LOTRO Community Site Revamp July 28 - Aug 1, 2013 - ESTIMATED

[Community_Name]

I'm not Turbine, but based on earlier Turbine responses, I'll try to summarize for you:

The PvMP Leaderboards are being discontinued because:

• The leaderboards rely on data.lotro.com services for their information on characters.
  
  • The data.lotro.com services no longer work reliably.
    
    • It would cost too much to make the data.lotro.com services work reliably again.
• The leaderboards rely on custom WordPress widgets to display on the Community Site.
  
  • The custom WordPress widgets no longer work reliably.
    
    • It would cost too much to make the custom WordPress widgets work reliably again.

Short answer: They cost too much.

The same answers apply to most of the Community Site features being discontinued, not just the PvMP Leaderboards.

Oh, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, we have full asses of MONEY, but we want more MONEY.

[Khafar]

Hmm... I don't see a couple of pretty important things on the list:

• The hugely obnoxious spontaneous logouts are gone.
• New logins are secure https, not in-the-clear html posts.

If those are coming along with faster forums, great! If not... Turbine can expect some flames, and not just from me. We've been dealing with those for far, far too long already.

Khafar

[Political_Suicide]

We the players really really wish you guys would create an easy and fast button to lock and unlock the toolbars. Please consider this highly and if you do please make it small and unobtrusive hehe. thanks for your time and concern and thank you for all that you do.

[Eartholloth]

i did not find the interactive map that great prefer the ones wiki had

I agree, I think it stinks just like the lorebook. I always use wiki. Much more useful imo.

[Maximilan]

Here goes nothing! I get to two hundred posts and the forums go poof!

[Runesi_EU]

Well, it seems to be working faster so far.

[Yaksha42]

[Laire]

It does seem to be going faster. Meh the text box is too large :P Well this page is not loading correctly, so I assume it'll be less straining once all kinks are worked out.

*messes with options*

[ShammWoww]

I'm back.
Looks great!

[Priestetute]

I prefer the old forums.

[HunterGreen]

While I am definitely looking forward to the reliability and speed, the color scheme, if you can call it that, is kind of blah. I know vBulletin supports user-selected color schemes and that lots of them are available, but most vBulletin sites don't install them and make them available to users for reasons I do not pretend to understand.

Any hope we're going to get some more options for color schemes here, at some point? (I realize that wouldn't be a priority during the crush of work of initial setup, but maybe something for down the road, once the bugs are worked out?) I would really like one with dark text on a light background, for instance. There's a good reason that virtually everything else on your computer defaults to that kind of color scheme and has since the mid-80s.

[Sapience]

While I am definitely looking forward to the reliability and speed, the color scheme, if you can call it that, is kind of blah. I know vBulletin supports user-selected color schemes and that lots of them are available, but most vBulletin sites don't install them and make them available to users for reasons I do not pretend to understand.

Any hope we're going to get some more options for color schemes here, at some point? (I realize that wouldn't be a priority during the crush of work of initial setup, but maybe something for down the road, once the bugs are worked out?) I would really like one with dark text on a light background, for instance. There's a good reason that virtually everything else on your computer defaults to that kind of color scheme and has since the mid-80s.

I had originally requested a light and a dark scheme. With the number of issues we encountered getting this one working correctly (and it's still only about 90%), the light is very, very low priority.

[nachouls]

I totally love the new forum. Thanks Turbine for this!
It's faster, simpler, and looks more... hmm... how to say it... pro & modern.

Looking forward for new lotteries now, and the next 20 dev questions

[Belsar]

I totally love the new forum. Thanks Turbine for this!
It's faster, simpler, and looks more... hmm... how to say it... pro & modern.

Looking forward for new lotteries now, and the next 20 dev questions

Sorry. I'm still testing this "Display Name" for the new site, and that nick was one of my old trials. I use this chance to report that, when trying to confirm a post edition, the site took me to the main forum page instead of the post, and the message wasn't changed

I'll be reporting this on the corresponding section, though.

[tanlis]

I had originally requested a light and a dark scheme. With the number of issues we encountered getting this one working correctly (and it's still only about 90%), the light is very, very low priority.

I understand the troubles of trying to support multiple themes as having run forums for a MUD back in the day. But I really hope you consider a couple alternatives as right now the light grey text for posts against a black background is very difficult to read. While my eyes are far from bad(I do wear glasses for driving), it was really noticeable that I had to bump the font up in order to read anything in this new theme.

That being said, thanks for the new forums. Loving the speed!

[Ukhidden]

If the only reason for removing almost every feature that made my.lotro.com something that made the game experience a LOT better, is just money, then I don't know what to say. I've never complained about the forums, I've never complained about anything in my.lotro.com, because everything worked, and I don't see why others should complain either. Yes it's a bit slow, the forums were also quite slow, so I understand that, but simply removing EVERY feature just because of the forums being slow? I have no idea what you're thinking. Apparently you're thinking with money.

If you don't think with money, then why couldn't you SEPARATE the lotteries, forums and BR transfer with my.lotro.com, and optimize those SEPARATELY. my.lotro.com's homepage widgets were awesome, in addition to the logs of what you've and what your friends have done in-game. Also the ability to check your character's stats outside of the game was pretty neat as well.

Seems like we've all taken my.lotro.com for granted, that's it's something that would always be there, but I guess we should praise it more.

[Leixy]

agree, definitely needs a text colour adjustment. I like the forum, congrats to you and all of the developers on making a successful migration, hopefully near 100% successful.

If color is the major disagreement, I believe you've done a very good job.

[Crono_Poingdefeu]

That's better and faster. Thanks for that.

[Saronai]

Since no one has responded yet to questions on the details about discontinuing refer a friend, what are the details on this? Is the program ending completely, or are we just not being allowed any new referrals for the foreseeable future?

[RedlineJunkie]

I had originally requested a light and a dark scheme. With the number of issues we encountered getting this one working correctly (and it's still only about 90%), the light is very, very low priority.

That's weird. I don't know anything about forum software, but it seems like the color of text and background would be a very basic setting in the year 2013.

[Hurin]

That's weird. I don't know anything about forum software, but it seems like the color of text and background would be a very basic setting in the year 2013.

I've skinned a few IPB forums in the past. . . and it can be that easy. But then the menus don't look quite right. . . so you change that value and the header menu gets mangled. . . etc.

I'm not saying they can't adjust it. But it might not be trivial. And some will probably complain about how ugly/painful white text is on black. =)

[NaktiesKarys]

Forum looks better and I believe it would work better.
Experienced strange thing while logging in: entered my country (LIthuania), checked about the rules...and Firefox told me page was trying to adress something "in a way it would never complete". Stopped FF, reloaded - site works fine. Is it for me only or....?

[cdq1958]

I like the changes so far, with some tweaking. I can tweak it some, can't I?

[Padhril]

I understand the troubles of trying to support multiple themes as having run forums for a MUD back in the day. But I really hope you consider a couple alternatives as right now the light grey text for posts against a black background is very difficult to read. While my eyes are far from bad(I do wear glasses for driving), it was really noticeable that I had to bump the font up in order to read anything in this new theme.!

Fully agreed. I wear my glasses all the time, but can usually read things well enough with their aid. But I always have trouble with low-contrast layouts, and the site is not very good to read as it is now.

[littlesquinky]

I hope this is just a beta/first sprint version of the new forum.
It looks just plain ugly.

On the first page, there are white titles on gray background, it's pure white, so it's going to make bleed people with low quality monitors, which diplay a cold white gamma. On the opposite, the threads are light gray on dark gray background, too low contrast. You should keep the look and feel consistent on all the screens.

The skin you choose or customized looks like some early late decade tech sites, not even a lively tech site. If you wanted your forums to look like some place for engineers, you should have taken a look at springsource, or any decent tech site. I mean, even oracle forums look more lively then this grey on sepia on grey stuff. And again, this is a game forum, it should look cheerish, lively, vibrant, not dull like a rainy day on november.

Another big issue is recognizability. If I took a screenshot of the previous forums, It spoke lotro out loud, if I take a screenshot of this one, it doesn't speak anything about lotro, apart the headers. I mean, you cannot even show this in pp at some meeting, your peers would not recognize it is about lotro. This does not look as lotro forum, it looks like a random forum, an ugly one.

So what we have here is a community site, which is not even a community site anymore since you stripped down all the other functionalities, forums excluded, and you say the main benefit of this is that the forums will become faster and usable. As a customer, I would expect a service to be usable and reasonably fast as a pre requisite for it, not as a bonus. As a developer working for an it company which develops enterprise services, I can tell you this is what customer expect from you: they want a service which is usable, reasonably fast and nice to see and show to other people (say a random lotro player shows this forum to a random wow player, the latter will say mine looks better, the former but mine is fast, the latter yeah mine too).

I think this migration is for the worse and not for the better, and selling it to people as a speed bump is very unprofessional from you as a company. I just hope this will not impact the game, like forcing everybody to set graphics on medium because it's faster and cheaper for you to mantain (this is what you did here to the forums).

Sorry for grammar and bad choice of words, english is not my mothertongue and since I'm not writing a work mail I'm not gonna double check it for errors, eh eh.