Polycount Update - BUGS & SUGGESTIONS

adam

Use this thread to post any bugs you notice or suggestions you have on improving your experiences on the site.

Please use images whenever possible so we can see the bugs you're seeing, or to help us understand your suggestions better.

Alternatively, if you wish to keep your thoughts private please send me a Private Message directly.

COMMON/IMPORTANT SUGGESTIONS & BUGS

Below is a list of common suggestions or bugs we're seeing users report in this thread.

1. The front page won't load on mobile and the forum is loading a default Vanilla skin. The front page should be loading and the forum skin needs to be Polycount themed.
2. The site could use a pass on overall spacing of information, make things a bit tighter.
3. Quote button doesn't work.
4. The WYSIWYG editor can bust formatting at times, making it difficult to fix.
5. Many users used the 'New Posts' button from vBulletin and would like to see it back.
6. The notification window that pops up from the bottom left of the screen has white text on a whitebackground, making it illegible. 
7. There is some confusion over when and how threads get updated. Some users cannot tell where there posts are going when they reply, others have a hard time discerning if a thread is updated since they viewed it last when looking at the thread list. There is an icon indicating this, but it needs to be more apparent.
8. There is a missing step in the forum breadcrumb that is omitting the main Forum name. See here.
9. Emoticons are appearing in the Lightbox and when sending content to the front page. This shouldn't happen.
10. Many users are hoping for redirects from old forum links, as many of them have specific threads bookmarked that no longer work.
11. This member's name is all kinds of buggered.
12. Users reported that Facebook & Twitter links is broken. I need to investigate this bug for better details.
13. Clicking on a front-page news post that comes from a REPLY does not link to the reply, it links to the page it was posted on.
14. Bring back custom Polycount emoticons.
15. The website favicon is missing.
16. Users are reporting some poor performance happening in the WYSIWYG editor.

beefaroni

I can't seem to edit my posts! Apparently there is a gear icon but I don't see one anywhere.
Edit: Never mind, are edits locked to 1 hour now? That makes it a bit tough to keep newest in progress images first in wip threads. 

Ritchmen

I can't seem to use the sketchfab attachment.
plus BEEFARONI has a good point there about newest progress.

adam

@beefaroni  Let me look in to that time limit for you. If there is, I'll nuke it.

imyj

Looks way better, good job! Although am I the only one who finds the vertical padding on the post listings to be too much? I find I have to scroll more now.

adam

@imyj  You're definitely scrolling more now, and the vertical padding is something up for review in the future. Promise!

root

I used to use the 'previous thread/next thread' links at the bottom of the page to browse Showcase forums, and now those links are gone! Flipping through those threads takes like two or three more clicks per thread now!  Can you bring them back?

Makkon

Image lightbox viewing for all forums is also including smilies from posts.


Also I have no idea how to add images to my posts without uploading them as attachments. the IMG tags don't seem to work anymore.

Formatting overall is messed up when editing posts. All of my paragraphs are now double spaced when I type, but not in the final post. It's a little disorienting.

adam

Haha, sweet. IT STAYS.

Kidding - we'll get it looked at.

commador

Seems like "Quote" may be bugged? Or I'm not quite familiar with how it works now. Unlike "Reply" where you type just a comment, it wanted to create a new thread. I second the vertical padding. I think it could be reduced a bit

Ritchmen

I don't now if any one else is having this problem but i can't see the ads

adam

@commador  Nice catch! That's a good one. We'll add it to the list.

adam

@Ritchmen They're definitely busted. @cheeseplus Can better explain why but they'll be fixed before that'll matter.

JedTheKrampus

Congrats on the successful update! I like the bigger default fonts but I would also prefer to scroll less. Looking forward to Marmoset Viewer integration to roll out!

z3phon

Is there a "new posts" button that shows the latest posts from all the boards like before?

leleuxart

I'm definitely liking the new color scheme and cleaner look, but the formatting for a lot of stuff feels off. I'm sure some of it is just because it's new, but for instance, the home page(polycount.com) has some weird formatting issues with the sizes and positions of the news boxes. I also opened it up again and got the second image somehow  



A couple of other things that I've noticed while typing this:

- The avatar icon for the OP is scaled way too big considering the original avatar size limit was fairly small. It looks like the new max is 2MB though, so I guess everyone should update their avatar now 
- There doesn't seem to be any visible difference between read and unread threads, other than the "new" icon. But when you're not logged in, that doesn't show up. Even when you're logged in, there's no formatting change or color change. 
- The emoticon window when typing a post is either really low res or it's the colors that make them really hard to focus on and distinguish at first.
- I pressed 'Enter' when pasting a URL for the image and it automatically submitted the post. Is it supposed to add the image automatically without pressing Enter? 
- There's a plain black button by the "Flag" button on the bottom right that seems to open up a link for sharing to G+.  
- Emoticons are moved to a new line in the post, despite there being plenty of room while typing.

leilei

Is there a way to not have such a claustrophobic margin? This is a bit of a pain on widescreen. There's a lot of blank space between the post area and the original poster's avatar's right half.

I don't know what this GooglePlus kind of thing can allow for clientside CSS customization to work around these issues

pior

For what it's worth, here's a first mockup tackling sub forum layout, done at 90% scale. I'll do another one for thread layout later if that's helpful.
Overall I think there is a lot of potential, but as mentioned by others already spacing and scaling need tweaking.

http://i.imgur.com/wFwGcw7.gif

I hope this helps !

PolyHertz

Right now we can only see thread authors before clicking a thread, will we also eventually be able to see the name for the last poster?

throttlekitty

Congrats on getting this out! I like the clean look buuuut.....  (seriously nice work though, not bitchin for the sake of bitchin here, i love this place)

It feels overly large with wasted space all over. Margins and text size mostly. There's a weird vertical space between the OP and replies because the forum icon is large with status reply/quote sitting under it. 

Seconding last poster.

Can't MMB+Drag while hovering over topics to scroll/pan.
No 1/2/3/...781 in the topics list is kind of a drag. I'm not sure where it's going to drop me, though there is a "Last" when I hover over? Maybe I can get used to the "replies" number, but I'm so used to gauging thread size from that O_O

It might be nice if topics that aren't "new" since you visited them last had a slightly dimmed background?

It's late and I'm tired, this bright text in the edit box seaaaars my eyes in the most overly dramatic way!

PolyHertz

Another thing I'd like to see is a way to 'collapse' the stickied first post in a thread. Needing to scroll past it for every new page is a pain.

monodrobe

I ve tried clicking on few  links in the what are you workin on thread and they bounce to can t find page or bounce to the front page. One of em was a full link and another was a tiny link

adam

@pior  Nice! Personal preference is the top banner remains full-width. There's something fun planned with that.

Here's a quick mock I did to see how it'd look with nothing changed but the vertical margin.

Side note, I love that you can literally just drag a JPEG in to the editor now and it'll upload and place immediately.

adam

Note to self: Investigate why .GIF(Y), etc isn't embedding. It was earlier.

GhostDetector

Nice update to the site!

However there are some things that might need fixing or adding, (importance is not in any order)

The button next to Flag (comments) is just a black box, (share google button I think)

• Search Topic bar, the Icon has low contrast between the background and button itself (in low light settings its hardly visible but in higher light settings it is fine.

• Only 16 emojis?  (emoji was typed as the same line as the text yet posted the line after)

• Maybe there should be a way to favorite posts comments of posts

• Search person's post through search bar (I couldn't figure out how to do it)

• I like the old system where new/updated threads were green while threads that I've recently visited grays out. (That way I could look at previous threads at a glance) copy

• The color green should be polycount green as the preset

• Also there's no way to change text color back to white unless you copy/paste white text and start typing.

• Toggling the formatting options (left center and right justified) unselected the text making it annoying to reselect the text.

• Since I was testing the comment system (the formatting to be exact) the List (unordered) got buggy.  The first entry of the list lost its bullet point and the spacing between the bullet points (between this entry and the previous one) is closer together than the other ones.

• Is there also a way to partition your comments?  Such as  a line going across the comment bar? (like below but instead of just holding down Shift + "-" ) 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (I had to delete part of the line post edit posting since the the comment box and the post box are at different lengths)

• 1. You can double bullet/number
• You can do this by selecting text with and without bullet points
• You cannot make sub bullet points or number lists.

Great update despite some small bugs.

1. I was testing testing comment section so maybe bugged on my end
2. Preview didn't show bullets or numbers
3. Also whats the point adding the "settings icon" to the comment when it only gives the edit option?  Can't it switch to edit?
4. No preview  for editing comments

(thanks for pointing me to the correct thread)

Autocon

Love this mock up picture for the regular spacing! Feels cleaner, easier to read and I am able to view far more content that I otherwise could. If you don't want that the default I would LOVE it as an option

@adam Also are the @'s suppose to send you a notification? You used one in the other thread and if they are suppose to send notifications I never got one. Thought I would mention it.

Really digging a lot of what has been done to the site so far

oxygencube

Thanks so much for all the hard work guys! I agree with the other comments... the margins are quite a bit much and the #ffffff white text is a bright bright.  I suggest tighten up the margins, there is quite a bit of wasted space for a msg board / forum... Here is a mock up of my suggested padding/margins and font size.. Take it or leave it. 

thanks again guys! 

GhostDetector

@Adam, does the person get a notification if I edit a comment and add @______ ?

Pleasure

I would love to see a button to mark all posts read in a specific Sub-Forum.

Other than that i am pretty impressed !

iadagraca

In my profile all my old topics are marked as new, i would like a way to clear that or they should all be cleared if made before today. 

leleuxart

Tried quoting Anthony on the @ thing, but neither 'reply' or 'quote' included what he said. In fact, quote took me a new page for a brand new thread...

But I think being able to tag by username would be pretty cool. The notification window already seems like a good idea, but showing the posts you're tagged in would be helpful as well.

xChris

The @'s are working for me (at least I receive the notifications) , is anyone else having trouble quoting? I takes me to a page to make a new thread, and I feel like what its prompting me to fill out (title, select section on forums) I'll accidentally make one.

pior

On a side note, now that the update is out I think it is a good time to look at other forums out there to spot successful stuff that could be borrowed. Many forums are actually quite visually busy but I think SRK strikes a good balance. I am not a huge fan of their forum/subforum menus, but their thread layout is excellent and very space efficient. Here's a side by side comparison if you guys are interested : 

http://i.imgur.com/AG5OIBS.jpg

kodde

Nice new update!

I check out my profile and noticed I had an old email registered. Changed it and got notified that I should be getting a confirmation email to confirm the change. I haven't gotten that confirmation email yet. Checked my spam-inbox and nothing there either. Any ideas? New bug or just me?

yoda

I Love it! Could be possible to have different color links (green - grey) to the posts that you already visited, instead of the "new" icon? 

Neox

Hey guys, just wanted to leave a quick note

Besides getting used to the new layout i think some things are not as obvious anymore.
I really can't see if anything happened in a thread, say the waywo in 3d
i just posted, no idea if my post is the last post, or someone else posted. It's a nice info who started this thread, but after months and thousands of posts, this kinda gets irelevant, i'd rather see who posted last in that thread, to see if anything changed.

Also, how does one see if you checked a thread already? Is it that star? Can you change the background or text color of threads one looked at? so you can see at first glance "i checked this thread already, lets see if something new is there"

Also atm i zoomed out to 75% it kinda feels like the forum was optimized for small displays, but 100% is so huge, on FullHD there isn't much space on a page

SimonT

Let's celebrate the new Forum by looking at a version of 2002 Great work! Thanks for all the time you're spending into the project.


Here's my Feedback:

Copy/Paste Images
Attaching images is cool, but most modern Wikis (like e.g. Confluence) also support directly pasting an image from the clipboard which I think could be very useful for Polycount too, when a member quickly takes a screenshot via a snipping-tool and want's t show it here.

Image-Preview for the whole Thread
The new lightbox-preview in a thread is great BUT why not make it work for the WHOLE thread? Cycling through the images on ONE page is and was pretty relaxing but most of the times it's a bit annyoing to go to the NEXT page. Here a "global" lightbox could shine. In best case it would also be previewing Youtube-Videos and of course Sketchfab etc .
Also I would love a Thread-Image-Preview based on thumbnails exactly how Googles Image-Search looks like. I wish for something like that for years now and no forum supports this - even those where it's all about images. But for me it seems so obvious to hide all the text and only show images of a thread - similar the awesome Polycount Recap.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day!
Simon

Brygelsmack

Love the colors of the site (and as I typed this, it's awesome that it saves a draft of your post!). A few things:

- The spacing is terrible. There really is no reason to have such huge spaces between posts and forum threads. Readability goes down the drain. I don't understand this trend at all. 
- Forum navigation should be: "Home | Forum | General Discussion", so you don't end up at the front page when you expect to go back to the forum front.
- When you copy and paste text (like a quote or w/e) from other sites it tries to mimic size and color of the text you copied, and words that are hyperlinked are remembered as well. Kind of annoying that it keeps this info. It would be better if it just pasted in the same format as the rest of your post. 

Edit: Yeah, this is great Adam. That looks slick as hell.

Bek

That spacing mockup changing the vertical margin looks much better @Adam. Apart from the repetition of course  

Also having the quoting problem in case that hadn't been confirmed yet.

Is there any way to "mark forum as read" so not every thread is tagged as "new"?

praesidenter

I guess it's the same issue mentioned above, where the smileys appeared in the lightbox. They also appear in the thread image preview, when there is no picture before the first smiley. So while it's nice to have somebody smiling at you at that scale, you might want to change that  

pigart

Hmm I was editing my signature and it seems like you can't make a text saying something like "portfolio" that when you click will lead you to your site. I tried doing this with the [url] tags but then it said that I can't have images in my signature.

Wesley

Are the bookmarked links to specific threads/posts now dead? All my bookmarks come up with 'page not found' or it kicks me back to the main forum. Sorry if this was mentioned in that update post; I read it rather bleary-eyed this morning...

LoTekK

It seems like all pre-update forum links are broken, as there's no form of redirection going on from the old link format (eg. showthread.php) to the friendlier new urls.

CapableWizard

Other than the spacing issues, which it seems like you guys are on top of, it feels pretty good so far! I'm missing the greentooth favicon though, in fact there's a definite lack of greentooth on the main page!

Farfarer

In general, you got a *lot* of padding around everything.

Also, there's now no look at what the latest post/thread is in the Tech Talk subforums. I used that a lot to see if there was anything interesting, but now it involves going into each subforum, bit of a pain. I think people might visit less now.

thomasp

glad to see it's not that unfamiliar looking after all. the spacing and font sizes used do need work though. i usually browse on a laptop or the phone, scrolling the forum now takes miles and miles. happy to see the forum does no longer log me out all the time. yay!

bug: on android/firefox the newsfeed page now has column paragraphs formatted to a single character per line.
bug: the wiki is now broken, all the direct links to threads seem to not work anymore.

personal preference: splitting avatar and user info to the left and right of the textbox seems weird. shouldn't it all be in one spot or with the info spread out above or below the text box?  also i think location is a more valuable info to see at a glance than number of topics started. *shrug*
also, we should have some greentooth related smileys, the standard stuff does not cut it IMO.

Farfarer

Also, if you jump into a subforum, there's no breadcrumb for the forum root. There's "Home" which is the polycount front page then the subforum you're browsing - but no "Forum" in between those for the main forum overview.

Edit: Like Neox, I also liked seeing who the last post to a thread was by.
And the edit field of a post has some odd line spacing

Bek

The greentooth favicon also seems not to load (firefox). It was working earlier though...

Blaisoid

Well, like I feared it's outright painful to browse on pc/laptop. Post text size is way too large to read comfortably from normal distance. Subforum rectangles are too large too. It's basically catered towards tiny tiny screens of mobile phones and disregards everything else.

BTW, typing reply is extremely slow on my old pc. There's literally a delay between hitting a key and seeing it on screen. It's a bit silly that such a simple thing can be so script-heavy or drain resources. I've never had that issue on other "modern" forums.

Also, I agree that separating avatar from user info is a bit strange choice.

< ASH >

Hey there, first of all well done with the update !
The new forum looks great and the new features very handy.
 Since the update went live yesterday am getting a weird bug with my username.
On the old forum my username was < Ash > , but on the new one it reads &LT; ASH &GT; .
The problem, other than being only aesthetic is that is interfering with my ability to modify and update my profile: when I try to modify my profile I am getting an error saying that can't find my profile, even if I am logged into it profile (and as you can see I can post).
Do you think you can fix this or at least allow me to modify my username to a more suitable one?
I also have a question: it is not possible anymore to get the link to a specific reply as it was on the old forum?
Let's say that I posted a script or a tool in a specific reply and I want to be able to have a link that points directly to that instead to have to scroll down the thread until I find my reply.
Many thanks in advance.

Ash

Ged

Hey nice update!

I agree that its all just a bit too spaced out, cant see enough on one page anymore, feels like it would be good on a tablet though.

How do I clear all my favorites? I dont remember favoriting anything but I have loads now and I dont want any of them right now.

thanks for the hard work!