[Admin PC]

As the title suggests, this thread is to be used for reporting technical issues with the forum, or suggestions for new features/enhancements.

A few initial clarifications:

- We will not be adding a Requests or Mocks forum; other outlets are available for these.
- Special roles/badges for people 'in the industry' are not being considered.
- Rules and moderator decisions are not up for discussion here.
- Existing forum rules apply in this thread as they do in every other thread on Pres Café. And that includes the 'only post if it adds value to the discussion' rule. So if an issue has been reported, a 'me too' reply is not needed unless it provides additional information.

[Keith]

Can I suggest a separate (locked) thread for announcing when the T&Cs / rules have been updated, along a summary of what we need to know. Whilst I appreciate the rules page itself has this info, unless you happen to check it you don't necessarily know it's been updated.

[orange]

I was thinking maybe the 30 character minimum shouldn’t apply to users after they’ve been a member for a certain amount of time? I get that it’s to stop low quality posts, but I think if you’re an active user on here you are less likely to be making short posts that are genuinely disruptive. Sometimes you just want to reply to somebody with a youtube link etc. without having to add some placeholder text.

[Admin PC]

I was thinking maybe the 30 character minimum shouldn’t apply to users after they’ve been a member for a certain amount of time? I get that it’s to stop low quality posts, but I think if you’re an active user on here you are less likely to be making short posts that are genuinely disruptive. Sometimes you just want to reply to somebody with a youtube link etc. without having to add some placeholder text.

The character limit is a standard feature in forum software and is primarily used to discourage short, low-value responses. It's a global setting and is just as relevant to long-time members as it is new members.

[Admin PC]

Can I suggest a separate (locked) thread for announcing when the T&Cs / rules have been updated, along a summary of what we need to know. Whilst I appreciate the rules page itself has this info, unless you happen to check it you don't necessarily know it's been updated.

We revisit the terms/conditions/rules periodically. Such a review took place over the last few days. Changes resulting from a review are tagged.

The vast bulk of the terms/conditions/rules have remained unchanged since launch. Much of what is there is standard fayre.

Whilst no further significant changes are expected, we will notify all users of any further changes via a banner at the top of all pages.

[Blubatt]

As the old post has been removed, can i ask if the moderators have anything to say regarding a bespoke accessibility mode to view the forum? I made several suggestions , including using an alternative colour mode (buff/cream instead of white?) Or an option to increase the size of text?

I strongly think that this should be considered, or a statement on the technical aspect of making those changes, in lieu of no comment being made as of yet

[Frappé]

As the old post has been removed, can i ask if the moderators have anything to say regarding a bespoke accessibility mode to view the forum? I made several suggestions , including using an alternative colour mode (buff/cream instead of white?) Or an option to increase the size of text?

I strongly think that this should be considered, or a statement on the technical aspect of making those changes, in lieu of no comment being made as of yet

For the avoidance of doubt for everyone, no posts from the old feedback thread have been removed completely. We started a new thread as over time it had built up a lot of things many of which have already been implemented now. But internally we still have access to all the previous suggestions that were made so people do not need to worry about raising them again as nothing was lost. Unless it was something we have said we wouldn't do for a certain reason, then it is safe to assume anything suggested previously remains on our own big list of things to look at when possible.

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For this one specifically though, our actual aim around accessibility at the moment is a bit wider. Rather than focus on an alternative theme initially, we'd want to improve overall accessibility on the main themes first to address outstanding contrast, colour and size issues as well as difficult to read page structure with the aim of making it at least WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliant. So that then even the base experience is as open as possible to everyone and has the widest compatibility with a user's own browser, operating system or external tooling. Once we have the main themes to this point, then we may look at alternative colours or themes if there are still holes we were not able to cover.

There is no one date or big bang that we'll do this though as most of this is more of an ongoing process with other feature work. Every time we update anything to do with the styling and templates of the forum we're looking at parts we can improve here at the same time and we'll continue to do this. There are some things that will require more involved direct technical reworking to make work within the forum software, particularly when it comes to any user-supplied content - Such as alt tags on images and embedded video players like YouTube - but we'll implement anything else we can as early as possible.

[Chad Blake]

A few suggestions:
- An option to change your profile's username
- Upping the file size limit for png files, most of the time I can't upload a 1920x1080 png file directly
- An option to toggle the "last visited" on the top of the page on and off
- Adding a sidebar with related posts and/or media like TV Forum used to have

[Frappé]

A few suggestions:
- An option to change your profile's username

The software embeds usernames into posts whenever people are quoted providing a limitation we are unable to easily get round. As has been shown with social networks like Twitter (as it was), it also causes a lot of confusion when people keep changing names regularly and others then try and register the old names to pretend to be someone else. That said, we understand there may be occasions when someone has made a mistake with a username and wants this corrected. In this case the best approach is to use the contact us feature in the top menu and just put in a polite request. Provided this is a one off thing and people are civil about it, we will always see what we can do when possible, though as this is a manual process due to the limits mentioned above and is especially problematic the more people have posted it may take some time to be done.

- Upping the file size limit for png files, most of the time I can't upload a 1920x1080 png file directly

We are looking at improvements for the built-in file uploader as it happens so the site is not then dependent upon third party sites being kept online all the time. However, and while this may not be the answer you want to hear, the example provided is actually something that should not be done. PNG is an image format intended for simpler graphics with large areas of block colours that have not already been through MPEG video compression, so is not ideal for the photo-realistic or already compressed images that usually go out on broadcast. Broadcast screencaptures should usually be done as JPEGs[*], with quality set to around 90. It's easy to forget if you're on a high speed connection yourself, but not everyone else browsing the site is on a fast connection and may often be looking at it on congested mobile phone connections or similar. At which point having lots of unnecessarily large images posted in PNG format (or animated GIFs, which is another one we have seen used sometimes) will provide them with a painful experience browsing the site and is not something we would encourage. Try to think of everyone!

- An option to toggle the "last visited" on the top of the page on and off

While we wouldn't be able to make this a toggleable option, if people prefer we can just get rid of the 'You last visited' message for everyone as this is just something that comes in the templating with MyBB. It's not something anyone has ever raised previously, but if there was a more general preference from everyone to not have that we can change this.

- Adding a sidebar with related posts and/or media like TV Forum used to have

Primarily we consider the forum a forum for discussion rather than a place for dropping videos and news links. We are always looking at new things we can introduce to the templates, but it would have to be something more nuanced than this in order to draw attention to the best that is going on the forum and not just show every video link that gets posted.

Hope this helps!


[*] Yes, I'm aware of WEBP, but explaining the intricacies of that would be an even bigger can of worms to open.

[Rob Francis]

I like the "Latest" bar - could a link to the relevant thread be put in somewhere please so we don't have to trawl through pages and pages of discussion to find the relevant post?