Stuff that might irk you.

No flames or diatribes please.
What and Why, concise and clear info and answers.

Fast forum timeouts. Perhaps my biggest sad panda thing at the moment.

Need to login even when coming from my profile/community link. huh?


Because of our less mature members:

Font size needs limits (20 would work) or you're gonna have problems. I tried 160 as a test the above large text is only at 16. Ack.

Image size limitations. Same reason. Perhaps a resize to 200x200 or that as max.

Limit number of images per post to 10. I know some superusers might balk, but this was abused fast in the old forums.

Delay of 15-20 seconds between posts. Same spamtastic reasons.

"Set all topics as read" doesn't seem to work, when I go back to the forum index the forums still have a "new message" icon.

Alternatively, a "mark everything as read" on the main forum page would be neato.

I still can't see more than one page of post topics.

I think the cookie handling is killing this forum - needs to be set correctly and quick! Not only do read topics not show as read, new topics don't show as new, and "last poster" isn't always showing the correct "last poster"

The login problem definitely needs fixed. This is a phpBB forum, so it has the option to let users remain logged in (automatically log you in if not logged in). I know as I run a few of these forums. This should be allowed here. At the very least, they need to extend the timeout to at least an hour.

If you don't want to see the large fonts, you can disable that in your settings if it becomes an issue. Personally, I don't think it should be locked.

I don't want to see image sizes limited to anything under the maximum size that the game takes screenshots.

Limiting the number of images per post requires either a pre-made mod or else a lot of work to get it to work correctly. I don't think there's a real need. If there's a problem, SporeMasters should be alerted (with the alert button) and they should edit or delete the offending post. Repeated problem users should eventually be banned.

The limit between posts should be part of this version of phpBB. They just have to enable it if it's not already enabled.

Oddly enough the only browser I have been able to successfully log into the forums with is Firefox 3.0.1. I have tried IE 7 on Windows XP SP 3 and can't get the login to accept. And Google Chrome is of course hopeless.

I have noticed when using FF that I can log into the main spore.com site and when I go to community>forums my login seems to be following me now so that is good.

Actually now I'm home in Vista and IE7 is keeping me logged in just fine.

As far as the cookie handling, if this is indeed phpBB it's definitely the problem on posts/read/unread not functioning correctly.

The default phpBB cookie setting is wrong in every version of phpBB. You have to set it up manually in the config part of the control panel to correct the default setup which is almost always wrong.

Cookie Domain: This is default on most forums as your domain name without the http:// part. This tells the cookie which site set it and allows that site to retrieve it. This is the most commonly incorrectly set option and if set incorrectly, will lead to the inability to stay logged in.

Cookie Name: This is set as default as phpbb2mysql and is just the name that the cookie is given when being stored. It doesn't matter what this is set as but changing it will cause all the cookies to be needed to be added again. It is advised to give the cookie a name. If you are running multiple forums on the same server, it is advisable to have a different cookie name for each forum.

Cookie Path: This is where the cookie is directed to and is defaulted as / but this will depend on your forum location in your site directory. A common mistake here to put the URL (i.e. http://www.yoursite.com) as the path which is incorrect.

Cookie Secure: If you are running SSL on your site with the forums loaded with it, then enable this option to make the cookies secure.

Session Length: This sets how the long each user session lasts – if the user does not do anything for the number of seconds set here, they are logged out. The default of 3600 is usually fine for most boards.

The short time-outs are pretty annoying - nothing major, but really annoying. Just wanted to agree with that and everything else.

No advanced search such as by poster name.
No way to track your own posts from the forum.
Autorefresh is driving me nuts. I use tabbed browsing and hearing pages click every few seconds is annoying.
I'm tired of typing in my username and password constantly. Please fix your cookies.
Giant options button beneath text entry does nothing. Very distracting location for it.

Being logged out while I was actually typing an answer to a question is really annoying. Can't you set it up so we can stay logged in until we exit or log out? Or at least give us an hour between log outs. I am guessing you are trying to deal with bandwidth issues but it gets on my nerves having to log in every few minutes.

We'll be fixing the timeout in our next push along with a few other things. Sorry for the annoyance, we're getting there!

-MaxisKane

You made me loose my post count in the name change *shakes fist*

MaxisKane wrote:We'll be fixing the timeout in our next push along with a few other things. Sorry for the annoyance, we're getting there!

-MaxisKane

Oh good. I've been kind of avoiding the forums lately because of this issue.

MaxisKane wrote:We'll be fixing the timeout in our next push along with a few other things. Sorry for the annoyance, we're getting there!

-MaxisKane

Many thanks!

This thread no longer applies lol

Poetry wrote:
Stuff that might irk you.

No flames or diatribes please.
What and Why, concise and clear info and answers.

Fast forum timeouts. Perhaps my biggest sad panda thing at the moment.

Need to login even when coming from my profile/community link. huh?


Because of our less mature members:

Font size needs limits (20 would work) or you're gonna have problems. I tried 160 as a test the above large text is only at 16. Ack.

Image size limitations. Same reason. Perhaps a resize to 200x200 or that as max.

Limit number of images per post to 10. I know some superusers might balk, but this was abused fast in the old forums.

Delay of 15-20 seconds between posts. Same spamtastic reasons.

Everything sounds good except the image stuff. The limit of images per post think is a bad idea, there have been many legitimate posts with lots of images. Image size limitations are fine with me, but bigger than 200x200.