I thought about this while reading through my good-bye post. Can you make it so that you can make an account for free to access the forums, but need to pay to play ingame? I'd like to stick around on the forums without having to pay to play if I won't be online anymore.

Eloi

The website & forums won't kick you out after the 1st, so don't worry.

i would like to see if you could choose (*had* to choose!) a separate username for the forums ... as it is now, everyone can see other user's login, which is the same for in-game, forum and website ... leaves us all up to bruteforce attacks on our accounts (as it was a huge issue in shadowbane for example) ... please take this into serious consideration. thanks!

Something I think would be useful (especially for this suggestions forum), would be an option to post polls, so we could get a rough idea of what people thought of a suggestions. I for one am much more likely to vote in a poll that I think something is a great idea, rather than posting a reply saying I think it's great.

might be too much work (might not be)

But a "new since last" could deserve an extra marker. It can simply go on last visit time and mark posts + threads that are new. (and threads with new posts )

thgis would stop me from jibbing down the time whenever I'm in the forum :P

Two things I'd like to see:

1) time/date of first post in the index

2) I've been having trouble getting relevent results from searching. It *seems* like it is doing an OR search on words instead of AND, though I don't know for sure. AND seems like it should be the default, though the ability to use AND, OR and NOT would be nice. Also it would be nice to have the option to only show each thread once in the results (maybe sorting by the number of posts/thread).

I also like the ideas of a "new post" mark, and icons by peoples' names.

I really hate having to go to multiple pages to see the ending post in a thread. Make it an option to paginate threads please?

Not that my posts are important or anything, but John requested that I make the devlopers' names red and stand out.

Can you use a darker red? This one hurts my eyes...

Same, but I dunno if a darker red would fix it...

Except for being a bit slow to load I think these boards are excellent! Perfectly simple and straightforward. Infact that goes for the entire VO website. No need to waste time trying to make it better.

If I ever manage to get started on my guild messageboard I will learn from the elegant simplicity of this one :D

It'd be nice to be able to choose what the "author" field was going to be. This would especially helpful in the role-playing forum. As some of us have multiple characters... I'd like to post as them.

And if you character name was different from your login name then the brute forcing of accounts wouldn't be as relevant.

My only gripe with the forum is the functionality of the search button.

First, before I gripe, let me say that the search button is awesome. I don't know how I would find my old posts without it.

However, it appears to me that the default functionality for a group of terms is boolean OR ie "this that" becomes "this" OR "that".

That isn't very useful. Normally, when I add additional terms to a search, I want to restrict the search not expand it. When I write "this that" I want it to only return things that contain "this" AND "that" - or at the very least to preferentially return posts containing this and that.

Thanks.

How about when replying to multi-page threads, it doesn't return you to the top of page 1. The newly created post seems like a better place to go after posting.

I would like the ability to send a pm to people. I'd also like to be able to send "guild pms" to all my guildmembers.

Can we get a "You have posted too many threads" Thing?

The practice from people to go through and respond to EVERY DARN THREAD ON THE FIRST PAGE is starting to tick me off... just a bit.

Combined with a "You last read this ...." Thing that lets us check up wether there is news since last browsing or not. (or just compare a cookie like google groups does ;)

a page-list for threads on the thread index so you can jump to the last page.

x new posts since last-login (with a link to the new posts in the thread list)

After posting a reply you should be taken to your new post instead of to the first post in the thread (especially on multi-page threads)

Allow BeOS-style queries. IE:

Find all [threads|posts] by Attribute(s):
1: [date|username|title|content] [equals|does not equal|is similar to] _____
2: Same options as 1

etc.

:D

so how often do the devs read the suggestions forum? just curious, there's a lot of content to go through there.

How about changing the text/background colors? It plays hell with my eyes. Dark text on a light background would work better. When I stop reading the boards and switch to another program it takes my eyes a while to adjust....