EA Forums Update - Winter Edition

Hi all, here is a brief update to bring folks up to speed on what we’ve been working on here on the EA forums. We want to thank you again for the continuous feed back, both on our Feedback Board and behind the scenes.

You can check our last update from August here, we've been working to address issues there, and to prepare for launch in the intervening months. 

To start, we’ll review the main issues we discussed last time:

• Improved - Site Performance: We’ve been monitoring this extensively, and we’ve seen massive improvements on this front. That said, issues can still pop up, so if you see anything, please let us know.
  
  
• Fixed - Random Redirects/Misdirection: This was a commonly triggered issue, but fortunately is eliminated now.
  
  
• Improved - Posts & edits failing: We have addressed many of the situations which lead to posts failing for unclear or confusing reasons. While incidences of this are markedly reduced, please feel free to give feedback here. If you do encounter this, please let us know in the feedback section, we're still actively chasing down all the edge cases where this might happen. 
  
  
• Fixed - Reply Sorting: 

  Finally! We have globally changed the default reply sort to chronological. While there may be rare places where we may deviate from that, your feedback has been loud and clear. 

  Additionally, we are also giving you control to set your own default sort order about how you want posts to appear in a thread. You’ll see some changes in how threads are displayed, but you can also set your own preference.
  If you go to your profile page > Settings, you can scroll down to set a default display.

You can of course, always continue to override the sort order within the threads themselves too, just click the current sort setting under the initial post. 

• Improved - Post rate and image limits: Some folks were getting posts and/or images blocked incorrectly by our filters. We made some big changes with this, and folks shouldn’t have this happen.
  
  
• Spam Management: While we saw a spike of spam in September and October, we’ve taken strides to address and aggressively remove spam and to lessen incidences of legitimate content being filtered as potential spam. If this happens, please make a report, or just wait/check back later as the forums are actively monitored by the community team.
  On that subject, we also want to give a special "thank you" to the folks who have been diligently reporting spam when it does appear. 
  
  
• Bugged - Avatars: Currently there's an annoying bug preventing folks here from changing avatars, and preventing us from adding new ones. But we're actively working on it! (thanks to the Simmers for making us aware!). 
  We will let you know as soon we have a fix.
  We hinted at avatars customisation options in the last update, while there is still work to be done, we can promise that it is coming.

Beyond the big items above, we are still looking to address your feedback on large thread navigation and pagination, and are continuing to squash bugs that pop up. Shout out to all the people that have reported and dug deep on quirky bugs with us.

What’s next?

Full launch is coming next year, and with it means a huge migration of existing content and expansion of the games supported here.

You can see more details in the Answers HQ announcement here, but the concise message is that we’ll be closing down AHQ by February 2025, and moving a huge amount of the content there over to the EA forums.

We will also be opening localized forums, supporting the same languages as on Answers HQ: 

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Dutch
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian

This is a massive project, and we want to make sure we do it right.

Thanks for reading, we’re working away in the background but read all your feedback, thank you for coming with us on this journey.