Forum Discussion

JesLet40's avatar
JesLet40
Seasoned Ace
3 months ago

Feedback on the new sims-forums: loading issues

I have spent the last few days trying to get the screenshots in my story "The Whittaker Saga" to work, painstakingly going over each and every comment to add the pictures manually as none of them migrated with the move from the Sims-forums. 

However, I feel the job is useless when I then go back to continue and is faced with this view on loading: 

As you can see, the screenshots that were added here are missing when loading. And this isn't due to poor editing, when pressing edit, all the images are there. Instead this is a loading issue. It seems these forums are not powerful enough to handle large amounts of images in posts - which of course makes them very ill suited for what the community as a whole want to use them as. Screenshots threads, what happened in your game today, long story threads... none of those will work in these new forums unless the performance issues on this site is addressed and pictures load as they are supposed to. 

This isn't just image heavy post either. Sometimes such a simple page as notifications has to be reloaded at least once before displaying properly. Many text based threads has to be loaded both once or twice before displaying correctly. Combined with the lack of chronological order and the forum not remembering what you have and haven't read, it's exhausting following long threads. 

My questions now: 

  • What, if anything, is being done to enhance performance on this site and get images to display properly? 
  • Is the order threads are being displayed in being "looked into" or is the most liked-default by design and meant to stay that way? If it's being looked into, what does that mean and when can we expect an answer or result? 
  • Is it even technically possible to change the "load more" into pages?
  • Is there any way to make the system remember where you left off last time? 

We have been enough people now to lift these concerns that I hope you are looking into them and can give us an update on what we can expect and when. 

feedback
technical issues
  • Rob199x's avatar
    Rob199x
    Rising Adventurer
    3 months ago

    Based on a cursory glance at the HTML code, this place seems to be made up out of a absolute metric ton of JS mess running on some AWS hardware. Javascript is slow, especially when over used. I can't say wether or not this mess of JS is the result of the website building tools they may or may not use just being bad at not making spaghetti code, or of they hired a webdev that tries to solve every issue with a bit of JS code. Either way this overusage makes the website so slow it feels like we're back to the early 2010's where it was so bad we sometimes even needed browser plugins to block it.

     

    • pvrescue1's avatar
      pvrescue1
      New Traveler
      3 months ago

      That explains a lot! I don't think I've ever used a forum as slow as this one...

  • JesLet40's avatar
    JesLet40
    Seasoned Ace
    3 months ago

    Also, this is not just an issue with image heavy posts. This was my notification page two seconds ago when trying to load it: 

    That is not unusual either, roughly 1 time out of four that is the respons for clicking notifications. I need to reload the page once or twice to actually see it. I mean performance has to be really horrible if you can't even load a list of text. 

  • EA_Nils's avatar
    EA_Nils
    Icon for Community Admin rankCommunity Admin
    3 months ago

    JesLet40 It sucks that you have encountered so many issues with things that don't work the way they should, to the point that you had to find another solution - your blog.

    For what its worth, after you have spent a lot of timing updating your story, all screenshots seem to load fine on my end. I am hopeful it's the same for other users.

    Regarding your questions:

    1. We are investigating the reported issues, try to reproduce them, prioritize and then raise them to our platform host so that we can get them addressed.
    2. Yes, we are certainly looking into it. - I made a comment regarding what I would like to see here: The new EA Sims Forum | EA Forums - 4937984
    3. It's not something that can be changed easily via a configuration. But it's something we will raise along with other feedback.
    4. Agree with you that the current way it works is not user-friendly. We will be looking a solution for that too.

    I do want to stress that we are still in a phase where are going to try things. Some of it will work greatly, and some will not.
    There obviously many issues that we need to get addressed as well so bear with us while we collect, analyze and prioritize the bugs and feedback reported.

    It's easy to forget, but many sites don't start out perfect, this one is no different. It's only fair that you hold us accountable and judge us against other sites.
    We just ask for a bit of time so we can improve things and get to a polished state that you can happily call your new home when you want to discuss and share your experiences with other Simmers.

    • JesLet40's avatar
      JesLet40
      Seasoned Ace
      3 months ago
      EA_Nils wrote:

      For what its worth, after you have spent a lot of timing updating your story, all screenshots seem to load fine on my end. I am hopeful it's the same for other users.

      One reason it does work now is because I removed all images but one from each comment, making it much less image heavy. This works only because I have the blog where the rest of the images are.

      On this forum there are a lot of image heavy threads, which is demanding on any system. On the old forum we could help the system by putting these behind spoiler tags, but here that is only an option in the first post, not in the comments, which will mean issues when you're trying to read comment 115 or 256 and you need to load all of those comments containing between 5-10 images each. It's taxing on the system, and on the computer. A suggestion here is to add a spoiler tag system to the comments as well. 

      Or basically just use the old forum system as a modell and change this to resemble that one as much as possible. 

      • EA_Nils's avatar
        EA_Nils
        Icon for Community Admin rankCommunity Admin
        3 months ago

        Thanks for the additional context. We are looking at how we can additional features for replies, such as spoilers.

  • Simmingal's avatar
    Simmingal
    Hero
    3 months ago

    I also have this issue
    I have put up 2 of my story threads so far, adding in all the images that were stripped,
    the images are all there but won't load so the stories are barely readable. (I would even go as far as saying its unreadable)

    I would really like to have back pages, page numbers and chronological order as default setting
    I would also encourage to make the pages short (like 5 posts max) to make things load better

    I don't know about other sections but The Sims section has lots of threads that are extremely picture heavy

    share your last screenshot, share screenshots you took using the newest pack,
    various information threads, build showcases, sim showcases, stories, ideas... pictures are at the center of it all

    so if those don't work its like stripping away 90% of the discussion 
    and its very hard to find any posts that were posted between newest and oldest when there is no page numbers too

    and most definitely the option people want to use most on this section is chronological because we don't want to miss a thing
    ofcourse newest and most liked are nice options but its super hard to catch up on discussion as a whole on those settings
    or to see where you left off

    and in case of stories it makes absolutely no sense to filter by ''most liked'' or ''newest''
    cause its like reading the book backwards or only reading quotes from the book all in wrong order

    and images inside spoiler would be super helpful to have too especially thinking of build threads
    where people often do like long list of links to their builds and then add pictures
    but the list gets mega long if its showing all the pictures at once

  • catloverplayer's avatar
    catloverplayer
    Seasoned Ace
    3 months ago

    And about loading the forums are lagging when loading threads on both my pc and my android phone. I have the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

About Questions & Feedback on EA Forums' functionality

Ask questions about EA Forums' functionality and give feedback on new features & design during the forum launch.132 PostsLatest Activity: 7 hours ago