As posted in 'The list thread', here is a thread for ideas on how exactly we can improve these forums, as usual for me, a picture paints a thousand words, so her are my idea's:-

http://img32.exs.cx/img32/8314/forums2.jpg

I think a 'recent' topics of say 10 topics would be very handy for players to track whats new without actually having to go digging :-)

http://img32.exs.cx/img32/3208/forums1.jpg

Basically just made it more on par with what people are used to on forums, the avators arn't nessacary, i don't like post counts either, they just lead to people spamming. I'm not keen on signitures as people always abuse the priviledge to use them.

The 'medels' idea is just there for a better way of knowing who you are talking too, 1 for devs and forum moderators would be great, as not everyone knows the names of all the staff. you could incorporate the beta and aplha badges there as well so you can see who's been with the game for a while and hence probably knows what they are talking about :-)

The display would have an alpha channel like now so the backgorund below is visable :-)

On the index pages, I also think info such as 'veiws' and 'replies' would be useful, will allow people to know what are actually good topics to check out, and what are probably not worth reading :-)

Also, maybe have the a few backgrounds that you can have a choice of using as oppsoed to just the planet, its always nice to haev options to customise the forums to your tastes :-)

Oh yeah......one word.....Smilies.... :-)

(Sorry about the poor quility of the screenies, they were a quick 5 minute cut and paste)

I have to agree,

"no smilies please" beside that Suricata said it all.

>>mutorcs<<

I think we can all agree that these are not the best laid out forums in the world :) One option I would like to see is a Time Zone option, Im having difficulty adding 7 hours to all the posts to work out if they are recent :)

No avatars. That would increase the amount of objects and increase loadingtime..

besides, it kills good space for no good reason.

<OFFTOPIC> Wow the forum looks fugly with Times New Roman</OFFTOPIC>

Only thing I'd like to see are new/unread posts/threads indicators. Otherwise I'm actually quite happy with the current forum.

While I like the poster's-name-on-the-side layout, I don't think it would look good with the sidebar that already exists on the page.

Yeah, views and reply counts are definitely needed; the font is too big to show all that information as it stands now.

Timezone is something I've been planning to add.

The new post/unread thing requires a lot more bookkeeping than I was willing to do with this thing, but it would undoubtedly be very beneficial.

there are plenty of player made forums if you wish to get into indepth discussions that have lots of niceties.

Your right Durgia, there are plently of player made forums to discuss stuff, but, idealy the very best place to post stuff is on the games website which is accessable to the most ammounts of players :-)

I agree that maybe the side bar may not work, and yes, avators are good eaters of bandwidth :-)

I think one you get player stats up, the name of the poster could link to their stats, I'm still partial to the medels as well to indicate who people are, especially the dev and moderator ones :-)

I don't think the medals would be such a good idea because, you have an account, you have 6 different character names with different medals and such.

End forum Bloat!
Less is more!
No more features!

*pickets guild's office*

^
|
--------------- What he said.

Um, how about a pHpBB forum?

For pretty much any application of webring I'm part of, it seems that pHpBB has worked very well.

It's also tailorable to games such as this that requires the game's logins to be the same as the forums.

However, I'm not sure if the current threads/responses are transferrable...

In regards to the medels, I was asuming the alpha/beta medels would be given to accounts rather than players(as discussed in prevoius accounts), and I really don't see how a player is going to have a moderator or developer medel on only one of his toons :-) The medles were aminly there to distingusih the devs and other staff members, since not every player knows who they are. :-)

I can understand the les is more approach, however, this is the community headquarters to one of the latest MMORPG's, therefore atleast a few more options would be nice, it would be a terrible shame imho if the community uses fan made forums because they are better and have more features, since it just splits up the community and fragments it :-/

Although I don't think we need a ton of features, it would be nice to be able to tell which threads i've read and which I haven't.

Even simply having different colors for visited links would help.

A PHPbb forum wouldn't work out here, because this one was custom-built to interact with Guild's in-game database. Which isn't to say I'd mind some of PHPbb's features (quoting, time zones, etc.)

i agree with genka. and we certainly don't need smilies. imo they just look stupid.

pHpBB can be formatted to accept the in-game database. I know, because the last game I played did exactly that.

Now, I'm not sure how much coding this takes, but I know its possible....

Any gentoo users will just nod and quietly laugh at you if you propose phpbb, ipb or any of them. I mean, I love phpBB to death. But, honestly...

Just to knock this thread up a bit, I know theres still alot to do before release, but are any extra forums features planed? I know i'd love to have a feature to send private tells for sure :-)

Well, I know you can leave notes for your buddies. I wonder if that system could be integrated into the site.