For quite a while you’ve seen me and some of the other staff talk about some new forum software or something, well it’s real, and while not yet finished I want to show you what it’s sort of going to look like (we still have some styling issues to deal with)
We’re currently running on a heavily customised version of VBulletin, which is kinda buggy, lets spam through A LOT, we can’t upgrade it without everything breaking, I can’t make changes without it breaking, the web developers hate working with it…the list goes on.
Flashback to some point last year, myself and some of the web developers evaluated a tonne of software, some good, some bad, some meh. We finally chose XenForo which was the favourite for both me and the devs for it’s flexibility and just generally awesomeness of being able to do things like, put restrictions on how many posts you can have before you’re allowed to post in Collaboration without moderation (remember that discussion, I didn’t forget).
Anyhoot, this thing has been in development for some time now and it’s got the point where I’m allowed to try and intentionally break it, so why not take some sneaky screenshots and show you (because the internet will hate it anyway)
Our goal was to not really change the design all that much, but it is different and it feels different in a good way, like the good kind of tingle.
Please remember that the styling is not finished and we still have some things to fix, so if things look a little wonky, that’s why.
There’s no official launch but we’re close, when it gets super close I will try and give a warning that the forums will go into maintenance mode for a while.
I was just about to ask what the hell is with all that spam stuff and are you guys gonna do something about it, nice to know that you’re staying on top of things.
Yeah… I don’t even use forum’s search engines, they never find what I want. But using google works so well. I think it’s probably why most forums don’t focus on improving their own search engines.
You can “like” a thread or post but it doesn’t change the order of view. Part of the reason we wanted to change software is so we could install plugins without everything going crazy and breaking, so if you demand a feature change/addition it’s more likely to happen.
You’ve always had the ability to “follow” but it doesn’t really do anything on here (may be hidden now).
Our main search box at the top was fixed a while ago and now runs on google.
For me personally only the spammers was a real usability problem. I always loved and cherished the professional and non-cluttered feel that the forums transferred from the actual product it was promoting.
i’m wondering what (visual) consequence does “liking a thread” have ?
Because for me personally the super straight to the point design of the unity forums were a quite huge part for me enjoying it.
To me all these social/gamification forum features of following and likes are complete and useless bogus.
Makes me quite sad to see something like that included in here. I can already see all the “liked” posts incoming.
That profile preview picture with “trophy points” and “warning points” and “Likes you’ve received” makes me sad panda also.
