So...Status Updates and Wall Posts are kinda pointless now

dunno about you guys, but im not feeling having status updates and wallposts being mashed into the friends activity feed.it seems like it makes those things pretty much pointless now.

and especially not having a column showing your friends updates now. (especially when there is a LOT of empty space in the bottom right of profile pages)

because just mashing them into the friends activity feed, just makes them get lost due to your friends activity on the site (i would imagine this is especially true for people with hundreds of followers) .it surprises me that with how smart these guys are (i mean no bullshit these guys are geniuses) that this wasn't taken into account.

like adding another filter tab next to the friends and activity tab exclusively for wallposts could remedy that. and then adding a columm for your friends status updates in that empty bottom right space would work as well.

the site looks slick as all hell, but i dont think the balance has been struck between style vs functionality

smart simple functionality has been lost in favor of style. and definitely not feeling losing the forums activity feed from the front page in favor of the staff's tweets or for the community showcase (especially when the showcase only gets updated every so often) heck adding another filter tab right there in that spotso that users can switch between the community showcase and recent forum activity i think would work.

I also recently discovered that the activity feed on my profile doesn't hide spoilers in posts. That seems like an issue.

And by that I mean, a post that in the forums is spoilered like so: Spoilered! Will simply show up as plain text when it's posted to my profile activity feed thing.

Forum posts missing from the mainpage is a big mistake.

When I opened the site yesterday the first thing I did is go to my profile to see the status updates and blogs people had posted and thought there was a button or something I needed to hit to have it show up. I was seriously bummed to see the three most important things outside of staff articles/videos to how I use the site were all missing. (online friends top right, forums on front page, statuses & blogs)

There's so much space there on the right and to not have included it seems kind of bizarre. It was just a really weird thing coming to the site yesterday. I was finding it hard to care about how nice the front page looked, despite knowing how much care and effort has gone into it. I can live without the forums on the front page, but I have no use for the staff Twitter accounts, I'd love to be able to change that to the things the people I'm following have said and written.

oh boy, now i dont even wanna look at my activity feed anymore, makes me super happy i dont have much followers, thats gonna suckkkkk for the people with hundreds of followers.

I agree. I hope that returns.

Most of the stuff in my feed is people I don't follow posting on the profiles of the people I do follow. Instead of seeing updates from the people I care about, I see a bunch of messages from people I don't. I wish there were a way to turn this off.

Hopefully we get forums back on the homepage soon , dave kinda suggested that it might be worked on once the site is stable

Twitter sync causes way too much noise.

Goodness gracious people, is it really that bad? If anything, you have to do less work now. Instead of scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the main page to see recent forums posts, all you do now you just move your mouse to the right and click once.

Status updates....eh, they were kind of pointless before, and you only really noticed them if you went to the actual profile, especially since most users and staff don't even update them with any sort of regularity.

As for wall posts....why not send a PM?

All of these problems (barring the spoiler tag not showing, that should be fixed quick) have some pretty simple workarounds.

@likeassur:

Of course it's not "that bad". They could be on fire, after all. That doesn't mean it's not annoying, and a lot of people used the front-page to see what was going on in the forums. They want it back. That seems awfully reasonable to me. Ideally, you wouldn't have to use 'workarounds' to emulate features that were already standard before. Things are generally supposed to be better when updated, not worse.

Im still baffled people find the forum posts on the front page that useful. I always just click on fourm tab. Then again forums are where I spend most of my time.

@make_me_mad: I still don't get how scrolling to the bottom of the page was less work than clicking a button. It's really not an issue, and all the complaints I see are automatically translated as "I hate change."

As for the other issues, my points still stand: Status updates were just as useless, and the PM feature has been there since the beginning. Why not use it?

@likeassur: I'm sure a lot of your discussions are very simple when you assume everyone you're talking to hates change just because it's something different. Less work wasn't the problem: It was just nice to have the forums featured on the front page, so you could scroll down through the new videos and articles, see what people were talking about in the forums, etc. It was all quite simple and convenient. It seems like an awful lot of people made use of it the same way I did and would like it back. Is that so hard to comprehend?

stuff like that and with the way how unstable things are now makes me think this site shouldnt have launched justtttt yet.

especially stuff like what this user said below, is going to be straight up tragic for the people with hundreds of followers.

the forum thing bugs me cause of the fact i was planning to consistently post the news that doesnt get featured on the site for people to see, and my threads had decent traction behind them which helped make me realize that theres an audience that likes this ( i view 50 views as decent traction, but some of my threads spiked over 700-1000 views, which is amazing as those have outdone some of the stuff the staff posts) , but with people saying how that front page forum activity feed is how they see whats the latest happenings in the forums, ive definitely lost the initiative now.

i mean of course having the homepage be more staff focused is obvious, but there are quite a lot of times when there's barely any content being posted on the site, so not even having the forums feed for people to see to help sort of compensate for a lack of content is going to be dangerous.

also id imagine those people who make blogs now (especially those smaller people with not much followers) , especially with no dedicated column for status updates. are going to lose a good percentage of their audience.. like i highly doubt those small time blogs will get showcased on something as super curated as the community showcase. and thats gonna stifle a lot of good small voices in the community and make people generalize that the community is terrible whenever a fucking contentious article in the vein of the sexism stuff is posted.

and with the way how things are mashed into that friends feed now. i now have to click on the users tab, type in the specifc user i wanna talk to, click the username when it spits out that result and then write the wallpost i want (which now those are limited to 200 characters :/), at the end of the day, its just a bunch more clicking, but its a lot more clumsy than it used to be.

bitching about stuff out of the way,

im optimistic that the engineers will eventually fix and change things up in due time though.

@make_me_mad: For everyone to be so up in arms about it, you'd think the site started reading from bottom right to top left. Is it not simple now? Are you not able to scroll down and up and click a button? Your argument of "convenience" is really stretched when we're talking seconds of saved time. I used it just like everyone else, scrolling down and going from there. Now I have to click a button. My forum life will not end, neither will anybody else's.

This is playing out exactly like every other major site redesign. Facebook and Youtube come to mind. As soon as it changes, people are seriously flipping their lids, demanding that the old layout be brought back, deleting their accounts and boycotting the site until their demands are met. A couple weeks later, they're back and make no mention of their revolution...

....until it changes, and suddenly, the layout they originally hated is loved! "How dare they change this perfectly functioning layout" they will cry, completely forgetting their original rebellion.

The cycle will continue.

I just liked seeing active discussions. I'm somewhat put off by just hitting the general discussion forum, or the recent topics page because I find the page messy and, for whatever reason, I disliked all the pinned topics. The section on the homepage was just a nice way to get a quick "at a glance" look at the forums. Maybe I'll soon make checking the forum tabs part of my visits, but as it is right now, I'm imagining my interest dropping off significantly. Out of sight, out of mind

dont lose your shit over that guy, that ignorant dude loves to generalize, point is, with this supposed to be the new modern day site, the old site was a lot more navigation-ally intuitive for people and a lot of the more prolific users DO use the status updates, and people DO look at those status updates to see when said prolific user posted a blog

( a good example of this, im very sure zombiepie's community spotlight blog posts are going to get a lot less traction now with the way things are, the only way thats getting traction now is if its part of the community showcase. ).

Seems this site puts the forum users more in the back corner. which you know what maybe they have the numbers to prove that we are a minority group in their audience,

@likeassur: How is their commenting, in threads about the site changes, within a day of the layout itself changing, being up in arms about anything? Maybe you've just been to a more hyperbolic part of the site than I have, but I've yet to see anyone threatening to delete their account over it, anyone screeching obscenities via text at the staff, or anything that would even come close to the level of vitriol one is likely to see in you average Youtube comment section.

The fact that you have such an issue with people calmly and rationally pointing out things they don't love about the redesigned site is far more odd than anyone wondering why the forums are no longer on the front page. People liked something, it's now gone, and they're wondering if it will come back and talking about why and how they used it. You're going out of your way to try and invalidate their opinions for reasons I can't fully understand.

seems to that guy, a thread like this

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/the-giant-bomb-website-memorial-1423939/#32

is people FLIPPING THEIR LIDS.

seriously, ill never understand that mentality of oh "its just one more click", its about the intuitive simplicity factor that it was on the old site, of it was just there for people. its the same simplicity appeal is to why smartphones and tablets are so popular now, it eliminates the "oh its just one more click" factor for people, and for a lot of people that just one more effort is not something a good set would do.

We'll get these moved into their own area. Not a priority atm though, dealign with stability first.

I am in agreement with you 100%. Honestly, the new profile page just feels like a cluttered mess that -- as you said -- compromises functionality for style. Good to hear Dave has at least acknowledged the issue. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with as a solution.

much appreciated sir. definitely the priority is to get the site in a stable condition first. (its getting there, front page and the forums tab loads fine now, a lot of the server error messages have been more prolific when trying to view peoples profile pages)

@snide said:

We'll get these moved into their own area. Not a priority atm though, dealign with stability first.

Thanks for dropping in here to let us know -- I also feel like the current design is a bit of an impediment to interacting with friends on the site. Also, I wouldn't mind the removal of the 200 character limit on wall posts.

just casting my vote for the "recent activity in the forums on the front page" feature.

I found it very useful and informative, and it exposed all of the community's coolness to everyone.

Yeah I really miss my wall. I can live without the front page forum thing, even if it WAS my way of doing things before. But the wall was just fun man. Too much stuff gets lost amidst the chaos of the friends feed.

Being able to see if the users I follow are online or not is a big deal for me too.

This is in way more nitpicky territory, but I figure I'd still bring it up/ask.

The forums posts are really small and sometimes hard to read. I wouldnt mind it THAT much if it wasn't painfully obvious where the space went.

I mean just what?

This is a big deal and something that shouldn't be difficult to implement. That said, why did it go away in the first place?

That looks like it's more the site not adapting to your having a wider screen - the empty space isn't quite so excessive on my 13'. But I'd really be interested in seeing why they decided to put that stuff on the right side. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but between that stuff being over there, and the forum pages looking like the comments section of an article, the non-front page areas all seem to have this back- alley vibe, like we're suddenly in a weird part of the site instead of on a 'real' page (I'm not saying they 'put us in the ghetto', just that's the vibe I'm getting is all). There are graphic designers who know more about left-right eye movement than I do, but I'd be interested in seeing how they decided on the layouts that they did.

whats done is done, and ultimately dave has said that this stuff will be looked into. and right now the priority IS to get the site stable.

but i cant help but feel a lot of our noise would have been averted if they had did another radio show and talked about this stuff

@markwahlberg: My screen is 16:9! It's as standard as can be.

Well, I temporarily solved it myself by just zooming in to 125% with the browser. Makes some stuff look a little weird, but I personally prefer it.

BUT man you can totally get your Twitter feed on giantbomb.com, aint that better ???

The thing that I miss the most is being able to see blog updates seperately from feed activity.

I just miss the forum activity thing. It was great.

Good to hear, Dave. Keep up the hard work.

Also, for the people that automatically qualify any constructive complaint as mindless bitching, try to get past your own weird internet argumentative nature for 4 seconds and understand that most people here are NOT being angry or unreasonable about this stuff. There's a pretty big difference between "wah, I don't like change!" and "Here are the things that work and don't work and how I would like to seem them addressed." Most people here are of the latter rather than the former.

Good to hear, Dave. Keep up the hard work.

Also, for the people that automatically qualify any constructive complaint as mindless bitching, try to get past your own weird internet argumentative nature for 4 seconds and understand that most people here are NOT being angry or unreasonable about this stuff. There's a pretty big difference between "wah, I don't like change!" and "Here are the things that work and don't work and how I would like to seem them addressed." Most people here are of the latter rather than the former.

this. allllll the way

Seconded

YES. Yes.

I do miss the forums stuff on the main page. I honestly dont give a shit what the staff is saying on twitter or what anyone else is saying on twitter. It's good to know Dave is paying attention to feedback and will eventually work on ironing all this stuff out. Thanks Dave you rock.