Guild Wars 2

Why is this forum so…. meh.

No post count ( you can’t see if poster is actually some veteran of game or some random newb. )

No rep/karma bar ( you have no idea if poster has history of moron or good community member)

Signatures are way to tiny

No avatars

Plain, unimaginative, basic.

No titles or labels for users who are guide authors (valid, acknowledged guides) & fan site owners and operators.

From a company which developed one of the best games in industry you would expect a forum to follow game’s design.
This forum forum looks like a forum of some medical institution.

Take a peak into Rift’s forum to see how it’s done properly.
Wildstar also has good, feature rich forum.

Sorry, I like the game but I seriously dislike this plain, basic, feature lacking forum.
It’s one of reasons I’m less active here than on forum of other games.

You need only click on the poster’s name to see a count.

As for the rest, ArenaNet went for a clean, painterly look. Some appreciate it, some do not.

Functions/features can not be added until (or if) new software is implemented.

i just clicked your name, no post count. Only your posts displayed after one more click.
Why complicating something simple as post counter?

I like simple look of forum. I do not like forum crowded with avatar, title, post count and other information not important. For me forum is about information. I do not care how many post person have or what picture want to have by their name.

Also Anet say they can not do anything with this forum software now because company that make it Anet do not work with any more. Gaile said maybe some time in future they will use different forum software.

I don’t miss most of those things. People here who have a reputation have that reputation because of the quality of their posts….not because they made 11,000 replies. Post count also encourages more spamming.

There are titles for staff, mods, and volunteers.

Avatars might be nice as long as they can be chosen from a selection and match the overall look of the forum.

I agree the signatures are a bit tiny. As long as they never allow images in them they should be fine.

Tomerant.2701:

i just clicked your name, no post count. Only your posts displayed after one more click.
Why complicating something simple as post counter?

It’s up to the user to allow others to see their posts or not. (In IC’s case, you can see how many pages of posts they have made; not sure why this is important to show next to the user name, though; it’s a poor measure of quality.)

In regards to your other questions, ANet (like lots of other companies) makes use of third party software for their forums. It serves a number of purposes just fine; it lacks a lot of bells & whistles to which we’ve grown accustomed.

To change it, ANet would have to allocate resources to work on this from something else. Personally, I’d rather they have 1-2 extra customer support people or an HR recruiting expert or an internal IT hire, rather than doing anything at all to update the forum.

In other words, the forum gets the job done, even if it’s old school.

I don’t believe you can disallow showing one’s posts (and, thus, post count). One can however decide to show/not show highly-rated posts or posts one has up-voted.

Also, sorry about the one-click; let me restate: two clicks to see post count (and/or other information).

The content of what folks post is what matters here, not the quantity or rep.

I wouldn’t mind Avatars…
But can they at least fix the search bar? Anet plz.

Zalani.9827:

I wouldn’t mind Avatars…
But can they at least fix the search bar? Anet plz.

Anet say can not fix it because no longer work with company that made forum.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Forum-s-search-feature-doesn-t-work-A-tip/first#post4612877

The problem is deep within the technology behind the forum structure itself. Yes, we had a search engine in the beginning, but it was broken by our forum contractor in the course of working on other things. We no longer have a relationship with that contractor or his company, and someone else is not able to step into the system and fix the search engine because (1) our programmers are tasked with other essential work, (2) the forums run on a web framework with which most of our programmers are not familiar and (3) we’re investigating other options for forums and it would not be prudent to pour money into hiring someone to fix this as a short-term solution.

Actually, I rather like this plain look. No useless junk to load with each and every page.

After 15 years using, moderating and administrating forums I much prefer it when they don’t show a post count, precisely because people like you too easily fall into the trap of believing the number of posts is an accurate reflection of the value of posts.

A high post count only means that person spends a lot of time on the forum. They could easily achieve that by posting variants of “lol yeah me too” in every single topic. Or endlessly re-posting the same handful of terrible suggestions and recycling arguments with the people who disagree. (Both real examples.)

It would be especially meaningless in this forum because in general time spent on the forum is time not spent playing the game, so some of the most experienced players may actually be ones who rarely, or never, post at all. (And I say this as someone who is on the forum a lot, even when I could be in-game.)

Likewise a reputation bar where forum members can up or down vote posts/posters only shows that someone is good at following the crowd, or making jokes, not that they’re actually saying anything worthwhile and it usually just encourages different cliques (which always exist on forums) to downvote each others posts so they can then use the low ranking as a way of dismissing everything else those people say.

It would be nice to have more customisation, like avatars and maybe pictures in signatures. But I have to admit another pet hate of mine is trying to read text on a page full of flicking gifs and gigantic images that stopped being funny after the first 50 times I saw them.

Qugi.2653:

Zalani.9827:

I wouldn’t mind Avatars…
But can they at least fix the search bar? Anet plz.

Anet say can not fix it because no longer work with company that made forum.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Forum-s-search-feature-doesn-t-work-A-tip/first#post4612877

The problem is deep within the technology behind the forum structure itself. Yes, we had a search engine in the beginning, but it was broken by our forum contractor in the course of working on other things. We no longer have a relationship with that contractor or his company, and someone else is not able to step into the system and fix the search engine because (1) our programmers are tasked with other essential work, (2) the forums run on a web framework with which most of our programmers are not familiar and (3) we’re investigating other options for forums and it would not be prudent to pour money into hiring someone to fix this as a short-term solution.

Man, well that would explain it. Thanks though.
Although that is a nice tip…

^Why did you add some thing to my quote I do not say?

Qugi.2653:

^Why did you add some thing to my quote I do not say?

Lol, that was supposed to be in my post. Dunno how that got there.

Zalani.9827:

Qugi.2653:

^Why did you add some thing to my quote I do not say?

Lol, that was supposed to be in my post. Dunno how that got there.

Haha no problem. Just wonder why it was in my quote.