New Tom’s Forum Announcement & Feedback

[Jsimenhoff]

And that's the point. There's no way of telling if I'd read the original post in any given thread if there has been a reply since I've read it.

As an example, say the thread title is something ambiguous like, "I Need Help". I read the thread and it's something I know nothing about and no one else has responded. Ok. I have to go to work. Nine hours later, I get home, and come to Tom's. There's a thread titled, "I Need Help" that has one reply.

How can I know if it's the same thread that I read this morning, but still know nothing about?

-Wolf sends

I see, so you would like some kind of notification that you have opened as well as read a thread? To be frank I think that was another broken feature in the old system. It was supposed to function as it does now. Again, we will be discussing all community feedback with our theme developers. I'll bring this up and see if there are ways we can refine the unread/read/opened notification functionality on thread listings.

 

[Wolfshadw]

I see, so you would like some kind of notification that you have opened as well as read a thread? To be frank I think that was another broken feature in the old system. It was supposed to function as it does now. Again, we will be discussing all community feedback with our theme developers. I'll bring this up and see if there are ways we can refine the unread/read/opened notification functionality on thread listings.

With the old system:
If it was a new and unread thread, there was no flag.
If I read the thread, it got a faded red flag.
If there was a new and unread reply since I read the thread, it got a hard red flag.

Since the thread had a red flag (either faded or hard), I know I've read the thread. Since I didn't reply the first time I read it, I probably don't need to read it or the new reply(ies) again.

At least, that's how I see it.

-Wolf sends

 

[Barty1884]

^^ Agreed.

If I've read a thread and not contributed, there's a reason. In all likelihood, it doesn't matter what the next response says/asks, I don't need to read it again.
If I have an interest in the thread, but nothing to contribute, I can 'watch' it and see there were responses without it re-appearing as unread.

 

[Jsimenhoff]

With the old system:
If it was a new and unread thread, there was no flag.
If I read the thread, it got a faded red flag.
If there was a new and unread reply since I read the thread, it got a hard red flag.

Since the thread had a red flag (either faded or hard), I know I've read the thread. Since I didn't reply the first time I read it, I probably don't need to read it or the new reply(ies) again.

At least, that's how I see it.

-Wolf sends

^^ Agreed.

If I've read a thread and not contributed, there's a reason. In all likelihood, it doesn't matter what the next response says/asks, I don't need to read it again.
If I have an interest in the thread, but nothing to contribute, I can 'watch' it and see there were responses without it re-appearing as unread.

Got it, it appears I've misspoke or mis-remembered. Memory is a funny thing isn't it?

I'll pass this feedback along and see what we can do.

 

[Solandri]

On a similar note, the old forums would automatically put any thread you posted in to your "my topics" list (or whatever it used to be called). You could explicitly add a thread which you hadn't posted in, or explicitly remove a thread you had posted in (if, say, the discussion had drifted to something you had no interest/knowledge in).

With the new forums, I've been using the "Threads with your posts" as a proxy for this, but it has no facility for adding a thread I wish to post in later when I have more time. There's a "Watched threads" category, but it's currently empty because I haven't explicitly decided to watch a thread.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a thread automatically added to your Watched threads list whenever you post in it? As long as you have the option to explicitly unwatch a thread, I can't think of any problems this would cause. And it would be a lot less work than manually watching every thread I post in.

 

[geofelt]

I am very pleased with the new forum.

1. I like the larger/expanding window for replies.
2. It seems to me to be performing faster.
3. To date, I do not see current interest entries on tom's home page.

No matter to me.
tom's home page has some sort of a cpu loop for 10 seconds before entries can be made.
I can now simply use the what's new link and go to the the current posts.
Not exactly good for Tom's, if I ignore the home page, but works for me.

 

[Al_Biss]

Finally, I had no problem to log in.

 

[Frag Maniac]

The Tom's Community has 2.7 million members who have posted hundreds of millions of threads across the width and breadth of two decades. The servers most assuredly can handle your individual thread, but my caution was in making a change that rippled out to the vast ocean of all threads across all time that had any media embedded in them ever. Making adjustments is something there is strong appetite to do in the post-migration state, but caution must be exercised when changing the physics of the forum universe. As a case in point, during a post-migration state on AnandTech, when the posts per page setting was changed from 10 to 20, it didn't just happily change one minor thing kept independent at the bottom of the page for pagination - it altered the indexation and pagination for every thread page that ever was for those forums, bringing the servers to their knees for an evening.

The ones we're on are quite powerful (thanks DevOps!) but I'll need to review with people smarter and more proficient than I before considering lifting the media cap higher than 15 or setting it to infinite, which is also an option. This is to say that an extraordinarily minor change at the systemic level on a forum this large can have broad ranging effects. I'll investigate and come back to this. In the interim... you have 114 videos embedded in a single tutorial? Over-achiever, you! Show me?

Yeah I know full well such a thing could get extremely ugly were you to apply such an adjustment to all threads and tutorials ever made, but seems to me it's common on most forums that even member response to extremely old threads (pick a period, say 1 yr or more old), is frowned on, which is why a lot of forums put such old threads in archive status.

Just saying there's plenty of ways of dealing with it, especially if the new forum and/or servers are more robust.

My Ghost Recon Wildlands tutorial had 114 videos because that's how many main missions the game has when you include the Inca Camina and Media Luna provinces, both of which many whom play GRW have, so I thought it essential to include them. Even without those provinces the base game has a whopping 106 main missions. I could have in some instances combined 2 or even 3 videos into one 20 - 25 min segment (they average under 10 min), but with such challenges, the guide is mainly used by most one video at a time, and it's a LOT easier for them to access what they're looking for if it only has the content they are needing, vs having to find the right segment within the vid.

It took a bit over 3 months to make that guide because between playing each mission through several times to find the most effective tactics for playing on Extreme with no HUD or Skill upgrades, not to mention having a paltry slow 5Mb upload speed and needing to resize to 1440p and compress via Two Pass ABR to make them look good due to YT's horribly low 1080p bitrate, it was quite time consuming.

Many have gotten a lot of use out of the guide, and 4 months later I'm still seeing people say they're still referring to it. I would have loved to have response capability in the tutorials when I made it though. Had I known of the limitation when a mod here coaxed me into converting the thread to a tutorial, I'd have not done it.

You want proof, here ya go. Haven't taken the time to convert any to embedded yet, so it's kinda ugly right now.

How To - Ghost Recon Wildlands on Extreme with No HUD or Upgrades

This is a visual guide on how to beat the game on Extreme with no HUD or Upgrades. I have beaten it on Tier Level 1 via Mission Replay, but I feel this combination is more realistic. There are no magical skills applied, and no HUD or mini map markers as visual aids. Since there are also no...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Frag Maniac]

This page shows all the new posts without an answer so far - https://forums.tomshardware.com/find-threads/unanswered

The problem is, you can only use the unanswered thread filter for every forum, not just ones you have on Watch. Watch WILL give you an Unread watched threads option, but I would like to see an Unanswered watched threads option. That said, I'm leaning toward thinking any forum you put on Watch status leads to tons of Alerts to threads you've no activity on.

So at this point I'd like to ask any mods that know if Alerts are completely broken, or if I'm just not selecting the right options for them in preferences? I prefer to get them like on the last forum, only for threads I participate in. Today I logged on to see a whopping 19 alerts, and only 5 of them were regarding threads I participated on.

Make that 20, just got another one for this thread.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...-18-pixels-with-screenshots-gtx-1070.3449262/

Does it LOOK like I participated there? Can this be fixed please? A 25% success rate on tracking your thread activity is not exactly what I call good.

 

[rhysiam]

Q. What about article commentary?
A. Directly commenting on news and feature articles will be unavailable for what we expect will be a couple of months after the upgrade while work proceeds on bridging the editorial and community systems. In the interim, you will find commentary on the latest news from Tom’s in the forums under the “Article Commentary” category.

My apologies if this has already been addressed, but I'm noticing that many news articles don't have corresponding comment threads. In fact, unless I'm missing something, just one of the six more recent news articles at the time of writing has a corresponding comment thread.

Examples of news articles without comment threads:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-rtx-2080-2070-earnings,38618.html

Prices for 1TB Gaming SSDs Slashed in Half This Year- Report

The price for a 1TB SSD has reportedly tumbled from around $324 at the start of 2018 to roughly $97 in February 2019.

www.tomshardware.com

This is a disappointment for me as I'm often as or even more interested in the community response and discussion to a news article than I am in the news itself.

I understand that linking editorial and community systems is work in progress - that's understandable, but is the lack of linked comment threads a deliberate editorial decision, a choice of individual contributors, or simply an oversight/workflow issue? I for one really value the community response, it's one of the main reasons I keep coming back to TH. I hope this is retained on all news and reviews going forward and isn't restricted or limited to specific articles or major reviews.

 

[nobspls]

What version of Firefox are you running? (version 65 here)
What version of Windows are you running? (Windows 10 Build 1803)

-Wolf sends

After seeing your post and seeing other respond. I think the problem lies in the width of the browser on the screen which is limited by the width/resolution of the monitor.

You see from your screen shot you see 5 pictures for 5 topics, but int my screen shot I only see 4 pictures.

So had to go find a monitor with wider resolution and test. And when the browser was opened wide enough the "forum" button shows up. If you narrow it down a bit, the forum button will magically disappear. Even thought there is all that white and free space past the "Deals" button. There is got to be bug there withe calculations for the rendering of the page.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

You know what would be super awesome, is if instead of unread text being just a very mildly bold black, it is bold AND in a different color. hmm?
Would help with dark mode. Cuz bold white text vs non bold white text is practically all but noticeable. lol.
And more colors is always a good thing with a dark theme.

 

[Frag Maniac]

Would help with dark mode. Cuz bold white text vs non bold white text is practically all but noticeable. lol.
And more colors is always a good thing with a dark theme.[/COLOR]

Surely you're speculating a dark theme option will be added, otherwise show me that option, because this look is too pale face for me bro!

A little off topic, but Giant Bomb is the best forum software I've seen, period. Great looking theme that's dark but not too dark, really easy thread editing with editing tabs that stay at close reach no matter how far down you scroll, great large size embedded viewer, etc, etc. The only problem is that forum is WAY too inactive regarding topics and games I like.

I really wish members here would have had at least a week to test XenForo to give feedback, even if on someone else's forum where it's set up the way Tom's crew thought they'd use it. At least then there would have been maybe less guesswork on how well it would be received.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Surely you're speculating a dark theme option will be added, otherwise show me that option, because this look is too pale face for me bro!

I use dark reader add-on for Firefox. Also available for chrome.
But will be nice for when they create their own native dark mode as well.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Message to devs:

Is there a way to modify the current forum to where the at least the entire top bar of the site detaches itself and moves down with you as you scroll?
That way we don't have to scroll all the way back up just to access the menu bar on the left, but can instead just pop it out wherever we are on the page.

Not too big a deal, but would save a lot of time from having to scroll back up on a long thread page is all.

 

[Barty1884]

Surely you're speculating a dark theme option will be added, otherwise show me that option, because this look is too pale face for me bro!

A little off topic, but Giant Bomb is the best forum software I've seen, period. Great looking theme that's dark but not too dark, really easy thread editing with editing tabs that stay at close reach no matter how far down you scroll, great large size embedded viewer, etc, etc. The only problem is that forum is WAY too inactive regarding topics and games I like.

I really wish members here would have had at least a week to test XenForo to give feedback, even if on someone else's forum where it's set up the way Tom's crew thought they'd use it. At least then there would have been maybe less guesswork on how well it would be received.

A dark theme has already been confirmed. There will likely be some tweaks before it's implemented but my understand is it's ready to go.

As for members testing, moderators did. Of course, as more members interact with the new forum, more feedback/suggestions will arise.
It's just not practical to allow everyone into the test environment. By the time you allow everyone in, and have enough data etc for it to be viable to 'test', you've already migrated. Even if you allow a small sampling of active users, there will always feedback/suggestions from the wider community.

 

[Frag Maniac]

A dark theme has already been confirmed. There will likely be some tweaks before it's implemented but my understand is it's ready to go.

As for members testing, moderators did. Of course, as more members interact with the new forum, more feedback/suggestions will arise.
It's just not practical to allow everyone into the test environment. By the time you allow everyone in, and have enough data etc for it to be viable to 'test', you've already migrated. Even if you allow a small sampling of active users, there will always feedback/suggestions from the wider community.

As I said, "even if on someone else's forum where it's set up the way Tom's crew thought they'd use it". What I meant there was for instance to suggest to members to have a look at X forum where it's being used elsewhere to give members a rough idea, not letting them into the actual Tom's test environment. At least that would be something to give us an idea.

You'd think XenForo would be interested in keeping a catalog of willing participants to show their software on other forums. It would be like an advertising tool for both XenForo and the forums on the list. A sort of portfolio so to speak.

At any rate, things certainly could be worse, and I trust things will improve. Thanks for the heads up on the dark themes, that's one thing I was really hoping for.

 

[jpishgar]

Many have gotten a lot of use out of the guide, and 4 months later I'm still seeing people say they're still referring to it. I would have loved to have response capability in the tutorials when I made it though. Had I known of the limitation when a mod here coaxed me into converting the thread to a tutorial, I'd have not done it.

You want proof, here ya go. Haven't taken the time to convert any to embedded yet, so it's kinda ugly right now.

Love the tutorial. Couple of notes here - firstly, there's a team of devs working on outstanding issues that have been raised so far. One of those issues is that the older tutorials do show some of that unfortunate bbcode for videos. That is expected to be fixed en masse at the same time (since there are thousands of tutorials). Secondly, a much stronger tutorial system is on the way in the form of the AMS. We're hoping to get that installed and situated within the month, but we'll see based on stability. AMS offers much, much better options with tutorial creation and presentation.

My apologies if this has already been addressed, but I'm noticing that many news articles don't have corresponding comment threads. In fact, unless I'm missing something, just one of the six more recent news articles at the time of writing has a corresponding comment thread.

As mentioned in the initial announcement, the connection between Editorial news/features and Forums was severed during the migration. This is a temporary thing, as a bridge between the CMS and forums is in the works to restore article commentary. In the interim, editorial will be posting links to stories in News Comments and Reviews Comments section of the forum for discussion. The process may take some acclimating for staff since we're still fresh post-migration, and it's a manual posting process.

Surely you're speculating a dark theme option will be added, otherwise show me that option, because this look is too pale face for me bro!

Dark theme is done. Tweaks and adjustments are outstanding, and then it's slated for addition.

Is there a way to modify the current forum to where the at least the entire top bar of the site detaches itself and moves down with you as you scroll?

Technically, very much so. In fact, that's the default state of the forum theme - but this was toggled off because quite a few people complained about it in other areas. I'm hesitant to toggle this on, unless there's a broad consensus that others would like to see the top menu scroll-locked.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Technically, very much so. In fact, that's the default state of the forum theme - but this was toggled off because quite a few people complained about it in other areas. I'm hesitant to toggle this on, unless there's a broad consensus that others would like to see the top menu scroll-locked

Perhaps a way to make it available as an option on a per user basis?

 

[chaosmassive]

look sleek and clean, is there any plan for dark mode?

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

look sleek and clean, is there any plan for dark mode?

Yes, in fact, there are plans for a decent selection of different themes, one of them being a dark mode.
But for the time being you can use Dark Reader for Firefox and Chrome

Firefox

Dark Reader â Get this Extension for ð¦ Firefox (en-US)

Download Dark Reader for Firefox. Dark mode for every website. Take care of your eyes, use dark theme for night and daily browsing.

addons.mozilla.org

Chrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadpbcbfnmbkopoojfekhnkhdbieeh?hl=en-US

Oh, and apparently for Safari as well.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dark-reader-for-safari/id1438243180

 

[Colif]

settings/preferences
under heading Content
tick Automatically follow content you create
tick Automatically follow threads you interact with
Your choice if you want an email or not, I don't

should be on by default for all users. If they don't want to follow their own messages, its their choice. Currently people may never see the answers they are waiting for.

 

[randomizer]

this was toggled off because quite a few people complained about it in other areas

You can pretend I'm one of them.

 

[NerdyComputerGuy]

Can we get some or all of the old badges that you could get on the old forum, i liked the old badges more than the new ones, also make it so that CPU, GPU etc each have a colour like they could before like red and blue and this is shown on the profile when posting something on a thread, it's a better indicator to identify how well someone is within a specific field.

 

[Aeacus]

Can we get some or all of the old badges that you could get on the old forum, i liked the old badges more than the new ones, also make it so that CPU, GPU etc each have a colour like they could before like red and blue and this is shown on the profile when posting something on a thread, it's a better indicator to identify how well someone is within a specific field.

You can post the new trophy ideas here in the: "New Community Trophy Contest",
link: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/new-community-trophy-contest.3448241/