Things You Want Changed

[shortylickens]

make the nav bar on the left side an optional item. It takes up too much space on small displays.


Move over to a newer vB or php or something. If Fusetalk is fixed go back to Fusetalk.

 

[ultimatebob]

• Politics and News sucks, you guys should change that

-JP

See? The new bossman figured out what the rest of us knew about the P&N forum pretty quickly

But, seriously though, some tougher moderation and the permaban of about two dozen trolls who frequently post there would probably clean that place up.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Done.

This request has been approved and is being processed. Due to the holidays, we expect the change will take place within a matter of weeks. Our objective will be the complete elimination of the downtime period, rather than a rescheduling. You may see another downtime or two before we are able to enact this change, but it is approved and in process.

Welcome to 2014.

 

[Blain]

Go back to charging a member subscription fee, to help clear out the riff-raff.
It was $30 per year. But with inflation, that figure should be ratcheted up a bit.

What he said.

 

[Markfw]

++++++++++++++++++

Invisible mods


Let us bad mouth the mods

++++++++++++++++++

You do realize most of us donate our time, and don't get a DIME for our time. So you are suggesting that it OK to bad mouth volunteers ? That's like yelling at the volunteer nurse that is helping you.

Please be respectful of what they requested. REAL suggestions for improvement.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Is there any way to get searches in "For Sale/Trade" to be sorted strictly by last posting date? If I'm searching for something, it makes zero sense placing a two month old thread above one from today, regardless of the relevancy of the match.

 

[Carson Dyle]

You do realize most of us donate our time, and don't get a DIME for our time. So you are suggesting that it OK to bad mouth volunteers ? That's like yelling at the volunteer nurse that is helping you.

Please be respectful of what they requested. REAL suggestions for improvement.

I'm not a fan of the current situation. Some of the moderators here just plain suck. There's no way to candy-coat it.

If you actually wanted to improve the situation, then you permit moderators to be called out. If they don't like it, they can _un_volunteer. That's how it should work. If you had a shitty volunteer nurse, you'd make god damned sure that he/she came nowhere near you or your loved ones.

Or, you can have some sort of moderator feedback or voting system and get rid of them according to the will of the membership.

 

[Crono]

Done.

This request has been approved and is being processed. Due to the holidays, we expect the change will take place within a matter of weeks. Our objective will be the complete elimination of the downtime period, rather than a rescheduling. You may see another downtime or two before we are able to enact this change, but it is approved and in process.

Much appreciate everyone's feedback so far - please keep them coming.

:thumbsup:

Glad to hear this.

 

[PenguinPower]

You do realize most of us donate our time, and don't get a DIME for our time. So you are suggesting that it OK to bad mouth volunteers ? That's like yelling at the volunteer nurse that is helping you.

Please be respectful of what they requested. REAL suggestions for improvement.

Sorry, but if I had a volunteer nurse trying to insert an IV into my testicles I would probably voice concern. Same principle...volunteer or no, people should be able to raise their hand in concern about bad moderation. Improving moderation is a real suggestion for improvement...sorry if you don't like that.

 

[Markfw]

I'm not a fan of the current situation. Some of the moderators here just plain suck. There's no way to candy-coat it.

If you actually wanted to improve the situation, then you permit moderators to be called out. If they don't like it, they can _un_volunteer. That's how it should work. If you had a shitty volunteer nurse, you'd make god damned sure that he/she came nowhere near you or your loved ones.

Or, you can have some sort of moderator feedback or voting system and get rid of them according to the will of the membership.

We already have a method for disputing a moderator action Here
Moderator Discussions

Keep in mind, this is not for a callout, insults or the like, but a method of giving feedback when you don't think a proper action was taken by a mod.

Perknose, correct me if I worded this wrong.

 

[stormkroe]

Something that will be the best of both worlds:
Combine most of the subforums in to fewer, more general forums, like has been suggested, but give the poster subforum title icons (like we have frowny faces and thumbs-up) and let them properly label what genre it is. That way it's all in one place, but we can quickly determine the context of the post at a glance. For instance, a thread titled "old ball and chain" could be labled with the Love and Relationships icon, or the Medieval Weaponry icon.

 

[Gillbot]

Make it like L&R in that it's not public as well?

Of yourse, and i'd suggest a landing page before you can enter advising you that if you whine and cry to the mods about stuff contained within.... well, tough shit. Thicken up your skin or stay out.

Yes, I've also often wondered what it would be like to see an entire forum full of threads started by alkemyst.

 

[Thebobo]

See? The new bossman figured out what the rest of us knew about the P&N forum pretty quickly

But, seriously though, some tougher moderation and the permaban of about two dozen trolls who frequently post there would probably clean that place up.

Whoa there cowboy, This was allready discussed and resolved when when they opened the Discussions club.

The way P&N is now is what makes it entertaining and fun. If you over moderate you just have another bland forums just like 99% of the others out there, keep P&N like it is.

 

[Homerboy]

Android Forum (if we have Apple, why not Android? Or did that have to do with Anand's relationship"?)

Less sub forums (Yes, I get the hypocrisy between those two suggestions)

Do not... I repeat DO NOT make these forums UGLY. IE: tons of emoticons. Embedded videos etc etc. One of the best things about ATF is that they are (relatively) clean and simple.

Oh and make the left menu bar scroll down as I scroll down with the thread.

 

[JimKiler]

Allow thread ratings on all sub categories

 

[Spacehead]

There's a whole Greasemonkey Scripts thread in Technical Forum Issues that allow users to customize vBullitin to their liking after switching from Fusetalk.
The biggest issues to me were:

• 
  themes

• different color for visited links

• forum jump list at top & bottom of pages. Navigating forums takes up less space

• removing the sidebar list of forums. Possible to hide/show in vBullitin now?

Also:

• more emoticons - keep animated to a minimum

• Less sub-forums

 

[DigDog]

allow them and be able to deactivate them in the control panel for other people with poor connection.

agreed

 

[Greenman]

:thumbsup:

it's amazing how we've been complaining about this for YEARS and nothing was done about it. then a day later after a new admin comes in here, it gets addressed.

and i agree 100% with everyone saying get rid of all the subforums.

i remember the days when there were all tech forums here, and then you had off topic. and off topic was just that - off topic of tech stuff. we need to get back to that. it was great to be able to go into that forum and just read all different types of threads.

all of the "Consumer Electronics" forums were much better when they were in ATOT so you could just see all the stuff in there relating to cameras, a/v, etc. i don't know about now though with smartphones being so abundant, maybe keeping the mobile devices forum itself is good too.

but things like the garage, health and fitness, home and garden ... i liked it much more when that stuff was just in ATOT instead of their own subforums. although, the H&F one is nice now because you have the same few people who know what they are talking about. any time a health related thread happens in ATOT there is so much misinformation in there that if people took a lot of the advice in there, they would be no better off and possibly worse than if they had not taken it.

I think this is the point of the sub forums. I know a fair bit about remodeling and construction in general, along with 3 or 4 others here, but none of us appear to be around all that much. Having questions we can answer in one place helps us find them. When everything is tossed into OT I can't really follow anything because I can't tell if I've looked at a thread or not.

 

[Jaskalas]

How do these sub forums bother anyone?
I don't understand why it's being requested.

 

[gorcorps]

I'm in the "quit making so many sub-forums" crowd. We don't need to make OT even more boring than it already is. Keep talking sports there, and everything else. We don't need to fragment things even further... our community isn't strong enough on any of these topics to support it.

 

[cabri]

See? The new bossman figured out what the rest of us knew about the P&N forum pretty quickly

But, seriously though, some tougher moderation and the permaban of about two dozen trolls who frequently post there would probably clean that place up.

It was tried a few years ago to clean up P&N.
The members were given a choice at the time and they got what they asked for.

DC was then created for a more civil area to keep out the trolls.

 

[EliteRetard]

Stop with all the useless sub-forums. Virtually no one posts in many forums, meaning virtually no one browses them, meaning the few posts that do go there just languish often unread. Plus it is really hard to determine the proper place to post.

*snip*

Deleting the useless sub-forums would really help with making the site more clean, give more users more threads to view without having to click on dozens of pages, and give more visibility to new users who put posts in unused sub-forums then quit the site disappointed. *snip*

I strongly agree with much of this...but I see a lot of debate over adding or removing sub forums...and I had an idea:

What about using "tags" like we have in hot deals (deal, free, contest) and then allow sorting by those tags.

Selecting a tag when creating a thread seems simple and obvious to me the way it's setup now. Seeing the tags on the main page is clear as well. So I suggest combining some of the sub forums and use these tags to differentiate the various sub topics. Again it would be very important to allow a simple sort by the tags as well.

- v ----------------- v - possible sub forum ideas - v ----------------- v -

Some of the sub topics appear to be popular and quite busy themselves, so I wouldn't combine those...but the less used sub topics could be combined.

The CPU section is good as is the video card section, but perhaps we could have an "Other components and general hardware" section with tags for MOBO, RAM, PSU, etc.

Personally I think "Notebooks" should be their own thing...perhaps "Notebooks and Mobile" to include windows tablets and such, and change the current mobile devices sub to "Android and IOS Devices and Gadgets".

I think SFF and HTPC should be combined, they seem more in common than notebooks and SFF.

Perhaps "Cases, Cooling, and Peripherals" could be made one with three "sub tags".

We still need a computer help sub forum but maybe we could put the pre-built and computer build questions there as well. Maybe call it "PC Help, Build, and Buying". Move the stickied buyers guides there.

I guess I'll end here, the main point I wanted to get across was using tags to sort categories in the sub topics. I'll let you guys decide the who, what, when, where, why, and how the sub forums should be changed.

 

[smithkt]

• Get rid of the tapatalk prompt every time I visit the forum on my phone/tablet. I don't want to use it and it is irritating to have it pushed upon me.
  
• Get rid of the left navigation or make it a settable option in the event others use it. Wasted screen real-estate on smaller displays.
  
• I wouldn't be opposed to consolidating the forums, but not a huge issue for me. Someone else mentioned the HTPC and SFF forums as an example.

 

[Ken g6]

There's a whole Greasemonkey Scripts thread in Technical Forum Issues that allow users to customize vBullitin to their liking after switching from Fusetalk.

Userscripts.org is dead and buried. However, I wrote a lot of those. So I could give you copies if you really want them. On the other hand, you really don't want JavaScript mucking with the page like that in a production system.

The biggest issues to me were:

• 
  themes

Themes, fortunately, weren't on userscripts.org. Edit: Also, they're CSS, not JS. Mine are still present on userstyles.org. Feel free to take them and use them however you want - as long as they're optional. I don't want to be forced onto one theme or another, but I'd very much like multiple skins to be available. All work on Firefox, most work on Chrome, and there's no accounting for IE.

more emoticons - keep animated to a minimum

I think now is a good time to repeat [thread=2075540]my request for Free beer[/thread]. :sneaky:

No, not real beer! Of the smilies that didn't come with us when we migrated from Fusetalk to VB, I think :beer: was the most popular. I found a Free (as in speech as well as beer) beer icon that I think looks good, if you're looking for one:

 

[Ketchup]

:thumbsup:

it's amazing how we've been complaining about this for YEARS and nothing was done about it. then a day later after a new admin comes in here, it gets addressed.

and i agree 100% with everyone saying get rid of all the subforums.

i remember the days when there were all tech forums here, and then you had off topic. and off topic was just that - off topic of tech stuff. we need to get back to that. it was great to be able to go into that forum and just read all different types of threads.

all of the "Consumer Electronics" forums were much better when they were in ATOT so you could just see all the stuff in there relating to cameras, a/v, etc. i don't know about now though with smartphones being so abundant, maybe keeping the mobile devices forum itself is good too.

but things like the garage, health and fitness, home and garden ... i liked it much more when that stuff was just in ATOT instead of their own subforums. although, the H&F one is nice now because you have the same few people who know what they are talking about. any time a health related thread happens in ATOT there is so much misinformation in there that if people took a lot of the advice in there, they would be no better off and possibly worse than if they had not taken it.

I have been thinking about your post since I first saw it, and I am inclined to agree. AT is a TECH SITE. People want to talk about other things, and that is great, but lump it together. The forum home page makes it look like we are an "anything and everything" forum, with a little tech thrown in for flavor. The forums should complement the website, which is first and foremost, a TECH SITE.