New fourm feedback

[kevin.granade]

If you read the announcement on the old forums you’ll see the details, I guess I should cross-post it.

These forums have been hosted by GlyphGryph for the last 4 years, but that time is coming to an end.

I’ve acquired new hosting at Discourse Inc. and I’ve migrated the entire forum contents (300,000 posts!) there. The new site is accessible at https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org

Please join me there where we can continue to discuss cataclysm (among other things).

This site will stay up in read-only mode until some time in March when the current contract expires, at which point it will go down.

I have a plan for redirecting smf.cataclysmdda.com links to the corresponding posts in discourse.cataclysmdda.org that I’ll try to get working before then, so that external links won’t break.

[ragamer]

I like the new functionalities… But It will take some time for an oldie like me to get used to the new nav system. Congrats on a job well done… Because “something” is telling me that the whole process may have taken “a bit more” effort than what it may look by your posts. Thanks for finding us a new home .

[ribblle]

Seriously? Still no voting system?

Love the rest.

[kevin.granade]

It’s here.

• Hit reply, Click the icon, click “build poll”.
• Look up the poll markdown syntax and type it in manually.

Show results

[ribblle]

Brilliant. Hope everyone does this on their suggestions.

[ribblle]

Pro-tip; it’s possible to filter the forum by top posts now. Click on the 3 lines in the top right corner.

[TheZoneWizard]

Not sure if our old log ins are transferred or not. Seems like mine was not. I guess if not transferred then some ass hat took my handle…wtf??
Either that or my password won’t work or who the heck knows.

Kevin: is there going to be some changes to make this new forum look like the old one? I can’t find jack nor $h!t and I doubt I’m not the only one. 300,000 posts of pure gibberish all in a pile is going to put off the devoted and completely turn away anyone new. I mean holy mother of mercy this is even worse than the old forum mate! >_<

PS- How the hell do I delete private notifications and messages? I do not get many but it is annoying to see crap I read already at the top of my list.

PSS- a google search does not show the new website. Hope this changes as march is not far away.

PSSS- So forum pages no longer have the option of sifting by page? Such as Go to last page/post. Yeah yeah…scroll…I can still see the thread with 1000 posts turning into a cluster of crap we cannot survive sifting through ourselves. I know it is small. But this sorta stuff REALLY makes the forum functional. Not just knitpicking.

[kevin.granade]

Not sure if our old log ins are transferred or not. Seems like mine was not. I guess if not transferred then some ass hat took my handle…wtf??

Did you have a working email configured? The password recovery thing should work.

is there going to be some changes to make this new forum look like the old one?

Not as such. There are various style changes we can make, but making it look just like the old site is not one of them.

I can’t find jack nor $h!t

Have you tried either searching or the category view? Search works pretty well now and navigating by category works the same as navigating the old forums.

I can still see the thread with 1000 posts turning into a cluster of crap we cannot survive sifting through ourselves.

It already was, stop posting in threads with thousands of replies.

[TheZoneWizard]

Appreciate the replies. But unless anyone really wants me as the ZoneWizard, I am ok with my handle as is new…Just REALLY not liking the eease of jumping through the main categories as we had them on the old forum. sigh

Well thanks anyway. )

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

I love the edited posts archive feature.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

The makers of forum did away the last vestige of thread owner’s mod powers by limiting thread locks.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

@kevin.granade the official website cataclysmdda.org/ still claims that the tutorial is in working condition.

[druidniam]

the official website cataclysmdda.org/ still claims that the tutorial is in working condition.

Isn’t the official website the .com extension? @kevin.granade should just redirect the .org to the .com.

Edit: and redirect the forum link to the new forum.

Edit2: And the wiki.

[kevin.granade]

.org is the cannonical site, the .com is going to go away at some point. Actually I might just kill the .com site to prevent this confusion.

[tilia]

Okay, I know I’m late to the party, but I want to know what the appeal was with Discourse and why you’re not considering going back to SMF or perhaps some other “traditional” forum model.

Thanks for any info.

[kevin.granade]

Fair question

1. More resilient to spam and trolls
   1. Login is more robust and difficult to get a spambot through.
   2. Flagging posts is more streamlined, If enough users flag a post it gets hidden without intervention from me.
2. Free as in beer (other options are open source, this one also has free hosting for open source projects).
3. Hosted, meaning I’m not on the hook for upgrades, plugin management, server migrations, etc.
4. Works on phones. Smf at least was utter garbage on phones, which severely limits the times I can interact with the forums.

[grumpy_old_git]

I’m afraid I registered here just to voice my concerns regarding the forum software. I genuinely did not expect Discourse to stay up this long, because it is awful. I believe I represent a silent majority of lurkers who slowly drifted away from keeping up with the CDDA community after the changes.

Out of all the forums and other social sites I’ve used over the past decades, this is easily the worst. Doesn’t even load without javascript. The desktop site is disgustingly mobile-themed, which I can’t imagine being desirable for the audience that’s interested in oldschool ASCII roguelikes such as CDDA. It also feels rather bloated and is annoying to navigate. While some complaints related to that might be just grumpy old gits resisting anything new, I sincerely believe the usability of Discourse on desktop is objectively worse than any classic forum software. The fact that there are multiple site feedback threads complaining about the forum software strongly shows that Discourse is worse for users than SMF was.

Now, I can understand that having a functional mobile theme is an unfortunate necessity these days, and I have personal experience with SMF spambot issues, so I understand the need to switch. Unfortunately I cannot offer better alternatives that are completely free and hosted. But you get what you pay for, and it really shows here.

A tangentially related anecdote I would like to point out is that all CDDA related searches I’ve made in 2018 have pointed me to either the wiki, the old forums, or occasionally elsewhere, but never this place. Either this forum isn’t indexing properly or it produces nothing of value (to me personally). With this rather pointless personal anecdote in mind, I hope there are no plans to stop hosting the old locked forums in foreseeable future. They contain a lot of valuable information.

Sorry for all the negativity, but that’s the truth of the situation. II don’t expect another forum software change any time soon, but now that the dust has settled I wanted to add a new post here to enforce the opinion that this forum is still awful. It wasn’t just a first impression of few users.

[kevin.granade]

I believe I represent a silent majority of lurkers who slowly drifted away from keeping up with the CDDA community after the changes.

The server stats say otherwise.

Pageviews

Either this forum isn’t indexing properly

This is a problem, I don’t know what’s causing it, but google doesn’t seem to want to index this site.
It’s on the first page of results for “cataclysmdda”, but nowhere to be found if you search “cataclysm dark days ahead”.

I hope there are no plans to stop hosting the old locked forums in foreseeable future.

There are no plans to continue hosting the old forums, they are living on borrowed time at this point. Literally every piece of information on the old forums was migrated here, so there will be no loss of information, and I suspect this site might be “shadowed” by the old forums, so once they’re gone the bots should be able to start indexing properly.
Literally the only thing I’m even considering doing with the old forums is setting up a micro-site that issues appropriate redirects from the old forum urls to the new forum site.

I’m sorry you don’t like it, but maintaining hosting with smf was and is simply not an option.

To clarify, the old smf site went DOWN for almost a month with zero notice, and I had to stop working on the game to do the migration. the options at the time were literally:

1. Discourse
2. No forums

Those are still the options, I can’t afford the time to self-host the forums. The only reason I was willing to put in as much work as I did to migrate to this site was that it resolved the issue semi-permanently. If my only option for keeping the forums running was to self-host, I probably wouldn’t do it.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Literally every piece of information on the old forums was migrated here

I still have to log into my old account to access my archived PMs. How do I access them on this site?

[TheZoneWizard]

So where exactly are we suppose to find the official experimental download section on discourse?

I asked before and was given rubbish that didn’t go anywhere. That said I’m not unfamiliar with CatDDA and noobs are going to ignore the game entirely because of this very basic info being completely obfuscated that even regulars like I do not know this.

Now, I can google CatDDA and the old site comes up in a flash and I get the links to:
http://dev.narc.ro/cataclysm/jenkins-latest/Windows/Tiles/

Without any problem. But this is suppose to be THE primary site(discourse) and it doesn’t come up as such on google and after asking I still have no flippin clue while on here how to get experimentals like the site I just linked.

So whats going on with this? >_<

Seriously I wouldn’t be annoyed if I could just google this forum and at the very top bar go straight to the experimentals direct download site without having to search for this. GAH!!! =(