While I love this server, this is the worst forum software I’ve ever seen. What goal can we hit to replace these with nicer, cleaner and easier to navigate forums? Thanks!
I quite like the forums. I don’t understand what you mean? It’s easy to navigate already. There’s general discussion area, for any discussion really. Support for, obviously support, and news… and so on. What exactly are you refering to?
Edit:
Even if you don’t know how to use this forum, you can actually get a tutorial by @discobot
Really useful.
And it’s also easy to use this forum’s features
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Hello and welcome @DirtyOldBastard
oh, that is a “challenge accepted” call for me 
If it comes to things I love, I am honest. And let me tell you that Discourse (the name of this Forum software) is the best out there.
“Best” is relative, I know but there is really nothing it can’t do.
So let’s first start with:
- you are probably used to the old DDoS forums like phpBB? Bulletin? XenForo?
- you didn’t complete the Forum Bot Tutorial?
- you don’t know what Ajax / Asynchronous loading means or don’t get the user experience this forum is built on?
- there are features, you didn’t discover yet?
- you just have personal preferences about design / layout in gernal?
- Discourse is free to use but the most powerful software. I have running it on my own machine, configured and set it up from scratch by hand. Even able to import the phpBB database 2016.
- The “magic” is, that this forum does not require “page reloads”. Press F5 for example. Data is always present and delivered with a click.
- The Design and overall spirit of Discourse is an easy navigable and less obtrusive. It leans quite a lot on the nowaday usage of the internet, mainly adopted from Smartphones. That means a title, an image, a button leads you somewhere. It is not 1990 style anymore to have underlined text for all links out there.
- You can switch this theme / design to a dark mode or light mode
Anyways, I can talk all day long, in the end “You don’t like it”, right?
So please make suggestions on what is missing, what could be look different, what issues you have in detail.
Only then I’m able to “fix” this. Even if it means I program an individual “DirtyOldBastard” theme, you can choose.
P.S.: This theme for this forum here is written by me. I shared it open source to the Discourse Community, because I feel I should give something back to those awesome guys. By now over 8700 users watched it and is used on over 100 forum sites.
If you scroll in their theme category, you can get inspired though, what else is possible to design.
P.P.S.: Developing a different theme for the forum could be another Patreon Goal indeed
I also like the current setup but the mobile version needs some help if you ever add it to the list.
Other than it can’t cook for shit, it seems to be just fine with me as a forum.
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I have 1 question about the forum on mobile actually.
When scrolling down on mobile, on the main page, i always have to scroll past every single guide before i reach support and stuff. Would it be possible to limit it a bit there?
Yes, I’m used to vbulletin and phpbb and others like that. They are easy to navigate and user friendly… I’d argue that any forum that needs you to watch an instructional video on how to use it, isn’t user friendly. You and the few people that post here may find it appealing and easy, but given our numbers I’d expect a LOT more people posting. They aren’t. When I talk to friends and faction members about why they don’t use the forums here, the simple frequent answer I get is that they “just don’t like the forums here” or it "looks cheap and isn’t user friendly. " It’s something people can eventually get used to. Maybe. I’d just like to see more people using the forums. If they aren’t, then why?
Many use discord because it’s simpler/faster.
I do see lots of people using this forum though, and you don’t need to use the tutorial to use the forum. It’s just a help.
Just looking at some phbb, and vbulletin forums, i’d to anytime prefer this which we have now.
Can you be more precise what help a poor soulless device needs?
I see what I can do
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That is an subjective statement - same as mine 
Of course, once you get used to a design, you memorize it and change always sucks.
Redesigning a brand is one of the hardest and most expensive challenges. Expensive because most of the money goes to making it “backwards compatible”.
Anyways, I guess I know what you mean with that and sure, it’s easy to get the different threads all listed etc.
If you watch a bit more abstract at this forum here, you would see all of that is here as well though.
Well, posting and reading are two things. Let me show you something:
Bots like Google should be already excluded if I’m not mistaken.
And writing in the forum is mostly done in one particular category:
5719 tickets is quite a number for me 
Anyways, I still got no suggestion what you would like to look it like or what exactly is bothering you?
Try to cluster your suggestion in:
Main landing page: if you go to https://forum.empyrion-homeworld.net, what are you missing?
Post page: pages like this one here, where you can reply and read. What are you missing?
I’m a web developer and take such claims serious. So please also give me something I can work with. I have a crazy life guide which is called “make everyone happy”.
Btw. that is right for me
Think about these numbers in a silent moment…
And these numbers would not be there with a software which is bad or I don’t like.
That being said: the human brain just needs a bit of time to adapt to everything and then it’s very easy and fast for everyone as well
I understand what you’re saying and I appreciate the detailed response. Perhaps myself and many others just need to get used to a different look. I’ll give it more time and effort on my part and see if my perspective changes.
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Also @RexXxuS can you somehow allow special characters in names?
I see in the Behavior and Chat rule, you said this:
But that’s quite difficult when i’m for example not allowed to have a . or a space in my name.(Dr. Dark).
The discourse community blocked dots in username for some reasons.
I tried to implement a regex to allow it as test. Let me know if it worked.
I can have the dot now, but i still can’t have a space in my name.
Thanks for fixing it 
I added spaces as well now… I think…
But see it rather as test…
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Didn’t work.