Video Game Forums

Let me count the ways...
* The general way skins/styles work looks sloppy to me. Unlike Invision Power Board it's just this mess of weird lines.
* Millions of random features/mods (at one time, that huge HP bar thing made each person's post literally longer than what they said)
* vbPlaza (Why couldn't they just implement these things into the software itself and do away with the weird dysfunctional 'buying' process? Even UBB could do display names easier than that.)
* Boggy, slow loading times
* Goes nuts at midnight and becomes unresponsive
[strike]* Not that UBB was any better at it, but searching is weak and has difficulty finding things over 7 years old[/strike] (Although it can still be difficult, for some reason the search is working a lot better than it did last time I used it)
* 25 foot 'posting rules' box which iterates redundant, useless information on every page
* Bizarre location for style switcher
* Counter-intuitive, weird menus for changing personal stats
* Everything you click morphing into a toolbar half the time, plus several layers of MORE toolbars elsewhere
* Weird WYSIWYG editor that lets you copy/paste things... sometimes... and other times it botches them
* Unconventional ubb tag for strikeout things
* The default icons are horrible (thank goodness we got rid of them)
* The fact it probably cost Shane a bunch of money to use, despite all of its messy stuff
* Tags which exist to confuse people
* etc

VGF is fine where it is, and I'm not saying VGF's forum stuff sucks as a result of this, but I am saying that VBulletin is sort of trashy. IPB isn't a ton better but somehow I feel like the programmers of VBulletin weren't as awake as the ones who made UBB.

UBB had serious security flaws and questionable design choices.

Also, fixed.

Like, all these things aren't in relation to VGF, right? Because there's a lot of things on your list that, if they were referring to VGF specifically, have little or nothing to do with it being on vB. So I assume you've come across those problems elsewhere.

I just want everyone's sidebar-under-the-name cut down and the Thanks plugin fixed. :(

At the very least, we could cut four rows of gifts down to one, or none.

The posting rules box is only like an inch tall, man. Besides, it's at the bottom of the page anyway; I rarely even see it anymore.
And it's hard to find stuff from more than 7 years ago because most of that stuff is GONE, lost in either a server crash from shortly before I registered or in the forum switch itself.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

we should move to proboards

Remember the RPG bars? Those were fun.

I just realized you can minimize the posting rules.

CaptHayfever wrote:The posting rules box is only like an inch tall, man. Besides, it's at the bottom of the page anyway; I rarely even see it anymore.
And it's hard to find stuff from more than 7 years ago because most of that stuff is GONE, lost in either a server crash from shortly before I registered or in the forum switch itself.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

Yes, but, the search option does not allow me to specifically select a date cutoff any longer ago than '6 months ago', which is a joke when most of the posts I'm searching for occurred back then. And they happen to actually be here, just buried beyond visibility, so...

I find it silly that VBulletin (thanks for the typo fix, AI) doesn't make that option go, say, further into the past.

As for the posting rules box, it's just out of place and weird to me. It's just me, I know, but I hate cluttered UI elements hiding in the corner. I have a sort of OCD about those.

Saria Dragon of the Rain Wilds wrote:Like, all these things aren't in relation to VGF, right? Because there's a lot of things on your list that, if they were referring to VGF specifically, have little or nothing to do with it being on vB. So I assume you've come across those problems elsewhere.

In the limited time I have used VBulletin on other places, I have found it to have the same sorts of errors and interface quibbles. Up to and including there being all sorts of mods doing weird things to it. Therefore, it is not VGF alone, but VBulletin in general. Even if I owned one there would be little I could do to suppress most of these annoying quirks, at least without having to do extensive hacking of board files, if it's even in PHP at all.

And of course UBB had some issues, which is why I'm not suggesting anyone change VGF back to that; lord knows we'd probably have some more robots and banned peons running around due to those holes.

Rooty Toot Jasperson wrote:we should move to proboards

oh lawl not that piece of junk

Just now I went ahead & tested the search; I was able to get results as far back as June 2004. If you want, I can try to make it go even further.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!"

The hilarity is that I can't link you to the specifically infuriating search issue because of a different problem with VBulletin's method of URL-ing their search things.

It's not that I can't, it's that if I have too many results, the oldest ones are not visible. So if I go Gunjin-digging, I can literally not get it to see the oldest posts.

Hm, that's odd. Somebody added 'A Year Ago' and a way to sort them that would thwart that. Well, cross that bug off the list.

THIS was what I was trying to get, but couldn't get when I tried a year or so ago: http://www.vgf.com/forums/search.php?searchid=533925

vBulletin is actually better than most forum templates, but there are better ones out there at the same time.

I think VGF utilizes vBulletin fairly well, actually.