Yeah I'm not really a fan of this setup either (but everyone said I just didn't know better). I don't really see how it's encouraging more or better conversation. I don't feel like it's easier to navigate, since we had those little dropdown menus before that were plenty easy (in fact, i feel like they were easier to use).

And I know they're placeholder, but the icons suck. I'd rather they were just text at this point. I hope that the new icons are smaller -- I don't like having all that garbage over to the left of every thread. It makes the forums feel off-kilter compared to the rest of GFF. It's not balanced. I like balance.

I don't like it either... the forum are way more confusing for me now... and it doesn't look very appealing to me...

This is you guys:

http://a.photos.cx/myworldischanging-stephen-487.jpg

I'm hoping better icons will fix it for us. I imagined being able to look at a glance and see the threads I wanted, but the icons are just too awful to be able to do that. Maybe with good ones it will look nice.

So far this new setup is just as bad as I figured it would be. I know it's still being worked on and such, but why didn't we wait to combine them until we actually had icons and filters ready? Everything is too cluttered at the moment.

As an actual issue though, there's something screwy with the text tags (PC, Help, News, Attention, etc.) in IE. They show up fine in Firefox, but in IE they're all just blank rectangles like they're images that refused to load.

The filters do work. Click on one of the prefixes. They aren't as fully featured as they will be but they do work. Text works just as well as temp icons for the moment. Blah more than likely tests everything in Firefox first but IE will probably work fine once everything is in place. Also, IE sucks yadda yadda.

I'm using IE7 and I'm not having any tag issues. Perhaps this is with earlier versions of IE, I'm not sure.

As for the forum setup I'm not overly enjoying this either. If we were to make the area where you select "Video Gaming" off the main page the general gaming area with optional thread console tags and then seperate Forum areas for each of the indevidual consoles like the Multiplayer and RPG areas already are, this would allow acces to console specific forums off the main page while also keeping the list of the main page small and make things a little more organized for the users.

EDIT
PC, Help and Question appear to be the only tags I see boxes for, didn't notice this earlier.

No no, that's not what I mean about the filters not being ready. Originally I thought it was planned to have the filter tags up at the top to easily click on too, or a way to set custom filters.

IE does suck, but I hate dealing with Firefox.

Except, y'know, wrong.

I asked Lukage about this, and he has told me that in regards to the Bioshock thread he posted in, that he would either not have seen it at all or not seen it for several weeks (depending on it's location), if the gaming boards weren't centralized like this. That's a prime example of what I was talking about before. More users see more threads more often that they wouldn't have before and we get more discussion.

The rest of your complaints/issues are all opinion so I won't bother addressing them.

I will agree that the icons are too big at this point and should be shrunk. Other than that, I'm in love with this.

Question
So what will happen to the once forum specific Sticky threads? Are these just simply going to get lost, buried amongst all the other threads or what's going to be done?

I LIKE the new icons. They just need to make the column width smaller.

awesome, one guy, one thread. :rock:

who seriously doesn't check the general gaming board anyway? haha.

I'm citing just one quick example. I'm relatively certain this won't be the only instance of this ever happening.

I clicked on a thread involving the 360 by accident and promptly closed the tab...does that count?

That's five to ten seconds wasted. It could have been completely avoided had you just been in the forum of your video-gaming platform of choice!

BUT! Since you opened the thread, you should have read it and replied to it! Tsk tsk, we're trying to encourage conversation here!

I'm fairly sure that we'll be having a filter system similar to SA.

Check out their gaming forum and filter system:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/for...php?forumid=44

If they don't apply any more or aren't important then they have been unstickyed or rewritten or planned to be rewritten.

Are there any stickies that you see needing to come back that aren't there? Please tell me.

I always wanted to keep pace with all the systems forums. Thanks to a consolidated gaming forum, I can now see what's hot at one glance. This sure helps some exotic games getting the exposure they deserve.

The only things I still don't agree with are tags and the Multiplayer and RPG subforums. Really, dealing with subforums is always cumbersome, even with the little popup windows. I totally appreciate the effort put into these nifty extensions, but I don't think they're really needed.

What's keeping us from just putting all gaming threads in a single forum? We don't need tags, either, those are pretty pointless if you just put the platform name in the thread title or something. The gaming forum would look so much better without tags and subforums. Just keep it clean and simple - less is more.

Because those of us with only one system will become ENRAGED every time we have to dig through 10 threads to find one we think is remotely interesting.

RR nailed it. Rock, you're so wrong here it isn't even funny.

I can see what both Rock and Reaver's points are and they each have their points.

Rock: Without the tags and subforums people will more likely to participate in discussions that they might not normally seek to participate in.

Reaver: The tags and subforums is to give people the option to be more selective with the things they want to read and Discuss.

As for myself I'm still a bit sketchy on the idea. I think that more participation on the community is a good thing, however people already get frustrated when someone has a difference of opinion on a topic, imagine when you get all the fanboys of group A voicing their opinions in the threads of group B. Perhaps I'm underestimating the maturity of the community here but from what I've experianced from being on other gaming forums from gametrailers.com to GaiaOnline these things tend to not often turn out for the better.

All things aside, I think if perhaps we could order the threads in the gaming section by console a litle easier with perhaps a drop box for console selection over the tag colum instead at the bottom of the page like it is now may be the simplest fix for everyone.

Yeah.

Basically with absolutely no sorting function, the forums would be a complete clusterfuck. I can live with the way they are now, it's functional enough to be acceptable.

But with no sorting features, I really couldn't enjoy paging through the forums just to see if something strikes my fancy. Maybe we should combine all the community forums into one big clusterfuck and put "general," "community," "politics," "jokeslol," "adult," "food," and "emo" tags on everything. It'd be so streamlined that way.

It would be Fark and you are retarded and yes I know you're exaggerating.

I agree with the subforum part. That stuff makes 100% sure I never know where to find Squeenix games. Plus, you guys don't know either since you keep making threads and moving them back and forth. So it's not just me. :D

But tags are absolutely necessary.

BUT ACER! It would expose people to threads they might not see otherwise, and encourage conversation! Plus people can see everything all at once so they don't have to change forums! SO EASY!

It might make it so I actually go into Community. :p