Hi there people! It took a while to realize what had happened to be honest, since I've been almost entirely using Discord and Itch for a while now for releasing games and talking about game development.
Now that I have come back I'm quite shocked really. So here I am to vent against the new format and everything bad about it!
Enjoy!
This is not to be taken seriously, I'm just pointing some things out and then I'll go away ;)
Signatures
Signatures have been a thing on forums for... a long long time. Sometimes they have been abused like we've seen with 'game keys for clicks' and all that, but with the right rules and moderation that has always been solved in time.
I use signatures for letting people know who I am and what I do. My signature used to have the title art for the three main games I've released over the last year or so and with links to their itch.io pages. People could see what I've made and what kind of games I'm into as well as my rough skill level with C2 and game dev in general.
But we don't have that anymore. Now, the best we have is an avatar and a name. And even if you click on a profile you have nothing useful to show who they are. This effectively kills community, since now the only way to get exposure is not to join discussions and be helpful but to create endless threads talking about your games.
Private Messages
So I realize the whole 'think of the children' thing here but I really don't think that's the real reason. If it were, you could very easily have a 'over 18' checkbox on registration and completely remove PM features for anyone who doesn't check it. Anyone who does and is lying can be dismissed outright because they lied at registration. Now people have to put their email addresses on a public site. Not a good idea. Scammers, spammers and phishers love that stuff. I know there are ways around it (personally there's no way I'd put mine up here) like discord or something like that, but personally I'd be more inclined to ask someone to go send me a PM on some other, better forum!
Images
So this is one I really can't stand. Long gone were the days of 2012 where every image you upload disappears in a few months because the forum needs more diskspace, we have things like imgur now, or google drive. Oh wait we can't link to them any more.
Hello 2012!
Profiles
I can't remember too great because it was a while ago and I didn't use it much, since we had signatures instead, but I have this feeling that the profiles of past were a lot more versatile. I know we used to have 'about me' on there, which at least could tell people where you're from or what you're interested in. Now we just have stalking mechanics. I mean we always had those but now we only have those. So now instead of looking at someone's about me or going to some other page they're on, I have to look through all of their recent posts to get an idea of what they're about. I don't even understand this it's too dumb for me, I ain't even mad at this point, just real confused.
Notification Flooding
The first thing I noticed when returning to the forums to actually use them is holy what the what why so many notifications! I must be really popular or something. Nope just thirteen of these:
There's a Construct 3 Update!
Right, I don't even use C3. I realize there's a big push for moving to C3 but there's a difference between marketing and.. whatever this is. It doesn't feel right. It reminds me of bad shareware from 10 years ago. It's not bad entirely, it just looks bad, and feels bad.
So there you have it, my rant about the new forum system and a totally objective and reasonable, thought out unemotional argument explaining why it's just so terrible.
Thanks for reading I guess?
I'm go bang my head against a wall.