What does the Community Beta still need?
Reposted From: http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=45218242#post45218242 For all Reds who use this site.
Just a thought, why don't we try to compile a constructive list of things that would make people actually feel at home using the community beta?
lets keep in mind: This is only conceptual, let's allow someone else to worry about feasibility (whether or not it can be done)
-Embedding Currently, while the community beta allows uploading (in a limited quantity), it does not allow embedding, what this means is --You cannot show images, only a link to them. --Youtube and Twitch videoes still will not automatically embed if detected.
This is overall a huge downgrade, as while some image posting threads are hazardous, not all of them are
-Sort by activity Currently, upvote/downvote plays a big role in how the community beta works. Because of that, we need a "sort by activity", so to say.
Basically: --If the thread is posted in, it gets bumped --if the vote system really must play a part, then upvote and downvote both bump a thread, rather than one going up and the other going down.
The idea being a thread is picked not by it's popularity, but rather by whether or not people are in it.
-Uploading/Embedding in subposts
Currently to my knowledge, anyone who posts after the original poster cannot add images to a thread. This not only hurts the posters but the original poster in picture threads.
For example, in any form of comic thread, no more than 4 comic strips can be posted even by the host. Noone after the first post is allowed to add to the thread.
As previously said, while some image threads can be malicious, not all of them are. And forcing a cap on how many can be uploaded, and more so preventing additional images prevents these threads from forming.
-A unified redtracker Lets face it. Noone wants to manage 3 sites. If you can make a redtracker that can track GD, Reddit, and the community beta...chances are, people WILL stick around.
From Frosthaven:
Alright, Riot MilkManiac, I'll submit some feedback in the form of a question:
Dearest Web Team, How do you plan to combat the common situation of the top (and only visible) comments becoming short quips and witty memes as seen on similar comment rating formats (using the comments on this website's news section as an example).
Love, Frost
Red Response from WookieeCookie
Frosthaven I can't speak for the Dev team here, but I can give you my own opinions. First, I completely agree with your criticisms of Reddit.
I absolutely hate low-effort content, replies, memes and stupid puns you find on default subreddits that gets voted to the top of a thread. "OMG DID ANYONE SEE THIS LE GEM OF QUOTE BY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON WHICH PROVES THAT X VIDEO GAME PUBLISHER IS LITERALLY HITLER?"
The default subreddits on Reddit are some of the worst places to go to for informed conversation on anything you truly love, and we should all do our best to avoid having our own forums turn into them. One thing we have, which defaults on reddit lack is the backing of passionate employees who care about the subject matter at hand. If low effort content, puns, and memes is being upvoted to the top of the thread, then Rioters here are not doing their job responding and commenting to worthwhile conversations to highlight their value for everyone else.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with Reddit, but when I think of the value of Reddit I don't think of a subforum like r/askreddit or r/funny I think of more qualitive subreddits like r/askhistorians which have a lot more moderator interaction. r/askhistorians is an extreme example because they have very strict moderation, but in my opinion it's a good step forward to having constructive feedback and discussions on Reddit compared to the more lax subreddits.
Any other suggestions everyone?
Additional Suggestions:
Gavran:
In addition to "sort by activity (recent)" there should be "sort by votes (most)" so highly controversial topics are very visible as well.
Faceplosion
Some way to gain individuality. In GD, people can actually somewhat recognize me and my posts. When it comes the community beta, everyone looks the same, and it doesn't feel you're making any progress in the community. Fixing this would be as simple as adding things like post trackers, forum titles and avatars unlocked by getting certain forum achievements. Adding any one of those would make the forums much better, and give incentive for people to post.
GodKilleR
A GD format converter, by that I mean you could see things in a GD style rather than the reddit one. The threads you see at the top would be the ones that were posted in, when a reddit user comment someone's post it automatically quote it in the GD format.
A good way for both communities to coexist together without erasing one.
ProfDrDeath
Better post formatting, aka: Pressing Enter begins a new line. Underline. A better distinction between stars for italic and stars for list items.
Links from EUW and EU N/E.
Ability icons shortcut.
More subcommunities.
Renaito Yuujou
I think GD's look is fine. Neither good nor bad. As far as the community beta goes, I dislike that navigation takes up the right third of my screen. I like navigation to be at the top and bottom and the meat of what I'm absorbing in between. It reminds me of the story books that I and my classmates would make back in elementary school with no real sense of organization to it, ya just got stuff here and more stuff beside it for no real reason.
I'm also used to looking left to right for information. I just spend about four seconds looking for how many posts a thread has and it's tucked away underneath the post title (in very light color and in small, non-distinguishing font).
Now that I'm looking at the posts, I see a post that melts directly into a response box and then the responses under it. Just whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy would anyone do that? There's, like, no space between them it all just flows together into this long, ugly, mismatched thing. Why would the response box be in the middle? It IRKS me and I'm obsessive compulsive as Hell about stupid shít like this. Stupid shít makes me ANGRY.
MrRado
I'd enjoy it more if the format was modular and that I could save it, as well as some edits for readability and making use of space.
By space, I mean I'd like to see TWO columns of posts, not one.
By modular, I mean I'd like to choose what topics go into each of those columns. By readability, I mean that one "thread box" (box with all info for a particular thread) takes up too much vertical screen realestate. I think the spacing could be greatly reduced for more visible information at once (something I like). This should be a toggle or customized option.
TrueObjectivity:
"Krylhos
There's a bit of a hidden gem that I'll make easy to access in the next couple of weeks. If you add ?show=flat to your URL in your address bar, you are presented with the same ordering and feel as a standard bulletin board listing. We did this just to see how trees looked when they were flat, and I think we'll add a bit more support to make it easy to go back and forth between flat and tree views."
Fantastic! Perhaps you could even try something like replacing the 'show parent' option with just having a quotebox containing the parent, when in flat mode. I guarantee that coding in an easy toggle will be worth your time. I personally don't intend to use branch mode at all, and I think many of the members of our existing forum community would agree.
LVNsNASmurf
Sort of. I mean that I want to see only the first level replies (Posts), with a tiny indicator of how many replies they have. If I care about the post, I can expand the replies.
I do not want 4 levels of replies to be shown by default. For example, clicking on Post 2 would only shown subpost1 and subpost2, but no further levels.
MisDerpina
a little tutorial on how to use the interface. the only reason i don't like the community beta is how confusing it looks, and that the classic GD is so much more user-friendly.
as you can see, not everyone knows how to use reddit. i mean, if i knew how useful and effective reddit is, i don't mind the community beta.
/end of opinion
ratcharmer
I agree.
Currently if the first person to view a post downvotes it's almost guaranteed that no one else will see that post. It's frustrating and it encourages some annoying behaviors like duplicate threads, spamming, vote farming and using smurf accounts to upvote yourself.
Hardinger
If it hasn't already been mentioned...
what about a mobile site? More often than not, I'm on my phone trying to look at the forums. It would be such a boon for the website to be intended to work from my phone.
ExpertSockThrow
Please change the colour scheme, or give us the option to do so. Whites and greys hurt my eyes and can trigger migraines for me, no matter how well-lit my room is. I want to be able to track discussions and participate without the risk of pain. :)
This will sound like a nightmare, but my ideal discussion format is the following: Posts in chronological order (flat), but with the option to nest. Say I enter a topic where the OP is discussing how cute Poros are. The third comment is an opinion that dissents -poros are too ugly to be cute. Wanting to see how people reacted to that, I can click on a link to a reply to that comment and the comment will auto-nest within the post it was referring to. (Think of browsing 4chan with the 4chanX extension.) It would look something like what I attached to my post. Bonus points if we could read the comment while hovering over the link to it. After I was done reading that thread of conversation, I could close the nest and return to my comfortable flat layout. In the next post, I see someone trolling the OP with nonsense, and see that he's gained a few replies for it. Next to his post is a little [-], and clicking that will allow me to hide his post AND the posts that replied to him as I continue to skim down the topic. Conversations with large numbers of participants will naturally split into many different threads. Being able to track them at will, and ignore en-mass a thread of talk I'd rather not see but still stay in the main conversation, is probably the best thing that I've ever had the pleasure to use. http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/attachment.php?attachmentid=898579
SelikemKwadz
I'll be honest, reading the beta starts to hurt my eyes the way the text moves slowly to the right, I like to see all comments in a line, and the beta look makes it a bit hard for me to focus on individual posts, and I just think the reddit feel doesn't work with it
StrikeZone
I just want the [Recruit and Season Reward] emblems I worked hard to get keep them and I'm happy
ggdoom
What killed it for me was the lack of shortcuts while typing though, I'm a lazy person and I love me some shortcuts.
Skreeg
My 2 cents: the beta red tracker is so, so much worse compared to the forum red tracker. I want to be able to tell the thread title at a glance so I can skip topics that don't interest me, and I don't want to have to scroll past six pages of an uninteresting topic to see if there's anything interesting below it.
Rastarogue
The thing I would like most of all is simply a way to sort through a post chronologically. I like to read the long posts in chunks, and to bookmark where I am and come back to see what has been added. With the current setup, I feel like there is no way for me to read all of the posts in a thread.
Intimacy
In the interest of offering solutions to the problems that I, personally, have with Community:
• Community takes significantly longer than GD to load (a noticeable 3-5 seconds, from GD's < 1 second load times).
• I haven't personally had issues with tracking new posts (because I haven't actually tried to), but one of the big concerns with that seems to be that it's non-intuitive to do so. I'm not sure what could be done about that, but I'd imagine that (1) the ability to subscribe to specific sub-threads and (2) a "next update" button (that scrolls to the next new post in a subscribed sub-thread) would be useful toward that end. Additionally, threads that have already been read could filter to the bottom of their parent thread, automatically collapsed and marked as "read".
• Chrctr lmt sux
Holy Malevolence
I think they should give everybody a vote weight, much like a report weight. So that someone who goes around upvoting everything they see doesn't have as much effect on an individual topic as someone who only votes on a rare thread of high quality.
Users Having Bugs
ratcharmer
For me the main thing the community beta still needs it to reliably work.
There have been several times when I've tried to log-in or otherwise interact with the community beta and it simply would not work. Often by insisting that my password etc is incorrect (yet the same password will work other times).
I'm running Chrome as my browser if that helps.
ikaul
@ratcharmer
this has happened to me as well
AnonTwo
Following the suggestion of a user on the community beta, i tried uploading a picture to imgur.com and then linking that. Sure enough, the picture loaded! but it's strange. When i use your hosting service: http://apollo-na-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com , the picture doesn't show. Is this an oversight?
MackleDoge
Can we do something about the nesting limits? I don't know if anyone else has experienced this but I've had a few conversations just flat out stop because once you reach a certain level of nesting it no longer allows replies. Is there some manner of fixing this already or is this an issue that hasn't been addressed yet?
ggdoom
Yeah I was able to figure out how to navigate through stuff after a while, but by that time I was already annoyed.
The home thing just baffled me (even though I know why it happened, I'm in Mexico) because every other Home button in the site takes me to the NA home.
AnonTwo
Reporting another bug: Did some "stress testing" of the embed feature...and well...
it doesn't handle images very well.
I'll let you guys be the judge...it's some old Lulu comics though, so enjoy :)
