Petition: Return to VBulletin!

[MedwedianPresident]

PETITION: Bring back VBulletin

The new forum sotware has brought us many new features such as better font size control and polls with multiple questions.
 However, many of us have made complains about most of these points:

One word: Eyesore. I will confess to you my sin of playing ROBLOX, and this change in layout is comparable to what happened to ROBLOX a year and a half ago. The amount of content one can see at a time has been minimized by at least the factor of 3, and reading large texts is just uncomfortable. The choice of colors is a complete fail, and many buttons were removed completely. The KSP forum looks more like a social network than a place for professional communication.

Either SQUAD is aiming at simplifying the community to increase it's size, which means that KSP will stop being a good old indie game and will become something like Roblox or the people behind the forum change have made a serious mistake. The forum has lost it's unique feel. The PC version looks like a mobile site. Lots of wasted space. Simplification is the wrong way.

The loss of BBcode is...painful. Why did you have to remove the whole thing when just adding an OPTION to create content through WYSIWYG? 90% of all posts are broken now.

I understand that as the community gets larger, the "cute little game and cute little forum" feel where people actually WAIT for new posts on the forum and new versions actually add NEW CONTENT instead of only fixing bugs, will be lost, but this new forum has actually stripped the community of it's professional look. This forum looks like it aims at children. Seriously. Compare with ROBLOX.

This forum is actually meant for people to write LONG posts, even post STORIES and ESSAYS here. It has been stripped of it's seriousness. Now it looks like people are supposed to exchange small sentences. This is a Forum, not ROBLOX, not Facebook, not a Chatroom.

And at last, yes, several people have already noted that the new forum software is actually a DOWNGRADE from the old one. The forum just looks bland and stripped of many features.

SQUAD has severely disappointed us.

 

Is this the KSP Community Forum or is this the KerBlox Forum or KaceBook?

 

I hereby open a PETITION to return the forum to VBulletin. If SQUAD will not do this or at least return the forum to a comparable look and format while using the same software, the developers should expect that the community will shrink. I hope that the pleas will not be ignored just as they are on ROBLOX.

 

[Tex_NL]

Return to vBulletin? Yes! From the bottom of my heart YES! ASAP!

[razark]

56 minutes ago, MedwedianPresident said:

The KSP forum looks more like a social network than a place for professional communication.

While I am not a fan of the new forum, I just have to say: You do realize you're talking about a forum for a video game, right?

[LordFerret]

I see this thread being locked before the day is done.

 

3 words - not gonna happen

[PB666]

9 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

I see this thread being locked before the day is done.

 

3 words - not gonna happen

gonna is not a word, going to is two words.

Hey, ok the new forum has problems, we need to work with sys ops to fix the problems.

[Sampa]

no, I think the new forum is fine, but does need some tweaks...

[Hobbes Novakoff]

I hated the old forums. I shouldn't have to introduce people to the forums by telling them how to post pictures. The graphic design was ugly (looked like it was from the 1990s) and literally everything to do with quotes was horrid. I hated having to manually check every thread I've posted in to see if that post was an answer to my question or just banter. The mobile site was, to quote John Oliver, "Repurposed Bovine Waste," and when I used desktop on my mobile (as that was the only way I could browse and understand what was going on), I had to constantly zoom out to enter links in weird dialog boxes. When people quoted a wall of text to reply with a one-liner, I always ended up scrolling past the quote. And on the subject of blank space, the old forum was far too wide and annoying to read. There's a reason books are taller than they are wide, people. I also hated having tiny avatars that were impossible to make out. I shouldn't have to upload the same image twice, once for my profile and once for my avatar. And finally, font sizes are in points now, not "KSP Forum Size Units."

Edited November 30, 2015 by Hobbes Novakoff

[Superfluous J]

Here are 3, then: No way, mate.

They're not going back. Put your effort into making these forums better.

You're petitioning your father to go back to the gas guzzling, safety-rule breaking A-Team van that you loved riding in but could have killed you if it didn't irreparably break down somewhere, instead of trying to convince him to replace it with a better car than that Kia hatchback he thinks is so cool.

(Yeah my analogy broke down a little there but analogies are like oceans)

[Deddly]

I voted "no" because it's too early to judge. I have nothing against either formats thus far, but the main reasons given for changing to the new forum are good reasons. I would also like to add that there was nothing unique about the old KSP forums. There are many other forums I've come across that look identical.

Most of us instinctively react negatively to change. I say give the change a chance.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

You know what I think? We should just all return to the orbiter forums!

[Alshain]

Lol, It's probably not happening at this point, unless someone wants to pull a KerbalStuff.

[Elthy]

Dont go back, make sure the forum gets improved until its better than the old ones, e.g. with constructive criticism.

[The Aziz]

Okay, I wasn't going to post about new software, but this is a thing.
I have accounts on few game-related forums baset on this software, and they work just fine. Of course, there were some losses at migration, then some bugs after that, but I'm sure SQUAD didn't make all these problems on purpose.
So, since we're here, you know what this forums really need? Proper, Kerbal theme. And I'm certain that we'll get it anytime soon.

[Flymetothemun]

I affix my name to this petition to return to the former VBulletin forum software.

[WinkAllKerb'']

Wut getting used too some stuff is never annoyin for anyone ? ... tss tsss ... welcome the new forum ; ) (btw sig & [table][/table])

[Valerian]

1 hour ago, Deddly said:

I voted "no" because it's too early to judge. I have nothing against either formats thus far, but the main reasons given for changing to the new forum are good reasons. I would also like to add that there was nothing unique about the old KSP forums. There are many other forums I've come across that look identical.

Most of us instinctively react negatively to change. I say give the change a chance.

I second this

[Pronoes]

I agree it's far from perfect at the moment. 

My personal thoughts

 - Return BB code and source editing. WYSIWYG is all well and good, but a toggle option is better.
 - Options for colour please. KSP is a game (mostly) about doing stuff in space. There's no evidence of the blackness of space here. Just lots and lots of white.
 - "List New Posts" needs to be a thing. Not 'Threads' but 'Posts'. The unread threads is confusing. Is it threads or posts? Also, put it on the forum tab, not the activity tab. It's the first thing I, and presumably others, hit when visiting forums.
 - Colour. For the love of god colour.

[r4pt0r]

This actually hurts my eyes. Like I literally cannot browse for more than a few minutes because of the spacing/contrast/font size, IDK what but something is amiss and it is very uncomfortable.

[Guest]

Though I prefer vBulletin, it would be even more downtime, and as they said, they already failed at upgrading to vBulletin 5.

[TMS]

Vbulletin was never a long-term solution for hands-off admins.  It was old and busted with no viable upgrade path.

However, the notification/follow/subscription system on IPB sucks big time.

My "threads I posted in" list doesn't update.

Managed to set auto follow for any thread I post to, but the activity feed it provides is terribly verbose.  I don't want a list of every damned post made to a thread I posted in... can't I just get a list of threads with a way to take me to the first unread post?

And the activity feed settings don't seem to save properly.

Edited November 30, 2015 by TMS

[Tex_NL]

34 minutes ago, TMS said:

Vbulletin was never a long-term solution for hands-off admins.  It was old and busted with no viable upgrade path.

vBulletin is one of, and probably THE most versatile forums there is. It can be endlessly modded and customized. Everything you've been told it can not do and IPB can is a lie.

[FleshJeb]

1 hour ago, r4pt0r said:

This actually hurts my eyes. Like I literally cannot browse for more than a few minutes because of the spacing/contrast/font size, IDK what but something is amiss and it is very uncomfortable.

The same thing just happened on DailyKos. The other users recommended the Font Changer extension for Chrome. I just tried Verdana at 12pt for here, and it's not quite so hideous.

[Bill Phil]

Okay...

 

For everything there are pros and cons:

 

The pros of IPS 4 are pretty good. For example, there are more posts per page. I like that bit. Notifications are no longer nearly as limited as earlier. And for me it's much more mobile friendly, or at least appears so.

 

Now, there are cons. But, at least in my eyes, they are not big enough to go back. But I am only one person out of many.

[Norpo]

1 hour ago, r4pt0r said:

This actually hurts my eyes. Like I literally cannot browse for more than a few minutes because of the spacing/contrast/font size, IDK what but something is amiss and it is very uncomfortable.

Tip that may help you: Turn your screen brightness up a little bit. Once I did that it was back to normal again.

I think that the new forums are okay, and I really don't think Kasper wants to switch back to the old forums, the old forums were running on old, essentially depreciated software, possible security vulnerabilities were present, and it was just terrible to work on in the back-end (or so I hear)

The forum layout can probably be modified to be slightly different if enough people unanimously agree on some improvements, but I don't think going back to the old forums is going to be an option.

...If you hate the new forums so much you can't stand them, well, there's always Reddit.

[Bill Phil]

2 hours ago, r4pt0r said:

This actually hurts my eyes. Like I literally cannot browse for more than a few minutes because of the spacing/contrast/font size, IDK what but something is amiss and it is very uncomfortable.

This could be a plethora of things. Maybe it's some other piece of hardware and/or software. But any of these are possible.

 

Maybe adjusting monitor brightness could help.