v4.0 Wish List

Cinder

First, I wanted to say I'm really grateful for the heartwarming reception these past few days. I seriously didn't expect it as I was completing the third month of what I was calling "Forum Jail" -- and having a tiring cycle of essentially day and night jobs! Traditional forums may be dying out, but I'm glad to witness and support such a great community coming together in this day and age.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're not here to listen to me go on. You're here for something else...

I've already seen a lot of requests scattered around forum threads and discord channels, and some were easy to take care of on the spot, while others are a lot more difficult to take into consideration. I'd like you to repeat what you've said and use this thread for that. I wonder how many of our wish list items overlap?

The number one thing I want to make clear is that there are no promises for anything and no promised timeframe for completion.

Truthfully, I don't have the expertise about the system to be able to confidently make everything come true, and sometimes it's too crazy for one person to fix issues for every different way people are using the forums. Some things might've been easier or even existed on the old platform, but we got so much more moving on to this one... so I hope you can understand.

My goal for this thread is to see what it'd take to reach a point of stability.

If there are single items that warrant focus, attention, and a discussion with the community itself, it may be beneficial for you to create a new thread instead.

Game Rules

One post per user containing a wish list AND optionally an "unwish" list
Wishes can only be practical forum features related to the overhaul -- reasonable, easy to understand, and have the community in mind
Edit your list as you see fit, but at the very least please use the hyphens to make the bullet lists
Wish for the same things to show interest, and unwish items for the opposite effect -- they don't have to be worded the exact same
No need to list items I'm already committed to, below:

My List of Committed Work

~~Nighttime Arlong Park~~
Alternate color skins
Alternate themes (CP9, Sabaody)
Custom titles
Discord bot for multiple channels
~~Fix the url redirections as best as possible~~ (can't do b/c of the migration :( )
"Pirate Crews"
User-enabled signatures
One Piece emoji reactions
Custom subforum icons
Donation/sub badge and rewards
~~Bold unread threads, unbold read threads~~

Sakonosolo

Allow hiding of the banner at the top of threads that say the thread title and gives information. IMO it clutters the screen, and it's related to the below suggestion as well.
Possibly shrink things or have that as an option. It seems to me that too little content is displayed on the screen at any one time. This is partially due to how zoomed in everything seems as well as the constant banner that follows you as you scroll mentioned above. I have the site put at 90% zoom but even then it seems this way to me. And I think doing it at a site level instead of at a browser level would work better.

The subforums and making read/unread threads more obvious are others but they're already on your list.

GreatLiver

These are predominantly quality of life things that are simply different from the way I had gotten used to interacting with the forums over the past ten years. Just like how whenever facebook rolls out an update, everybody has their nitpicks in the first few days but has completely forgotten them two weeks in, I'm sure after a little bit of time none of these will bother me. While they're still top of mind though, I figure I'll throw them in to see if anyone else feels similarly.

Being able to collapse the reply window without discarding the draft. I think this may go along with what Sakonosolo mentioned about things feeling zoomed in. When it's active it takes up about half the screen and doesn't allow as much space to read through threads. It's especially noteworthy when trying to add multiple quotes.
I know you already have what I mentioned in Discord about more easily differentiating read/unread threads. I loved in the old forums having icons on the left that signified that (Caribou sticking out of a barrel in the Fishman Island theme, for example). The redesign shows the avatar of who started that thread in that space, which at least for me does not seem like particularly necessary information. Once threads get going, for the most part, there isn't really any ownership of it by whoever started it, so it seems unnecessary.
I also haven't been able to find a way to simply mark entire subforums as read.
As someone who is using pagination, I do miss having the button at the bottom of a screen that scrolls directly back to the top of the page. I believe the closest option is the up arrow that brings you to the top by taking you to the first post of the thread. Not a huge difference, but with some of the longer threads it takes a bit of a second. Not sure if that's something that can even be addressed because it may be counter to the default of full scroll.
Something else brought on by pagination is that there are thread page numbers on the bottom of pages, but not the top.
For almost entirely judgemental reasons, I wouldn't hate seeing join date when clicking on a user's avatar to get a little more information without going all the way to their user page.

Kdom

Thanks for all the hard work, I will focus on the ergonomy since it is what is most important to me.

what i miss the most is a go to first unread message button. I understand it is automatic when you click on a thread but it is a bit cloncky especially on mobile. Also it does not work if you refresh the page. Since there is no more pagination, It also means you cannot go to the first page directly. On threads where the first post is edited, that was useful.
Having the read threads in another font would indeed be great rather than guessing on the last post time.
Folding the banner would prevent to get a link toward the parent forum, so i'm not sure i would like that. It's practical to have it easily.
I'm a bit puzzled with the reply/quote mechanism. They are redundant but i find the reply mechanism hard to follow, though it seems to be the most used.
A multiquote plugin could be useful.
About the bounty system, i understand the upvote number is part of the equation, but i fear that the spoiler readers would be advantaged over the official release readers since it is in the spoiler thread that the discussion happens. Especially now that there is a complete week of spoiler discussion (For me, this is also an issue that should be discussed but it is not the object of this thread)

Riddler

@Kdom said in v4.0 Wish List:

Thanks for all the hard work, I will focus on the ergonomy since it is what is most important to me.

what i miss the most is a go to first unread message button. I understand it is automatic when you click on a thread but it is a bit cloncky especially on mobile. Also it does not work if you refresh the page. Since there is no more pagination, It also means you cannot go to the first page directly. On threads where the first post is edited, that was useful.

There still is pagination though, we can all choose individually in our settings if we want pagination or infinite scroll.

Kdom

i mean the pagination of a thread is not visible in the subforum, it only appears in the thread at the bottom.

AnimeFTW

Is there a way to mark the whole forum as read? Apologies if I missed it somehow.

Johnny B. Decent

So, all the pinned threads are in red, right? Maybe change it to a darker shade of red once it's been read with no new posts?

King Cannon

I have no idea how to post images here. Is there a tutorial? because it doesn't feel as straightforward as it should be.

Kdom

@King-Cannon said in v4.0 Wish List:

I have no idea how to post images here. Is there a tutorial? because it doesn't feel as straightforward as it should be.

The site uses Markdown syntax. For image it is explained here
https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#images-1

You can also use the post toolbar, but it is only available if you click on reply (on someone post or at the top of the page), not by using the quick reply button at the bottom

Hakase

The one feature I either don't know how to use or I'm missing from the old place is spoiler tags.
Their most useful use would be to kind of shrink down image heavy posts in the old place.

Thanks Femme.

Femme

@Hakase Check Cinder’s announcement post for how to post spoilers https://forums.arlongpark.net/topic/44258/welcome-back-2022-edition

Kishido

I only have 1 wish... This emoticon I made and is now used in 2 forums already

Zar

Thanks for all the hard work! I think the forum functions perfectly as it is, so below is just little things that'd brighten my day.

Wishlist

Prevent posts from the spoiler thread appearing on people's profiles. It's currently possible to get yourself spoiled by visiting someone's profile page.

G1Ravage

I would like an option on the home page to "mark all threads as read". I used to use that a lot.

cavendishsama

If I can...really declare my wish....I....
I would like to see the page counter in a thread both at the top and the bottom, rn you can only see it at the bottom. I find that useful occasionally.

Thanks for all the great the work, even though I've mostly been a lurker, I really missed this forum.

Wintermute

No suggestions, I just love that there are no timeouts. While writing my posts and in general. Hated that in the old forum.

Mr. Artemis

Search option please. Thank you.

TourianTourist

I would like e-mail notifications for when there is a new topic in a (sub)category that you're watching. This used to be super useful with the spoiler section in the past.

Greg

Any plans for search? Would be really fun to dig up my moon posts from over a decade ago.

All Fiction

@Greg Don't know if this helps, but I only managed to find this one screenshot:
alt text

Greg

@All-Fiction Wow! How did you access the old site?

All Fiction

@Greg I didn't. It's an old screenshot I found from 4chan archive.

Greg

Haha! Oh boy, if that isn't creepy! (Not you, 4chan) Thank you!

Cinder

The post in question for funsies https://forums.arlongpark.net/topic/26057/chapter-585-brothers-cup-discussion/555

I had been looking for search engine alternatives but I'll bring back the one that was on here before if you guys promise to not overload the server.

Johnny B. Decent

I wanted to ask about the "Unread" category. I don't think I've ever seen any thread in it. Is that supposed to work like that?

Riddler

I figured that one out, for each subcategory (Anime, General Discussion, Media etc.), you can change your settings to "Watching" in the upper right corner and then all unread threads belonging to that category will show up in "Unread".

I went through all categories once and changed the setting, so now all unread threads appear there automatically.

Edited to add that you can theoretically also go to single threads and change the setting only for that thread to "Watching", too, if you are only interested in a small number of topics.

Kishido

This post is deleted!

Johnny B. Decent

Do we have a dedicated button for spoilers? As I've been trying to do so with no effect.

Cinder

@Johnny-B-Decent

Sorry for the late response. If you hit the icon, it'll set you up. It's basically a set of triple colons ( ::: ) surrounding the spoiler text and/or images. There's a couple limitations with it (commonly you can't nest spoilers) but it's serves its purpose...

There was the odd occurrence where Redon posted a bunch of spoilers of images in a row, and a couple of them errored out because he used an emoji in his paragraph text before them... incredibly weird.

Alternative spoiler methods such as blacking out text are considered.