Forum Structure - Update & Feedback

ZOS_AlanG

In our continued effort to improve forum accessibility and support, we have added a new section for discussing combat and the skill system, and reduced the amount of nesting on the forums. We feel this will give more space to these popular topics, and make sub-forums more visible.

In addition to these current changes, we are working on a large scale visual and structural overhaul of the forums, which we expect will be implemented this autumn. It will also include a revamp of the developer tracker, and add language selection to the forums. These changes should also fix the problems some mobile devices have accessing the forums.

There are some small improvements which may be implemented before then, and as always we welcome any forum feedback.

Dec 15 Update

We wanted to let everyone know the forum overhaul will not be releasing in December. We continue to work on it, and will update everyone on their status as soon as we can. If you haven’t seen them already, we posted some WIP screenshots earlier in the season.

Probitas

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

Probitas

Thank you

kimboh

Probitas wrote: »

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

And lols

Nox_Aeterna

Hum nice to see the forums are getting attention.

Xnemesis

Class specific forums pls

jnjapexb14_ESO

Please purchase commercial forum software and use that.

Darkonflare15

Probitas wrote: »

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

A better question is Who we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from? Since you can easily find where you get the Awesomes and Agreeds from you comments by clicking on the aforementioned words.

Sigtric

jnjapexb14_ESO wrote: »

Please purchase commercial forum software and use that.

While I am much more familiar and at home with VB, this isn't bad. It's just different.

Ser Lobo

Edit: I made all my suggestions, and forgot the most important part! Thank you, ZOS, for not only maintaining and improving these forums, but for also taking part where you do and using many suggestions. It's refreshing to have a team actually listen to the mostly-minority forum community.

Some requested features:

- The ability to track developer posts more fluidly.
- A NEW SECTION, which links ALL developer comments and activity on sites other than elderscrollsonline.com, so that players can more easily track facebook, twitter and reddit comments.
- The ability to change background and style of the forums site, per user.
- The ability to downvote or disagree with a topic officially (no matter how many options we take away, you can't make people agree with each other, but forcing someone to reply to state disagreement is akin to naming and shaming in many cases, especially since you don't force them to reply in order to agree).
- The ability to ignore posters, per user (it's a forum, and there are trolls and personal vendettas and all manner of negativity ... let us choose to ignore those posters for our own experience).
- The ability to ignore entire topics (preferably chosen from the thread list before opening the topic itself).
- The ability to ignore all player-made polls.
- The ability to see the original thread poster and original thread date/time from the thread list (so you can see if a post is necro'd, or from a user who is commonly trolling, etc).

Divinius

Darkonflare15 wrote: »

A better question is Who we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

Actually, it's much better that the ratings remain anonymous. When forums display who is actually giving the ratings, the whole system turns into a mess with people rating others based on how they rated them, as opposed to actually rating the content.

Leave it anonymous, please.

AlexDougherty

Probitas wrote: »

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

Well, if you check your profile page it tells you which quotes gave which comments, which is Where they come from.

But there is no way to tell from Who they come from, which probably for the best, anonymity helps keep the comments from turning into an arguement, or five.

Universe

I'm happy that you have decided to further develop the current forum structure.
Two improvements which I think needs to be considered by you:
1)Fix the discussion editing- I can't edit a discussion no matter how hard I try.
It always notifying me: "Category is required"
This is essential tool for any kind of forum user.
I suggest adding this to your list of top priority issues.
2)I can't send private message to a player by clicking the "Message" icon in a user's profile.
I'm aware that my forum message count might not be grand and I'm still a "Soul Shriven", but it's should be available to anyone who participate in the forums(active subscription).
Please fix the forum's permission list.

Good luck

ZOS_AlanG

We are currently looking at changes for the reaction flags, but don't have any plans to change the anonymity of the system. The system is not anonymous for moderators, so if you feel that someone is targeting you or otherwise abusing the system you can report the matter to us to investigate.

Xnemesis wrote: »

Class specific forums pls

We will be making changes to the forum structure as part of the overhaul. We have seen calls for class forums in the past so this will be considered, and we hope the new combat and skill line category will improve class discussion in the meantime.

ruze84b14_ESO wrote: »

Edit: I made all my suggestions, and forgot the most important part! Thank you, ZOS, for not only maintaining and improving these forums, but for also taking part where you do and using many suggestions. It's refreshing to have a team actually listen to the mostly-minority forum community.

Thank you Ruze, for the compliment and the feedback. Improvements for the dev tracker are planned, and we are also investigating an ignore feature.

Preyfar

Will this change how the foreign languages are separated on the forums? I think that's my only issue - navigating through the forums and checking dev tracker has a lot of extra traffic to it because of that, and can make it a little harder to find what you're looking for.

Other than that, keep up the great work.

ZOS_AlanG

Preyfar wrote: »

Will this change how the foreign languages are separated on the forums? I think that's my only issue - navigating through the forums and checking dev tracker has a lot of extra traffic to it because of that, and can make it a little harder to find what you're looking for.

Yes. Improving language support and navigation is one of our priorities for the overhaul. We are aware that many find the current multi-lingual structure to be busy, and it has contributed to the general difficulty in navigating these forums.

Darlgon

ZOS_AlanG wrote: »

Preyfar wrote: »

Will this change how the foreign languages are separated on the forums? I think that's my only issue - navigating through the forums and checking dev tracker has a lot of extra traffic to it because of that, and can make it a little harder to find what you're looking for.

Yes. Improving language support and navigation is one of our priorities for the overhaul. We are aware that many find the current multi-lingual structure to be busy, and it has contributed to the general difficulty in navigating these forums.

And, I hope, make it so if a Dev/Forum mod posts, it automatically shows up in the Dev Tracker without it having to be manually flagged? (From how other mods say the forums work..)

Posts like the one i quoted sometimes never appear in the dev tracker. I do SOO like all the interaction with ZoS staff, and love to have some kind of official word on stuff.

Thanks.

Arsenic_Touch

The dev tracker needs an overhaul too. With a language filter and single column for posts.

RazorRex

Thank god for the language selection. It does make me feel uneducated, as though I should have learned those languages.

Blackhorne

jnjapexb14_ESO wrote: »

Please purchase commercial forum software and use that.

They did. This is.

Taresgos

pls add date&time for developer tracker

sungodapollo976_ESO

Darkonflare15 wrote: »

Probitas wrote: »

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

A better question is Who we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from? Since you can easily find where you get the Awesomes and Agreeds from you comments by clicking on the aforementioned words.

I was about to say that after I read that. It reminded me of a joke. How is where? and You are How?

Slurg

ZOS_AlanG wrote: »

/snip

In addition to these current changes, we are working on a large scale visual and structural overhaul of the forums, which we expect will be implemented this autumn. It will also include a revamp of the developer tracker, and add language selection to the forums. These changes should also fix the problems some mobile devices have accessing the forums.

If you fix the mobile device forums so they look normal and not like they do in this thread, I will give you eleventy billion awesomes and I don't care if the whole world sees it.

eventide03b14a_ESO

Probitas wrote: »

How about a way to find out WHERE we are getting those Awesomes and Agreeds from?

I actually like that it's anonymous. They should include a dislike button though and a way to bury unpopular topics by the amount of dislikes.

eventide03b14a_ESO

jnjapexb14_ESO wrote: »

Please purchase commercial forum software and use that.

They use Vanilla forums which is a commercial forum software...

http://pages.vanillaforums.com/forum-software-free-trial?gclid=CMCh38KmhMACFehj7Aod_AYA0g

Isibis

Great to see you are planning some improvements.
Here are some things that I would love to see:
1) Change the guild advertisement sections. The current set up is restricting with many guild types, such as trading, casual and everything guilds. As it is guilds are just making several threads each. Maybe implement tags and make a search feature for them.
2) streamline the access to inbox and notifications. As it is when I click on the little red number to check my notifications I am taken to my profile and have to take one more step to get there. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

3) It would be great to see some sort of color coding for the language sections to they are easy to differentiate.

Thank you!

KitLightning

@ZOS_AlanG What is the reason for deleting/hiding* of 14 pages of forum feedback? To much negative or not-so-constructive feedback? Seriously some took a great deal of time to formulate a solution to the current form. Such actions only aspire to more not-so-positive feedback imho.
*Delete whichever that does not seem fitting.

dreasteri

I got one question for the staff of Elder Scrolls..
I haven't played in 2-3 weeks because of work but I was going to play it tonight and when I started the launcher it automatically started to download the latest version but then it stopped downloading and freezed my computer. Then the message came up something about "Unable to connect to metafile. Please contact the support" or something like that and the blue "pause" button changed to "repair" and when I pushed it, it just started downloading again and the same thing happened again.

what is happening ? Why does it refuse to download the latest version so I can play the game ?

KitLightning

dreasteri wrote: »

...

I've experienced issues with this IP 54.243.115.56 (launcher.bethesda.net), all the other IP's used by the installer/updater gives 100% positive results. Did you create a Ticket in Support and also tried to see make a ping-test of the IP above, i.e. Start > Run > cmd > ping 54.243.115.56.

ZOS_AlanG

Isibis wrote: »

Great to see you are planning some improvements.
Here are some things that I would love to see:
1) Change the guild advertisement sections. The current set up is restricting with many guild types, such as trading, casual and everything guilds. As it is guilds are just making several threads each. Maybe implement tags and make a search feature for them.
2) streamline the access to inbox and notifications. As it is when I click on the little red number to check my notifications I am taken to my profile and have to take one more step to get there. Not a deal breaker, but annoying.

3) It would be great to see some sort of color coding for the language sections to they are easy to differentiate.

Thank you!

The guild section is intended to be temporary, but if it still exists when we overhaul the forums we will look at ways it can be improved. A tagging system could be very useful, and it is something we may look at after the overhaul.

KitLightning wrote: »

@ZOS_AlanG What is the reason for deleting/hiding* of 14 pages of forum feedback? To much negative or not-so-constructive feedback? Seriously some took a great deal of time to formulate a solution to the current form. Such actions only aspire to more not-so-positive feedback imho.
*Delete whichever that does not seem fitting.

The original forum structure discussion can be found right here. The feedback posted in that thread has been extremely helpful, and we are not turning out backs on it.

Given the length of that thread, a number of official updates posted in there had been buried by subsequent discussion. A fresh start has allowed us to consolidate this information in the opening post, and give the new autumn release for the overhaul some prominence. In addition to the small restructure last week, we have some additional tweaks planned for the coming weeks, and expect this thread to remain quite active.

KitLightning

Oh didn't see it jsut had been unstickied*, I thought it had been moved to the "other area".