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Thoughts from the first month on the boards.

AJStarhiker·11/4/2014, 4:40:54 AM·7 votes·1,335 views

Positives

  1. Post history. I like being able to look back and having an easy record of my posts.
  2. Choice of new threads vs. newly updated thread. I like that I can resort announcements to see recent stuff announcements, not just the ones with tons of comments. I almost never use the hot or best sorting. Those just don't interest me, but I can understand their inclusion.

Negatives

  1. Still hate the color scheme. Sorry, but I find the color borderline migraine inducing. I can only look at it for so long before I have to get out of here. While I do prefer a dark screen, straight black or a very dark grey seem to work better for me.
  2. Discussion mode. Yes, I get that it's easier to reply to a specific post, but I've never liked nested commentary, especially if it's a big discussion. You get through one and then have to start over on the next one. And switching to chronological view gets screwy due to loss of context if someone responds to multiple people.
  3. The sidebar. If I don't have the page on full screen, it can take up space I'd rather use to read/respond
  4. The way everything gets dumped together. I liked the separation in the old forums because it allowed communities to form. I didn't spend much time in the map-specific forums, but I was a regular in the New Players, Tribunal Ban Inquiries, and Player Behavior. With none of those existing in the boards, I feel a bit lost.

8 Comments

Sir Fuzzi11/5/2014, 9:05:03 PM3 votes

My only complaint is that since boards, Riot has been criminally non-present in board discussion that doesn't involve memes or circlejerking.

We have a help and support board, but it's really more about players consoling each other in the absence of any help from Riot.

disregardable11/4/2014, 4:44:31 AM2 votes

You left out my biggest problem with this forum: discussions get lost. You post something, and if no one comments on it within a couple hours it's gone forever. The old boards never had discussions just die out like that. I had tons of threads that I posted that got a single comment, or none, and were never heard from again. This community is way too big for that.

Hyrum Graff11/5/2014, 6:25:30 AM1 votes

Positives

  1. Post history. I like being able to look back and having an easy record of my posts.

Agreed!

  1. Choice of new threads vs. newly updated thread. I like that I can resort announcements to see recent stuff announcements, not just the ones with tons of comments. I almost never use the hot or best sorting. Those just don't interest me, but I can understand their inclusion.

Pretty much agreed. I like using 'hot' to view the boards front page, and 'new' when I'm on the page for any individual board.

Negatives

  1. Still hate the color scheme. Sorry, but I find the color borderline migraine inducing. I can only look at it for so long before I have to get out of here. While I do prefer a dark screen, straight black or a very dark grey seem to work better for me.

Disagreed here, I got used to it after a couple weeks, and now I rather like it. Still, I think it'd be nice to have a single official alternative. For the moment, you can get custom themes here.

  1. Discussion mode. Yes, I get that it's easier to reply to a specific post, but I've never liked nested commentary, especially if it's a big discussion. You get through one and then have to start over on the next one. And switching to chronological view gets screwy due to loss of context if someone responds to multiple people.

While I personally prefer discussion mode most of the time, I agree that chrono needs work, mostly with quoting and integration with discussion mode. Fortunately, I know the boards team is working on this, though I wish we'd get an update on release date soon.

  1. The sidebar. If I don't have the page on full screen, it can take up space I'd rather use to read/respond

Agreed. And, when I do have the page full screen, I want the sidebar to scroll with me instead of requiring me to scroll up to find it.

  1. The way everything gets dumped together. I liked the separation in the old forums because it allowed communities to form. I didn't spend much time in the map-specific forums, but I was a regular in the New Players, Tribunal Ban Inquiries, and Player Behavior. With none of those existing in the boards, I feel a bit lost.

You can kind of recreate the separation of the old forums by just going to one board via the sidebar links. I do this all the time with Boards feedback.

AJStarhiker11/5/2014, 6:53:10 AM1 votes

When I said migraine inducing on the colors, I meant exactly what I said. There's just something about the colors that makes me feel like I'm heading for a migraine.

Daen11/5/2014, 7:08:22 AM1 votes

#Positives

  1. Post history. I like being able to look back and having an easy record of my posts.

Yep, agreed.

  1. Choice of new threads vs. newly updated thread. I like that I can resort announcements to see recent stuff announcements, not just the ones with tons of comments. I almost never use the hot or best sorting. Those just don't interest me, but I can understand their inclusion.

Honestly, in my opinion the Boards shines most when using Recent as your default browsing setting and switching to Hot/Best when you want to specifically see what's trending or the most highly rated of all time. This of course is just my opinion, but I'm right there with you in that choice is good in this regard.

#Negatives

  1. Still hate the color scheme. Sorry, but I find the color borderline migraine inducing. I can only look at it for so long before I have to get out of here. While I do prefer a dark screen, straight black or a very dark grey seem to work better for me.

I...sort of agree. I actually like the general color ideas, as there is a lot of contrast and such. My main two issues are as such:

  • The platform completely lacks personality. It works really hard at being functional and seems to forget that it's intended to facilitate a community
  • The colors are all just flat blocks; no gradients, no patterns, no splashes of color, nothing really stands out. It's functional, sure, but it seems sterile to me.

I'm not sure how useful this might be for conversation or whatnot, I just wanted to mention it. I think the colors are OK but just don't...feel good.

  1. Discussion mode. Yes, I get that it's easier to reply to a specific post, but I've never liked nested commentary, especially if it's a big discussion. You get through one and then have to start over on the next one. And switching to chronological view gets screwy due to loss of context if someone responds to multiple people.

To me, this is really something where players should be able to choose. I actually switch between the two modes fairly regularly, and it really bothers me how little they work together. Discussion and Chronological might as well be separate, and the fact that it's immediately obvious which mode someone is posting on is not a good thing.

  1. The sidebar. If I don't have the page on full screen, it can take up space I'd rather use to read/respond

What sort of solution would you propose?

  1. The way everything gets dumped together. I liked the separation in the old forums because it allowed communities to form. I didn't spend much time in the map-specific forums, but I was a regular in the New Players, Tribunal Ban Inquiries, and Player Behavior. With none of those existing in the boards, I feel a bit lost.

Things getting dumped together: From my experience, communities are still able to form in the individual boards. Just click on the respective category and it's an insulated community.

As for being a regular in New Players, TBI, and PB, I can't agree more. I'm a bit confused as to why this stuff isn't supported fully, but there's also a bit of a shortage of activity at the moment so it kind of makes sense. I hope to see it in the future.

AJStarhiker11/5/2014, 10:30:33 PM1 votes

For the side bar, maybe a toggle, like Twitch.tv has, to hide it and have the discussion area autofill the space available instead of having a set width.

zackypooh11/7/2014, 3:24:19 PM1 votes

I prefer the old forums I find these hard to navigate, the part I do like is the report feature, that's about it.

AJStarhiker11/4/2014, 5:41:32 AM1 votes

I think that's part of everything dumped together. IIRC, the old GD things tended to drop off the first page pretty quickly, but the other subforums (in particular the ones I frequented) tended to move more slowly.