The Forums - a suggestion

I really miss 2 features that are present in other places I visit.

  • The date & originator of the thread - so you can see how old the thread is and who instigated it.
  • The username of the last post. I suppose this is not a high priority but for some threads I like to be able to see who is responding.

What do others think? More importantly though, How easy would this be to implement?


I very much agree.


The one thing I reeeeeeeaaaaally would like to see here is a function, say on the profile page, that lists all threads one has participated in.
Right now I have hundreds of bookmarks from these forums and when I'm looking for posts I've made myself it's a lot of work trying to find it.
That would be extremely helpful.

I mean... as long as we're suggesting stuff :)


Oh, and I do agree with what was stated above as well!


Ditto


might as well add this, for this list of desired stuff for forum, lol

the old forum, if I remember right (I'm getting too old now, my memory is getting more and more faulty, sighs), we were able to view all of a users posts (your own and others), which was very helpful/useful (able to peruse through all of pixie's excellent helpful posts, jaynabonne though he's not around anymore, though his posts/account still exist/remain, and other good programmers and quest experts with valuable posts, hehe), instead of trying to find them within the mass of forum, sighs


I wonder how many more threads there will be complaining about how bad the new forum is before the admin just give us the old one back. Come on, admin, this one is an eyesore. Get rid of it already and bring the old forum back.


I am guessing these are the remnants of the old forum?

http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/ifanswers/ifanswers.com/index.html


It had quite a few nice features which this forum lacks. The user stats, the ability to vote on answers, the tags...

It does seem superior in almost every way.


Actually the old forum was a phpBB. It's gone now (unless anyone still has a link to it?) but it looked something like these sites:

http://forum.adrift.co/index.php

https://www.intfiction.org/forum/index.php?sid=2ecd03242fe2c149f8466afbce9f50dc

As you can see, much easier on the eyes and loads of features this forum lacks. In fact, it's hard to think of a single reason why this one is better.


the 'ifanswers' was just an additional/other site (on top of the old/current forum site) for helping people that Alex created/set-up, and test ran, but it wasn't worth it, so Alex shut that down

and 'David W' already explained about the site's old forum, compared to the new forum for this site


Mr. Parser

What is Adrift? Is it better than Quest?


Version 4 of ADRIFT was amazing - much easier to use than Quest and while not as powerful, it was powerful enough to do what most people needed - but when version 5 came around, people stopped using ADRIFT. It was much harder to get to grips with and took much longer to do things with. Despite ADRIFT’s user base declining a heck of a lot over the years, not much has been done to fix version 5’s shortcomings and now the place is pretty much a ghost town. On the plus side, at least it has a great forum.


"What is Adrift? Is it better than Quest?"

No. Nothing is better than Quest. And for once, I'm not being sarcastic.


And for once, I'm not being sarcastic.

Is that sarcasm?? Haha.

In support of this, I have looked at several TA authoring systems that weren’t Quest and I was not impressed or pleased. Perhaps it’s because I started here and am now comfortable with it, but overall I think Quest offers more flexibility and ease of use and it certainly, as far as I could tell, has a better, more helpful community despite the lack of bling and glitter of the forums.


"...despite the lack of bling and glitter of the forums."

I actually like the simplicity of the forums. Maybe I'm just old, but I really hate stuff like "voting" on posts, a la Reddit.

The only things I find lacking in this forum are a way to search for your own posts or topics and a way to clean up the messages (like deleting old messages and sent messages).


Don’t get me wrong, JC. I too like these forums and would love them with the features you’ve mentioned.


"No. Nothing is better than Quest. And for once, I'm not being sarcastic."

Kind of off topic, but I doubt you'd find many people outside the Quest community who rate Quest more highly than Inform 7. Most of the big names in the IF community use Inform 7, it has the greatest number of entries in the IFComp every year - as well as winning all but one year this decade - and the most well-received games in recent years have all been Inform 7 games. (In fact, the one Quest author who did well in the IFComp - Steph Cherrywell - immediately switched to Inform 7 after her sole Quest game. Read into that what you will.)

I can understand the feeling, though. When you're part of an insulated community like this one, like I was with ADRIFT, it's hard to see the advantages the other systems offer until you actually make a genuine effort to use them.


"When you're part of an insulated community like this one..."

Like a wise princess once said, "You assume too much."

I don't like Inform's vaunted natural language approach and the need for Z-code or Glux virtual machines. I do like object oriented programing, but I don't like Inform's IDE.

As before, this is my opinion - feel free to disagree. I don't care that non-Quest users would rate it poorly, I personally love it.


Each to their own. I'm not going to try and encourage everyone to abandon Quest and use Inform 7. I just found your comment "Nothing is better than Quest" to be kinda naive, but if you want to use Quest I certainly don't have a problem with that.


Thank you for clarifying.


Each to their own. I'm not going to try and encourage everyone to abandon Quest and use Inform 7.

Can Inform handle text adventures (parser games, not IF)?

I'm genuinely asking 'cause I have no idea. Quest is the only tool I've ever used.
I'm also extremely satisfied with how easy it is to create parser games with it.


I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "parser games, not IF"? Parser games are IF.

And yes, Inform 7 is designed to create parser games. CYOA type games are better handled with the likes of Twine.


This topic is now closed. Topics are closed after 60 days of inactivity.

Support

Forums