how about sending pm's and stuff. that would be fun. also the ability to block people from sending you pm's

while I respect the Forum Manager, when posting suggestions, the repitition of a suggestion implies demand, thereby when you tell people not to post topics already discussed, you limit the marketing teams potential to determin if an idea should be screened :D :P

"Marketing team"? Guild Software has 4 employees. None of them are in marketing. And they know what the most popular suggestions are- most of them have been suggested consistently for the last 3-4 years. Then again, lots of our suggestions get answered, too. So just be patient.

subscribeable threads with email notification?

/me found the 'search' feature, but think sit might be broken....

it'd not producing results for strings I KNOW are there...

Read the directions and use punctuation where appropriate. Also note that it does not search titles.

Just curious... how's the forum update/replacement coming along?

[Of course, I for one would not complain if all of Guild Software's current efforts are spent towards developing the game, especially with all the new. exciting upcoming changes, but I suppose that sooner or later, the forum needs some love as well. Perhaps later, in this case.]

What about letting some players contribute with forum improvements? It's a non-critical thing for the game, but something I'm sure a lot of players have the experience and time to help out with. I for one have lots of experience with search and web apps (working for a major search companY!, former PHP core developer).

Anything to keep the devs focused on the Good Stuff[tm]. :-)

- CygnusX

It's not PHP, though...

I figured that, but it doesn't matter.

There are two things I'd love to see done with the forum:

1. New search, supporting phrases, and indexing more meta-data such as player names, posting dates, forum name, being able to sort the results, ranking matches, the list goes on. Right now search is pretty much useless. Lucene is a very good open-source search engine that can do these things.

2. RSS feeds, one for each forum (General, etc.) and one for all of them. This way I can keep track of the VO forums in my mail reader. Or even better, an RSS feed that includes the topics you participate in.

What is the current forum implemented in? MySQL and C/C++? Both a new search and RSS feeds are features that can be implemented outside the current forum, as long as they have access to the article database.

My list:
1. Something equivalent to blockquote tag.
2. Forum name and message subjects in the page <title/>

To stop really long threads from stretching the forum, the non-braking spaces in the pages list should be changed to normal spaces. Then the pagelist can wrap.

It would also be nice if all input was converted to utf8.

Or they could make a page hiding thing like phpbb has. Example:

Thread name
[1] [2] [...] [149] [150]

That would be more usefull, but also more work :D

When reading the forums, I often find long discussions without any dev input, or with some dev input buried somewhere in the middle of the posts. My two small suggestions:

1) Devs should be able to add threads to their "todo" lists for when you're considering implementing the stuff, so you can revisit the list and reply that you've finished it, and some extra stuff you want to mention about the new feature. This forum entry would then be marked as the "authoritive answer".

2) A dev should also be able to post an authoritive answer to stuff they're not considering on implementing, stating the reasons why.

The threads with an authorative answer would be marked with, say a small star in front of the thread title or something, and clicking that star takes you immediately to the authorative answer post so you can locate it easily without having to search X pages just to find it.

Right now, I'm reading up on way too many threads containing suggestions where the devs don't even bother to reply and we're left wondering what you guys actually think about it. I'm also reading up on way too many threads where the devs mention they're working on the fix, yet never report back when it's done. Apparently I have to read the news to know that, or follow IRC, or maybe it's posted in another thread. I appreciate the fact you devs have a job to do, but so have I, and I have limited free time afterwards. Some people here are lucky and are 14 and American, which means they got the whole afternoon to look up all the info they want 'coz you guys don't have school during the afternoon, or so I'm told... Others, like me, are handicapped by being European, 29, and members of the active workforce. I don't have time to consult 50 different info sources just to see what the hell the devs think about this whole "maneuverability while turboing" debate.

There's a post linking to all old and common discussion topics, the sticky one "read this before posting a suggestion" one, and I picked a random one: the old "shield" debate. One reply by a dev. One... Not even about the topic at hand, but about some tangent stuff about the notion of traitors ingame. While it's nice to know that Incarnate supports the notion of having traitors ingame and integrating it in the game engine, and while it's nice of him to mention this in reply to a post about traitors and their relationships towards nation specific benefits, I'd rather have him give his opinion about the main discussion topic as well... Or do I have to look that up in some thread about traitors?

What's the point of having a list of old discussions when they don't contain an authoritive answer? It's like saying "before you suggest something, make sure it hasn't been suggested first, 'coz if it has been, either the devs are working on it or not interested". Yeah, and how exactly am I to know which one it is if there's no authoritive answer?

/ignore

can we please have an /ignore equivalent on the forums?

then I could read them without getting that urge to gouge my eyes out after stumbling upon Lord Q's posts.

It would be nice to see sector lists in stations!! :-)

* Miharu kicks Breazle.

Go back to the tar pits from whence you came, BHu!

... this is a thread for forum suggestions, not game suggestions.

I want to be able to set my timezone. I don't know which timezone the forum uses (and really don't want to know) but it's about 8-12 hours from mine and it's annoying
[edit: and I don't know (and really don't want to know) what AM or PM is]

And I want that topics with unread messages somehow be highlighted (and these new messages highlighted too). And the link "view new messages"

Lots of good suggestions in here, pretty much all of which I was planning to add someday. Definitely want timezones and new messages and searches for threads you've posted to. And making the page list non-breakable is probably better than how it is now.

I just want to announce that I've added the [url] tag compatible with BBCode: [url=http://vendetta-online.com/]Hi[/url]. =
Hi.