Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Terrible idea. Employee posts and locked topics are very, very inherently different things and should be treated as such. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a topic letting you know if an employee has posted in it. I can actually see your system leading to many pointless thread-openings. "What do you guys think about Halo 4?" in the community forum with this new tag on it could either indicate that an employee has cleared up with somebody what they think of Halo 4 for some reason, or an actual lock. Let's say I click on it to see. If it's a lock, I just wasted my time and there is no employee post of this nature at all. Now, if it's an employee post and I just assume it's a lock and don't open it, I could've missed something I may have wanted to read.
It's a terrible mix.The tag would appear on a topic when it is displayed in the forums. You wouldn't need to open it to see if it's locked. It's merely a compromise for removing the icons but allowing locked/employee topics to be indicated in some way.
The specific problem you brought up about an employee posting in a Halo 4 topic could be alleviated by allowing them to toggle their ability to post in an official context or not.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
PinLocked is clearly meant to be a notice, and Pinned is a pinned topic for discussion. They're two very different things, and making them the same thing is pointless.I never said they should be the same.
A pinned and locked topic would appear in the pinned topics section and have the "locked tag" as I explained in the section above it regarding locked topics.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Stops pointless necrobumps.If I had the ability to hide topics at will or sort the forum then that it pretty much irrelevant.
To bring up another point though, why should topics expire and what do you think is the most appropriate time to make them expire?
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Didn't Acky say this'd be annoying to do?No.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Who replied lastIn the context of forums in general, your point is irrelevant. If you honestly can't see the point behind wanting to jump to the end of a thread then I have no idea how you're articulate enough to have typed this all out because the advantage and point is rather clear.I never said we shouldn't have a link to the end of a topic.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Avatar
Yeah. That's right. Take away a major way people identify themselves and others within the community and make the forums overall more boring. That'd make this place so much better. Great idea, daz.OK, so you don't like the idea of removing them. How about the other ideas I listed?
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
TitleExcept for administrative titles (Employee, Ninja, etc...) and perhaps an indicator for who the OP is (a nice little addition IMO) titles are kind of silly and a waste of space here. I don't really care if they continue to exist, but I don't like the fact they exist in a context where they have little meaning and are bigger than the actual post text. Having them in the panel I was talking about might look nice, and would be appropriate if I cared to learn more about a specific user.Again, this is something for fun. This is something for identification. This is something clearly not necessary but that people like because it adds something to the forums in a way other sites don't do it. Not everything has to be essential. Why do you want to strip the site down to the bare minimum? What the -blam!- is the point of that?Again, that wasn't the point.
The idea is to try to restructure/reformat the way topics and posts are listed so that whatever content is most important in whatever context it's in is displayed more prominently than user metadata (avatars, usernames, etc...).
For instance, when I open up a topic, why does author information of a post appear before the post rather than after, below, or beside it? Is having it above the post and being the first thing I read really the best place for this to go considering the post they have made is arguably more important than who made it? Is this user information really so important that it needs to be placed where it is?
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
Message user linkYou could make a similar argument for just about anything, so I don't think that's a good enough justification for it being there.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
(and it seems more intuitive to initiate sending a PM from a profile page anyway).Not even a little. It CLEARLY takes longer to do that, so why would I do it?I can't imagine anyone is sending messages that often that an extra page-load is of any detriment to them.
Posted by: CrazzySnipe55
2) Inclusion of an English-like timestamp.In the same vein of "this is an english-speaking game developer's website so deal with the fact that you have to speak and read english": This is an American game developer's website so deal with the fact that you have to deal with an American way of writing dates. The fact that you want this displays a pretty clear double standard.I think you may have misunderstood this.
When I say "English-like", I'm not referring to some standard format only used by [the] English. I'm referring to the way you would read the timestamp. A timestamp which says "Today at 5:01 PM" is FAR more readable by everyone instead of the current confusing format (American date formatting is illogical).
Posted by: Great_Pretender
*shrug* I dunno, seems fine. Forums are meant to be for you to express YOUR opinion, not an anonymous one. I don't see a problem with having a name attached to posts.-TGP-Just to be clear, I never said or implied we should get rid of usernames.