Someone should be fired over the 'NEW' SOE forums

[LFG]

Originally Posted by Niber

phpBB is awesome (for what it is). I tried out phpBB3 yesterday and it's impressive considering they only have 7 part time developers, all of which donate their time for free.

But it's hard to compare it to any commercial product like Ipb or vB. You get what you pay for.

Considering that a lifetime vB license costs about the same as a business lunch in California, I think it's a great value.

[CoLDMTL]

They appear to have successfully killed the official forums, they no longer will even load for me.

Either JForums can't handle the volume, or their database engine couldn't, either way I cite this as proof that someone didn't do their homework on the new forums.

(YES it could just be indexes, or some intern pulled the wrong cord, or blah, blah, blah)

As a communication tool it now totally reeks, search is useless, blah, blah, blah.

anyway, coming here more, and I pointed faylene here so they could see how they were crucified. :P

[Both]

its taken them all day to finally redirect to a SOE 404 page. I weep for the web master and his team. Maybe its not even a team. Maybe its just one guy, who splits his time between maintaining eq2players, the forums, and creating class hats. That makes sense.

[Grimwell]

A few things to share while I have some time:

• The official forums are currently locked for maintenance.
• The forum team works on functionality and features (for all forums) daily.
• The forums are an internal design and project. We own it fully. Long term this means we can do anything with them that we want.
• Yes, there are some bumps to get over first. Such as the performance this morning.

I'm taking the long view on this myself. I respect the forum team enough to give them the time to get everything in great shape and then add in cool features and functionality.

Trivia: I just sorted out a way to get in a link to EQ2 Players and will be doing that after lunch today.

I will end by backing what LFG had to say. Posting that some of my coworkers should get fired will get the post moderated. Posting that you have some issues with the forums, or would like to see some features (in the forum about the forums) will be viewed and respected. It's that easy. Blowing off steam feels good but if you want the post to stay alive, be nice to the people I work with eh?

[Tokamak]

SOE forums are now a joke. No ifs no buts no excuses, this is not my idea of professional implementation / upkeep.

Ill add my own cry to those of others - fix the search function to return less than 16000 results for a reasonably specific request.

Edit: e instead of y on reasnoably

[CoLDMTL]

Originally Posted by Grimwell

Trivia: I just sorted out a way to get in a link to EQ2 Players and will be doing that after lunch today.

Proving my point, that the community manager figured out how to do something before the forum dev 'team'. ( I know that is ridiculously unfair, it wasn't on their plate yet, etc., etc., etc.)

Sorts on grids are generally a checkbox in most current development tools. (did you guys go back to direct html edit in notepad?)

Thanks for the update, and I have posted often with suggestions (even nice ones), but not even trivial fixed have been seen (at least i haven't seen them) since the 'new forums' were launched. Hint: updates in official forums would be much much appreciated. Silence is the enemy, when customers have lost their communication avenue.

I can honestly say that if i released a product like this i would have been fired. Didn't realize it would earn me a 3 day ban over on official, but that was ok, no big deal, i know to post nice.

We are now what 6 weeks post release, and no significant chagnes have been made to funtionality. (well maybe you did all internal work first)

Did you guys upgrade to SQL '05 SP 2 , cause that thing needs a ton of time to recompile everything, with no load.

Frankly, using the SOE Official forums as the primary means of communication to customers is ridculous in my opinion, i have always thought that, but now you have left us with no communication whatsoever in a game you change very often.

If I was working on the primary/only means of communication with my customers, it would be dead on spot right the first time, or as near as humans could make it. I personally don't feel we got that level of commitment on the 'new forums'.

[checkov]

Both the SOE forums and eq2players sites are pathetic now and this coming from someone who used to check them both daily. Now I do not even bother to pay for the crap on players and never log in to the official forums except to check for update notes or an explanation as to why the servers are down (fat chance getting accureate info on this). My suggestion is to completely revamp both of them again and poll the users to see wtf they want.

[CoLDMTL]

In their current state they are unusable. And I too checked them daily. Now i am here.