Forum/Website Problems

from Sins Forums
There are a few issues with the Forum that have been driving me nuts for the last few weeks. I have dropped a few notes about it in posts for the Devs/Webmaster but there has been no notice so I am creating this thread. If you are having any issues that are not listed below please add them so we can have the best forum experience possible.

1) After editing a post you are dumped back onto the first page of the thread, instead of being retuned to the proper page.
2) It can take over a minute and a half to load a forum page.
3) You search utility does not allow decimials and includes an extra blank page in searches. (e.g. 1.03 Mod Tools)
4) The search does not sort by the highest matches meaning you have to go through all the pages to make sure that what you are looking for is not there.
5) Pages that are reported by the search utility are not accessable anymore, indicating that the search is running off an index that is not updated properly. (See below for workaround)
6) The Advanced button when posting does not offer any advantage (the text box is not larger).
7) You cannot watch threads so as you become more involved in multiple threads you have to bookmark dozens of pages (20+ for me right now) and vist them daily. Under My Replies not My Posts (even thought they are both).
8) The search does not allow for the commonly allowed limiting codes, such as + or -, or most importantly quotes so searching for "mod tools" returns everything with the individual words mod and tools (41 pages of them).
9) Cannot edit after a message is replied to.  This causes a lot of bloat and an unnecessary load on your servers.

Forgot to stike most of this out. See below for work-arounds for these problems. If it is search related then use google, not the search feature on the forum.  It usually works, but not always so try kryo's suggestion:

"If you cannot get the results you're looking for from the search, try using google with a site:forums.sinsofasolarempire.com modifier."

Thanks kryo!

14,974 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Well here's the fix for #5 since no one is interested in fixing these.

When you try to load a page that come up as 404 look in the address bar and delete
the "post.aspx" portion. Viola, you can now access the page so the search is at least a little more useful.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
i agree with most of the ones above.
i have a couple to add:
it can take over 3 minutes to show that there's a new post in a topic (i.e. you just posted, went back to the forum, and it doesn't show that your the last poster, and you click on the thread, and you are. i hope that's not too confusing)
some forum pages don't load at all, and i'd really like to see some other error, other than "Eee Gads! The Gremilns have stolen the forum page!"
faster servers are a must, half the pages take 5 min. to load.
the quote function doesn't work completely.
ex.
[quote="NAME"]this quote with the name specified doesn't work.[/quote]

vs.
this quote is done without a name specified
End of quote


and a preview post button would really help.
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks for fixing #1!

UEF Soldier
They are having a massively hard time keeping all of this site running, and I have seen pages down for a day. The only other thing they are likely to do is throw up a "Under Construction" page and it is as useless. If they knew part of the system was going to crash then they would stop it, and they are not likely to admit that they cannot keep the website running. It is not very good for consumer confidence (bad PR).

Now if they could only get the search engine to work that would be even better. I searched for "new planet textures" (no quotes) and got 8 pages of random collections of these three words. I used the page search feature to make sure that I was not missing it, and I went through them a second time just in case. It does not find
post 303450 with the title: New planet textures, and the opening sentence ends in
new planet textures. The post has been on this site for over a month and a half.
Since this is not part of the post.aspx issue, it means that this search engine is not indexing properly and should be replaced.

I just thought to try the following and it seems to bypass this, although it is severely inconvenient. Use Google, it works. I also just realized that google lets you do a proper search with all the characters and codes, so that solves the entire search feature problem. Just do not ever use it. Put in "new planet textures sins of a solar" and hit search and the first link is the correct one. :CONGRAT:


Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
If you cannot get the results you're looking for from the search, try using google with a site:forums.sinsofasolarempire.com modifier.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
It wood bee nise too half a sphell/grhammer cheque two...

 :) :) :) :CONGRAT: