate results, than that filtered screen with all the checkboxes ever did.

Whenever people would ask for help saying “I can't find this mod” or that mod, I would specifically tell them not to use the “big Search” (that usually tells you that it excluded a 5 digit number of results because of TAGS), and instead would tell them to use quick search exclusively, it used to be one powerful little search.

Now, it's worhtless 
 

[carpesangrea]

  On 3/28/2025 at 10:41 AM, kyeaxford1 said:

You know I'm just fed up with the devs because at this point they are basically ignoring, lying and downright ignoring all the negative feedback. If any well advertised and easy to access poll was put out for those who use the new site I truly believe that it would support and reversion to the old design or at the very least an option to switch back. The only reason I can think of that the devs have not done so it out of cowardice and pride that they know they have made a mistake and going to force it on the users because admitting they have got this redesign wrong would hurt there egos. 

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Every time they pull crap like this, they do irreparable damage to their image and their platform. The sheer arrogance and hubris is on a whole other level and will ultimately be their undoing.

[kat1004]

  On 3/28/2025 at 1:13 PM, Demorphic said:

During this release we have collected HotJar feedback from multiple survey pulses from thousands of users, with more to come after further improvements. We've been running ongoing focus groups through Discord and multiple user interviews. The release was preceded by a beta period with a steadily ramping number of users, whilst fixing emergent issues and monitoring usage data. This has been done while continuing to serve close to 400 million mod downloads over the last 4 weeks and over 16k TB of data.

While there's room to keep improving, 75% of respondents to our last post-launch survey rated the pages 3-5 stars. With change always comes a period of adjustment, and we are committed to keep listening to your feedback and improving our services.

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The issue with HotJar is that a lot of users use adblockers, and it's generally blocked by said adblockers for being untrustworthy.

The users you're getting feedback from are either casual users who don't go on the site often and don't have adblockers, or people who thought it was worth the potential risk to their computers/privacy.

Run a poll that doesn't run on HotJar, see what the actual feedback is.

[Glitchfinder]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:17 PM, HadToRegister said:

I used to use Quicksearch in both instances, because it returned far more accurate results, than that filtered screen with all the checkboxes ever did.

Whenever people would ask for help saying “I can't find this mod” or that mod, I would specifically tell them not to use the “big Search” (that usually tells you that it excluded a 5 digit number of results because of TAGS), and instead would tell them to use quick search exclusively, it used to be one powerful little search.

Now, it's worhtless 
 

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This is true as well. For Fallout 4 if I want Minutemen mods I put "Minutemen" into the quick search and hit enter to see what I get. If I want to go looking for armor mods that might be worth adding to my game, I would pull up the full search, fiddle with tags to limit it to armor mods, and then chug through page after page of semi-relevant results to maybe find something I might want to check out.

Now my only option is a derivative of the second one.

[kyeaxford1]

  On 3/28/2025 at 11:42 AM, Demorphic said:

Sorry you are fed up. I'll try to clear a few things up but ultimately, I think there's little we can do at this stage to satisfy your complaints other than just switching back to how the website was. To be clear, we are not switching the website back to how it was.

In terms of ignoring some feedback, we've read all of the feedback but yes, some of it will need to be ignored, at least in terms of responding to everything. There's been 1.8k replies in this thread alone, and that's excluding feedback from multiple Discord servers and Reddit and various other social channels. We need to organise feedback and build a list of priorities for the next period of work.

Are we lying? well I don't think this is happening intentionally. We are a team of humans, with human fallibilities, working on a fairly complex project, trying to build the ship while it is sailing, while managing a huge range of expectations and both internal and external priorities. We definitely have pride in wanting to do something worthwhile and do good work. We by nature value our own internal priorities but always endeavour to balance this with lots of user focus groups, beta testing period, Hotjar surveys and raw data coming into our dashboard, to ensure we lead by user priorities.

Like I said previously, a big news piece will be coming your way, probably on Monday, with a lot more context and things we will be working on as a result of all the feedback. Following that a breakdown of planned work will be published in our monthly update. Our objective has always been to find a balance between improvements and continuity, to develop our infrastructure to support the growth of the platform, while clearing away so much technical debt and accumulated issues with the site.

Yesterday was the end of sprint retrospective meeting here. We have our own adapted process, but it's sort of like this. The meeting includes product, design, community, front-end, back-end, and we've been working through all of your feedback and seeing how this fits into the next period of work. We are listening, we are iterating and improving and we do have the interests of the community at heart. We do make mistakes, sorry but who doesn't. We have lost patience at times with some of the outright abusive feedback and death threats that team members have received. I think we keep improving as a team, and making modding easy, while staying true to our power userbase will continue to be our objective.

I have no doubt that Monday's update will not please people who just want to go back to the old site. (For context, the last time the site was updated, there were angry people who just wanted to go back to the old site). Change is hard, particularly when the added value seems to be limited, or unclear. We will be shouting a lot more about the added value and will keep adding value, and keep iterating. I hope that you can have a bit of patience while we work these things out and to some degree give us a chance to expand on this vision.

 

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So in the end even if there is a large amount of evidence that people want to go back or want the option to switch back which given that I would say at least 70% of the 1.8k replies in this thread and likely a large percentage of the replies in other social channels you will just ignore it and push forward? As for change being hard I agree but that is especially true when the change is unnecessary and unwanted and as in this case it detrimental to the people using the site. For all your claims of wanting to improve and all the supposed good feedback and happy users I just cannot see any clear evidence of this and simply refusing to listen to the huge amount of people who want to switch back or at least the option to is just the equivalent of sticking you head in the sand and deluding yourselves into thinking you are right, it won't make this website any better and as a lot of people have said it has made this site harder to use. Put a poll on all the main game mod pages for a few days and see the results and then if it does show that people want to go back or have the option to then maybe show a little humility and say "yeah we were wrong we have listened" instead of just going forward despite what your userbase wants because in the end this is a site for the userbase. 

[HadToRegister]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:21 PM, Glitchfinder said:

This is true as well. For Fallout 4 if I want Minutemen mods I put "Minutemen" into the quick search and hit enter to see what I get. If I want to go looking for armor mods that might be worth adding to my game, I would pull up the full search, fiddle with tags to limit it to armor mods, and then chug through page after page of semi-relevant results to maybe find something I might want to check out.

Now my only option is a derivative of the second one.

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Using your “Armor” example, what I would've done using Quick search instead, is I would've typed in ARMOR, then when the dropdown list filled up, I'd hit ENTER, and end up with a LIST of several pages of MODS with ARMOR in the title.
Which, when also switching the sorting option to RECENTLY UPDATED, or MOST DOWNLOADED, would instantly give me A LIST of the most recent, and popular ones.

Also, if I want to tighten up the search, if I kept seeing the armors I liked, with something like the body type included, then I would just use the quick search again and put in the body type and ARMOR and get an even more refined list.

It used to be very easy to keep honing down your search without a big stupid window getting in your way, instead you could stay focused on your task.

IE using Quick Search you didn't HAVE to "fiddle with tags” to limit the search to armor, quick search did it itself, that's why I always told people to stop wasting their time with the “Big Search”, also, because TAGS on this site are really pretty useless to begin with.

[showler]

  On 3/28/2025 at 3:57 PM, Demorphic said:

The window is gone but your recent searches are saved and can be run again.

 

Also, you can always bookmark well-used, custom searches, such as

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One thing is that if I open the quick search and type "witcher" then the results appear in the overlay window.  If I type "witcher" and hit enter, the results appear in a "search results" page.  And if I open the quick search and click on my previous search of "witcher" then the results also appear in the "search results" page.  There appears to be no way to stay in the quick search overlay while re-using a previous search without re-typing it and avoiding hitting enter.

[showler]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:18 PM, kat1004 said:

The users you're getting feedback from are either casual users who don't go on the site often and don't have adblockers, or people who thought it was worth the potential risk to their computers/privacy.

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And I one again must ask:  What about either of those things is a disqualifying factor for randomly selecting people to get their opinion on the website change?

[Glitchfinder]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:42 PM, showler said:

And I one again must ask:  What about either of those things is a disqualifying factor for randomly selecting people to get their opinion on the website change?

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It's no longer random, for one. The entire point of a random sample is to eliminate sampling bias, so adding a sample bias back in after randomly selecting users will affect the results. The actual impact on the survey can only be guessed at, because there is no control group we can compare against to see what eliminating the more tech savvy users from survey responses would change in the results.

[kat1004]

  On 3/28/2025 at 4:42 PM, showler said:

And I one again must ask:  What about either of those things is a disqualifying factor for randomly selecting people to get their opinion on the website change?

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Harming the users who use the site most frequently because they weren't randomly picked from a hat to risk their computers' safety is... very much not a good look in general. 

I NEVER said anything about those being "disqualifying factors" though, so don't put words in my keyboard. They should run an actual poll though, one that gets feedback from as many users as possible. See how popular the changes actually are.