Howdy, Antarans! It's been ages since a good old fashioned announcement about progress on something. It's time to bust out our thinking caps and get some ideas on the table. That's right; I'm looking for your opinion, thoughts, and feedback on something important that affects everybody. I've had this feeling for awhile now, that the forums are rather... Unwieldy, difficult to navigate or use, messy, congested, otherwise slow and "heavy", if you know what I mean. It could just be me, but I thought I'd check and see what you all thought. How do you feel about the forums as they are? If you think they could be improved, please tell us how! I'm talking structure, layout, design, everything. If an icon is 2 pixels too far to the left, I want to know. (JOKE ALERT) Seriously, though. You guys and gals are the ones that use the forums the most, each and every day, so if you could have your ideal forum, what would it be? I want the forums to be best designed to suit everyone and the needs of this community. Do we need more IC sections? Less IC sections? More categories, less categories, or prefixes, etc. Are there features you use a lot and would like to see improved? Are there features you never use and are just taking up space? Let us know in the replies below!
I'd personally like to see the following layout. Number = Header, Capital letter = forum, regular letter = subforum 1. OOC A. General Discussion a. Creativity Center b. Character Discussion B. Suggestions and Concerns C. Roleplay Planning D. Anything I missed 2. IC A. General Discussion B. Journals C. Market and Trade D. Politics and Debate E. Settlements a. Various settlements that are approved F. Factions a. Various factions that are approved G. Anything I missed
related or unrelated, the chatbox becomes laggy after a while, refreshing the page doesn't help, you need to close the tab and open a new one
This isn't a problem with the website or one we can really control easily, as the chat is a third party addon. I believe it's caused by caching all the messages, which is only cleared in a new tab. When there is too many stores messages in the history, it lags.
I'd like to see a bit more customizability in the forum appearance. I currently use the Halloween theme as it's the most colourful (rather than the bog-standard and frankly quite shitty looking dark grey slate), but even then it loudly proclaims "Happy Halloween" every time I log in. I'd love to see something where you can either change the spot colours and background colours, or hell, even being able to put in your own pictures to have a personal background. Either way, please make options to not have blank crap grey everywhere on the forums, thank you.
You can do these things, except inserting a picture. It's the AD Styler. I'm just now noticing that the button that usually appears for it in the bottom left is gone... I wonder how long it's been like that. These forums are a mess.
This uhh, header bar. It's quite clunky and out of the way. Players typically miss the "apply" button that's there at the top. Not to mention "Forums" and "Chat" don't work half the time and cuase lag, because once the drop down menu opens, they're no longer a full functional link, and there's no option beneath their menus to go to the forum index, or the chat app, and it's quite frustrating.
I agree with Jetniss. The Apply button is pretty important, and maybe updating the chat would be nice as well. I'd also like for the faction forums and the settlement forums to be separated, if possible.
In what way is the navigation bar out of the way? It's top center, and color coded. Some more details would be greatly appreciated so I can better understand what you mean. As far as the buttons not remaining links after their drop downs appear, I can't say I've ever experienced that issue personally. Is it consistent? What browser do you use?
I don't see anything that urgently needs changed, but that's just my opinion. I'd like to see more IC stuff, but atm I'm not sure what could be added for that.
I use Google Chrome. So its out of the way in the sense that it's top center, and relatively small. It's narrow nature keeps it from being a nuisance, but it's also very easy, very very easy to overlook. When I used to design websites, I'd use top-center scrolling navigational bars and a lot of users tend to just skip right past it. There's nothing there to grab and hold the attention-- the color codes do help it stand out, but for the average user I believe it just becomes a colorful nuisance that you try to ignore as you take in the main content on the screen. Perhaps if a picture was places above the nav bar that scrolled with it, or if the nav bar was moved to the left side of the screen bordering the content box of the website so its always visible, always grabs your attention, all without being intrusive in a pesky way.
I'd love to put a banner above the navbar, but sadly Antares has never had a dedicated artist to create art for it... s'why we don't have a consistent brand or image.
well personally, my main problem with how the forum is structured is how there seems to be an incredible lack of focus. i sorta came into this place thinking it was a starbound community, but there's... actually nothing that states outright that it is one? plus all these titles to some forums are really weird. "creativity center", "online roleplay"; there's no clear distinction between ic and ooc, let alone actual forum purpose for some of these things. its really stilted!
I think outdated player forums should be moved to the archives, as some of them, which I won't name, haven't been updated in quite some time...
One change I would personally like to see is having "Player Forums" renamed to "Factions and Colonies", or something similar. I was trying to find the list of factions when I returned a while back and spent a good 7 minutes trying to find out where they were located on the forum.
The Forums themselves seem rather misleading now in terms of the Player Roleplay section, I suggest we re-sort them. Online Roleplay turned to StarNet Advertisement Player Forums turned to Factions & Settlements General Roleplay turned to StarNet Forums Re-organize the Roleplay into subsections so it's not as cluttered.
Have each section be an individual row so information is easily accessible. I like the old purple cosmo background thingy with the custom Antares logo. It's just classic. Xenforo is pretty plain. Make Smokestack supreme overlord. Add character pages for player usage. Enslave the members and force them to write journals.
