My general disdain for the new forum

[thereaverofdarkness2]

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but honestly it's difficult for me to tone down my hatred any further. I feel I have to let you guys know of the things that have been bothering me about changes to this forum. It all seems to go along a strategy of streamlining input which is presumably to make posting easier, but it actually serves to make it more difficult if I want to maintain the same quality of posting I used to on my old forum account. It's easier if I'm okay with all the default settings and actually understand how they work--but if I actually understood how it all works, why would I be satisfied with the way it works? It's a self-defeating setup.

 

Text Input Pane

The text input pane automagically renders everything the way it'll look when you post it--well except for the margins being different. This is great for people who know very little about computers, but it really should be optional because it makes it extremely difficult to edit the post exactly the way I want it. It doesn't allow me to place the cursor in a spot that distinguishes whether it's at the end but inside an HTML function, or at the end and just past an HTML function. That's an important difference, but the forum chooses for me and it chooses at the end but inside, which is honestly the one I'm less likely to want. Why can't I have the option to just not have it all automatically render? I don't want it to. I could go on for hours why it makes trouble for me, there are that many problems with it. Just let some of us not have it do that, please! I had to add in the paragraph headers after typing the whole message, for one, because of the way it handles changes in font/size/settings. It makes it almost impossible to get back to the setting you were at before, and it's actually easier to construct your post in a different order from how it's supposed to be read.

 

Quoting Other Posts

I can't quote two different posts or split one quote into two. I cannot select the quote, only the text within it. I cannot make my own quote boxes because I do not know which HTML quote style is used, if any, but the ones I have tried using don't seem to work. So instead, I have just made multiple posts for multiple quotes, and hoped the forum would stitch my posts together--another thing that is automatic that I have no control over. Sometimes I want to stitch two posts together but it won't do it automatically and I don't have the option to fix it myself. Sometimes I want them separate for a reason, and I don't have the option to fix that.

 

Email Spam

My email is inundated with spam from this forum. I've tried to change the settings, but at best all I can do is make the default setting be to email me once a week, and I have to set every individual post I follow to not email me at all. Why is this even a thing? I should have to specifically request to receive emails. Instead, there seems to be no way to not receive emails without going out of my way to make them stop coming in! I don't think that's a very popular setting. Why is it forced on us? There's a bunch of settings related to emails, they're confusing, and everything defaults to sending as many emails as possible. Why is there not one easy-to-find setting that enables you to receive emails, that defaults to off?

 

It just makes my experience here on this forum so much more frustrating. Sometimes I come here to say one simple thing, and I leave in a rage after having spent a half hour not figuring out how to accomplish what should be a simple task. This never happened on the old forum.

Edited June 28, 2016 by thereaverofdarkness2

[Kerbart]

Most of this is known, and sadly “it is what it is.”

I do agree that the quoting is a total disaster if you want to do it the proper way—combining multiple post quotes in one reply, split out by one or more fragments per post—I’m now at the point where I’ve given up on typing certain replies because it’s simply impossible to write a neatly formatted reply without looking like a troglodyte (some posters here don't care… yes, I’m talking about you, *******!). And that is with a desktop browser, not from my tablet or phone.

I cannot believe that it is a desired side effect of the current forum software for people to post less, yet here we are.

From what I understand,  plain-text tag style editing is not really possible with the current software, so we’re stuck with this.

 

[Stone Blue]

NOT to mention the horrible default color/font scheme...

If you look at the Invision website (the dev company of the forum software), there IS a LOT of settings that could be used by TPTB, to make a MUCH more user (and eye) friendly color/font theme... Its actually highly customizable... However we have been stuck with the horrible default theme since the forum switch...

A HUGE THANK YOU (from me and my ancient, failing eyes), to @n.b.z. for writing a REALLY nice, dark Stylish theme...

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

 

I completely understand your frustration, but I have some workarounds that might help you:

3 hours ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but honestly it's difficult for me to tone down my hatred any further. I feel I have to let you guys know of the things that have been bothering me about changes to this forum. It all seems to go along a strategy of streamlining input which is presumably to make posting easier, but it actually serves to make it more difficult if I want to maintain the same quality of posting I used to on my old forum account. It's easier if I'm okay with all the default settings and actually understand how they work--but if I actually understood how it all works, why would I be satisfied with the way it works? It's a self-defeating setup.

 

Text Input Pane

The text input pane automagically renders everything the way it'll look when you post it--well except for the margins being different. This is great for people who know very little about computers, but it really should be optional because it makes it extremely difficult to edit the post exactly the way I want it. It doesn't allow me to place the cursor in a spot that distinguishes whether it's at the end but inside an HTML function, or at the end and just past an HTML function. That's an important difference, but the forum chooses for me and it chooses at the end but inside, which is honestly the one I'm less likely to want. Why can't I have the option to just not have it all automatically render? I don't want it to. I could go on for hours why it makes trouble for me, there are that many problems with it. Just let some of us not have it do that, please! I had to add in the paragraph headers after typing the whole message, for one, because of the way it handles changes in font/size/settings. It makes it almost impossible to get back to the setting you were at before, and it's actually easier to construct your post in a different order from how it's supposed to be read.

 

Quoting Other Posts

I can't quote two different posts or split one quote into two. I cannot select the quote, only the text within it. I cannot make my own quote boxes because I do not know which HTML quote style is used, if any, but the ones I have tried using don't seem to work. So instead, I have just made multiple posts for multiple quotes, and hoped the forum would stitch my posts together--another thing that is automatic that I have no control over. Sometimes I want to stitch two posts together but it won't do it automatically and I don't have the option to fix it myself. Sometimes I want them separate for a reason, and I don't have the option to fix that.

It is possible to quote multiple posts, by click the "+" icon near the bottom left of every post you want to quote, then clicking the "Quote x posts" popup in the bottom right of the screen when your cursor is where you want to insert the quotes.  

To split one quote in two, press enter where you want to split the quote, then move the cursor to the newly created blank line, and press enter again.   

There is a button that makes a quote box in the bar at the top of the editor.  It looks like a double quote.

Posts will merge after 10 minutes, this was in the old forum software too.

3 hours ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

Email Spam

My email is inundated with spam from this forum. I've tried to change the settings, but at best all I can do is make the default setting be to email me once a week, and I have to set every individual post I follow to not email me at all. Why is this even a thing? I should have to specifically request to receive emails. Instead, there seems to be no way to not receive emails without going out of my way to make them stop coming in! I don't think that's a very popular setting. Why is it forced on us? There's a bunch of settings related to emails, they're confusing, and everything defaults to sending as many emails as possible. Why is there not one easy-to-find setting that enables you to receive emails, that defaults to off?

You want to go to this link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/notifications/options/

Here's how to make everything work like the old forums:

Uncheck "Send me news and information"

Check both options below "Automatically follow content" 

Set "Method to use for content I follow automatically" to "A notification when new content is posted"

Uncheck everything below "Notification preferences"

Now turn email off for everything below that, and turn on notification for everything except:

• New content for things I follow
• Someone comments on something I follow
• Someone reviews something I follow
• Someone I am following makes a post

Now follow this link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/discover/25/

And click "add this feed to my list of feeds" or a similar button, then click "set this feed as default" or a similar button.  Now there will be a little button near the top of the page, next to the "mark site read" button that reads "Settings."  

Yes, that's about as far as you can get from "defaults to," but it should work.

3 hours ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

It just makes my experience here on this forum so much more frustrating. Sometimes I come here to say one simple thing, and I leave in a rage after having spent a half hour not figuring out how to accomplish what should be a simple task. This never happened on the old forum.

Finally, there is still some working bbcode tags, that will not auto-parse in the editor.

I hope I've been helpful, there might be some more answers in this thread: 

  

[Trann]

@Mad Rocket Scientist has responded in a most helpful way and with zero snark.  I think I could have managed only one of those things.

[thereaverofdarkness2]

20 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

You want to go to this link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/notifications/options/

Here's how to make everything work like the old forums:

Uncheck "Send me news and information"

Check both options below "Automatically follow content" 

Set "Method to use for content I follow automatically" to "A notification when new content is posted"

Uncheck everything below "Notification preferences"

Now turn email off for everything below that, and turn on notification for everything except:

• New content for things I follow
• Someone comments on something I follow
• Someone reviews something I follow
• Someone I am following makes a post

Excellent! Some of those options are confusing. In particular, the one that says " Method to use for content I follow automatically: " A notification when new content is posted -- when I was reading it, I was thinking 'A notification on the forum, or an email notification? I don't want an email every time someone posts something. But maybe it means notifications without email? Nah! Why would it be at the beginning of the list!?'

 

20 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Now follow this link: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/discover/25/

And click "add this feed to my list of feeds" or a similar button, then click "set this feed as default" or a similar button.  Now there will be a little button near the top of the page, next to the "mark site read" button that reads "Settings."  

Cheeky. =)

 

20 minutes ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

I hope I've been helpful,

 

Yes, very helpful! Now I just need a workaround for this darn double-spacing I get when I hit enter!

[Superfluous J]

24 minutes ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

Yes, very helpful! Now I just need a workaround for this darn double-spacing I get when I hit enter!

Hold shift when you hit enter.

Except right after you hit enter and forget to hit shift, and then backspace. When you do that, it'll still double space.

And when you backspace to clear that, you'll go up to the line right under what you previously typed. This is where you wanted to be, so awesome. Start typing.

And then the forum will snap your cursor back to the end of the previous line.

PROGRESS.

[thereaverofdarkness2]

Well, let's try it.
Mm..it's tedious, but functional.

Edited June 29, 2016 by thereaverofdarkness2

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

3 minutes ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

Yes, very helpful! Now I just need a workaround for this darn double-spacing I get when I hit enter!

I'm glad I could help, and @5thHorseman has it.  

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

To split one quote in two, press enter where you want to split the quote, then move the cursor to the newly created blank line, and press enter again.   

Thank you, @Mad Rocket Scientist, that was an appreciated constructive contribution.

The problem is that it doesn’t always work. Then you end up with one big quote block with a lot of empty lines inside. When that happens, it is usually impossible to get the cursor outside of the quote block as well. At that point I just give up. Right now for instance, I cannot type something above the quote block.

WYSIWYG is fantastic when it works, but not when it doesn't. And unlike other system, IPB does not have a “plan B” for when the interface misbehaves.

When the forum switched over I was fairly ambivalent and felt that people complaining were just not open to change. Now that we've been on this system for a while I’m not really seeing any blatant advantages (aside from the admittedly magnanimous “it works”) while I’m getting less and less patient with all the little naggles one runs into on a daily basis.

[kiwi1960]

27 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

(snip)

 while I’m getting less and less patient with all the little naggles one runs into on a daily basis.

Yes, I too am going crazy with all those little naggles... I've killed so many this week alone, and the car is ending dirty and very dented.....

oh wait.... did I misunderstand?

[HebaruSan]

Hold on, gotta suit up...

        

... OK, that's better:  I like it. As a consumer of other people's posts, I'm glad there's a limit to how crazy you-all can go. A standardized quoting system means my poor eyes don't have to deal with parsing disparate styles and quotes-of-quotes-of-quotes of posts I've just read inline all over the place, and the same goes for fonts, paragraph breaks, images, etc.

7 hours ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

Why can't I have the option to just not have it all automatically render? I don't want it to.

This is just a guess, but I'm guessing it's because your post needs to be quotable and editable by all other users. If you use some syntax that the WYSIWYG interface can't understand and I quote you, then we are at an impasse. Whereas if it's all controlled by the same editor, then it's free to save off arbitrary metadata to help it figure out how to deal with each post, and we retain 100% compatibility.

None of which is to dismiss anyone's frustrations or specific gripes with the system (especially on mobile, which I've never tried). It's definitely not perfect, and it takes some time to get used to it. But on the whole I've found it to be functional, as well as convenient for the most common tasks.

I await your thoughtful replies.

[thereaverofdarkness2]

41 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

If you use some syntax that the WYSIWYG interface can't understand and I quote you, then we are at an impasse.

If the editor doesn't recognize my syntax, the forum won't recognize it, either. You'll still be able to quote it just fine.

My guess is that the real reason they don't want to give us that option is because mobile users are the new sheeple and our new corporate overlords want to give stupid people a leg up so they can push intelligence out of the population and make us easier to control. But hey, that's just a theory that fits existing data.

[Frybert]

49 minutes ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

mobile users are the new sheeple

Let's not go around insulting groups of users please.

[thereaverofdarkness2]

10 minutes ago, Frybert said:

Let's not go around insulting groups of users please.

Sorry, I guess I'm just a little frustrated. I stepped out of line.

[HebaruSan]

1 hour ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

If the editor doesn't recognize my syntax, the forum won't recognize it, either. You'll still be able to quote it just fine.

"the forum" only has to pass the low bar of generating HTML that a browser can display, though. It doesn't have to understand posts well enough to edit them. For example, suppose you type a sentence with some bold and italic text that incorrectly interleaves open and close tags. Sometimes, browsers can understand that sort of thing, so it's probably OK to translate it into <b/> and <i/> tags and call it a day, if all we care about is the display. But the editor probably needs a semantically-correct DOM tree where each node corresponds to a contiguous block of content with the same open/close tags, so already at the level of this simplest example we're having to make compromises and generate a modified version of your text, a version you did not write, just so I can quote it.

I could be wrong, and this might not be a factor, but it's the kind of thing that comes to mind when a product locks people in to its specific editor.

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, thereaverofdarkness2 said:

mobile users

If the forum change was to make things better for mobile users, then I have really bad news...

I loved the old forum on mobile, mostly due to the ability to use the non-mobile page on my phone. The new one is tolerable so long as all I do is read and maybe post short things with no formatting.

[HebaruSan]

In case anyone is curious, I typed the bbcode version of this (with square brackets instead of angle brackets):

For example, suppose you type <b>a sentence with some bold and <i>italic text that</b> incorrectly interleaves open and close tags</i>.

and it generated:

For example, suppose you type <strong>a sentence with some bold and </strong><strong><em>italic text that</em></strong><em> incorrectly interleaves open and close tags</em>. 

So instead of the two(?) tags that I typed, we've got 4-ish DOM nodes. But on the bright side for some, bbcode works for bold and italic!

[thereaverofdarkness2]

3 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

I could be wrong, and this might not be a factor, but it's the kind of thing that comes to mind when a product locks people in to its specific editor.

You're not wrong per se, but there's an easy workaround and forums have been using it for some fifteen years now without problem. Only recently have any forums used the WYSIWYG pre-rendering method. When they don't use it and I copy+paste pre-formatted text it doesn't recognize, it simply un-formats it. I was never bothered by this because it allows me to select the exact formatting I want. But the text-rendering editor is also nice at times because it can allow you to paste pre-formatted text, although you won't always get the same result as what you copied.

There's no issue with it at all. If anything there's more issue with pre-rendering the text, because that's a new feature and therefore more prone to bugs. But people like it and so forums choose to use it.

But seriously, it would be incredibly easy to add the option for users to not have it pre-render text, and it would cause zero problems. These bugs were all worked out over ten years ago.

[Kerbart]

I suspect it's a bit like Apple. It's really good when it works well, which is most of the time. But when it doesnt work, Geniusses will just say "it just works" and declare your problem non-existent, and there's nothing that you can do to fix it.

Tags are ugly and clunky, and can be left open. But that can be fixed. The IPB interface deciding to take a day off and saying “nope, not doing it today” cannot be bypassed and that's the frustrating thing.

If it was in respect to something arcane and byzantine it would be acceptible, but on a discussion forum the ability to quote is pretty essential. And it's terribly broken.

[Bloojay]

I've still got no idea how to Spoiler-tab something.

[Ten Key]

3 hours ago, Bloojay said:

I've still got no idea how to Spoiler-tab something.

There's a little button along the top row of the editor, the little eye next to the smiley face. Clicking on it pops open a "spoiler" box you can type into. 

[Bloojay]

 

@Ten Key

Spoiler

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!! Thank you!