New Sims Forum Feedback

I would like to have:
 -Custom avatars
-Signature banners
-A way to hide the panel of stuff that's on the right side so that the main text area becomes centered on the screen instead of being shoved to the left side of the screen
-The option to make the font size slightly larger (as a personalization option)
-Sub-categories within the categories (for example, "Sims Creative Corner" divided into stories, lots, sims etc. like we have on this forum)
-A quicker way to return to the Sims 4 main page after looking at your own profile (currently, once you open your own profile, you can only jump back to the EA Forums page and then have to re-click on Sims 4 to get to the Sims 4 page)
-A way to jump straight to the last comment that you read, but still have all comments be in chronological order (like we can do here) so you can continue reading the discussion from where you left off.
-A way to turn off the snippet text below the thread names so the list of threads showing on a category's main page doesn't look so overwhelmingly cluttered. I just want to see the names of the threads and who created it not the first paragraph of each thread in that list.
-A way to turn off the automatic line skip when hitting "enter".  I would like to control whether a line gets skipped or not myself, not have it be automatic.

I am very disappointed by:
 -Images in threads that were imported from the old forum no longer being seen as images. A lot of the threads we nominated to be moved here were nominated because we wanted to preserve all those screenshots people shared.  The story threads and screenshot sharing threads in particular are completely ruined because all the pictures are not visible.  To expect us to go back and re-link each and every image in thousands and thousands of comments is very frustrating.

Things I do like:
-The tool bar is at the bottom of the text box instead of the top.  This is awesome.  When creating a long post, I don't have to keep scrolling back up to the top of the box to use the tools.
-Being able to actually see the images I include in the post as I am writing and putting them in (rather than only seeing the link until I post the comment).  This is really helpful for making sure I linked the right image.

More detailed comments:

I find the new forum very cluttered, in a way that makes it feel unpleasant to me.

The main reasons are:
-too many things on the screen (especially the side panel on the right needs a way to be hidden from view)
-the main panel is shoved to the left (off center, making it feel uncomfortable to read)
-the lists of threads have lengthy snippets that make make the whole thing feel overwhelming and cluttered to me. It gives me that off-putting "wall of text" feeling that makes me want to just leave.

Old forum, list of threads is centered. There is nothing else on the page besides the list. The list is just titles, so many titles fit on the screen, and it is easy to read what the titles are.

New forum, list of titles is shoved to the left side of the screen because of the unnecessary panel of tags and highlights and featured stuff that I don't even want to see when I am looking at the list of threads in this category. And each thread has a lengthy snippet that makes it so I can only see a couple titles at a time, and I also just feel off-put by how much text there is.

The same problems occur even when reading just one thread.

Old forum, nice and clean, centered, just the thread I'm reading.

New forum, cluttered and off-centered.

For me, it feels unpleasant and makes me not want to stay and try to read anything. I feel overwhelmed by sensory input, and just generally uncomfortable. We need some options to hide the side panel, hide the snippets, and to make the main thread or category list centered in the screen. Different people will probably have different preferences, so it would be nice if these options could be personalization settings for our own accounts.

I also find it difficult to read lengthy threads such as long ongoing discussions, and serially posted stories. Using the "by oldest" sorting option puts things properly in chronological order (this is good), but then I have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the part I haven't read yet (this is bad). The "by newest" option puts things in reverse chronological order (which is useless because then the story is backwards). I would like an option to put things in chronological order and then jump straight to the posts I haven't read yet.

It's like if you have a book and your only options are start at the beginning and read forwards, or start at the end and read backwards. You have no option to start where you left off last time and continue reading forward.

In general, this new forum doesn't feel as inviting for having discussions and sharing things as the old one does. It feels more like a forum to ask questions and get answers. Obviously, we can still use it for discussions, but it just feels like it's not set up with that use in mind.

I will add my feedback here too, in hope it will be seen. I'm just seconding things mentioned already, but I wanted to emphasize that they really are important for so many of us!

• Please make the chronological view the default one in forum threads. It's the view that makes the most sense for the majority of forum conversations. They are ongoing conversations between multiple people - they are not at all about finding the best answer to a question the OP asked.
• Please introduce a way for us to find the first unread post in a thread and read from there!
• Please introduce numbered pages for forum threads - there are many really long threads from the old forum that are very popular, that feel almost like mini-communities in themselves, and numbered pages are essential to navigate through them.
• Please divide the Sims 3 section into subforums! At least General Discussion, Technical Issues, Stories and Legacies, Building, Custom Worlds.
• Last but not least, our individual avatars are important too! It's strange talking to players we know without seeing their "face".

There doesn't seem to be a collated feedback thread on here, so I'm going to tack my response on to this one. Copied and pasted from the official Sims forums:

At the moment, I don't like the new forums. And I'm not just resistant to change! I'm just resistant to bad design.

1) No custom avatars except for certain ranks. Yes, I know that it's "being looked into". But that means it's not a guarantee. The fact that you chose a forum style without first ensuring that users would all be able to choose an avatar is really telling. This should have been a bigger priority, because nothing makes me feel less welcome on the new forum than you taking away a feature I had here and telling me that only your chosen ranks get it now. This should have been looked into and set up before you launched.

(As an aside: I don't really want my EA account avatar for the new forum. I chose a Sims-related avatar for a Sims-related forum.)

2) Nested replies makes finding new responses harder. I read a lot of threads, and I appreciate that I can read them in chronological order. Having to jump back up to nested replies - on the off chance that there is something new - makes reading through the flow of a conversation incredibly difficult.

3) "Show More" instead of page numbers is a pain to load. My browser will eventually give up on loading if a thread gets to be too long. If I can't load an entire thread, I can't read it.

4) Forum posts are small and hard to distinguish from each other. On this forum, avatars are big and I can quickly tell when I'm finishing one post and starting another from a different user. On the new forum, I can see when someone has finished their comment, but all of the posts feel more "collapsed" and it's a lot easier for my eyes to slip over posts without fully taking them in.

5) The new forum feels cluttered. When I read a thread on here, my eyes are drawn only to the posts/replies in the specific thread. On the new forum, the sidebar of related posts/recent discussions ends up drawing my eye and makes the browsing/reading experience less enjoyable.

I was actually expecting the new forum to be closer to the Answers HQ style, which is - bizarrely - a bit more like this forum. Posts are more distinct, avatars are large and noticeable, browsing is done through page numbers. The biggest issue for me with the Answers HQ style is that the posts column is too thin, like it was designed for viewing on a phone (which feels a bit silly because most of EA's games are probably played on PC or console).

The new forums feel frustrating to participate in. They feel oddly devoid of character, and easy to ignore, like when you see a bunch of example posts on a blog that are written in Latin. It does not feel like an upgrade or even a pleasant side-grade experience.

Additionally, I don't like that the follow feature is set to automatically follow any thread you post on.  I only want to follow certain threads, such as the stories I read or discussion threads I plan to be actively involved in on a regular basis.  I don't want notifications about every single thread I leave a comment on.  And I don't want to have to go and click "unfollow" every time I post a comment on a thread that I don't actually want to follow.  I would prefer it to be the other way around.  I would like the default to be that I am not following threads unless I choose to click the button to follow.

We need custom avatars back. I feel like we lost our identity. The forum posts needs to be centered because it's way to far to left. It is very uncomfortable having to turn my head left to read posts. I use a computer to read forums, and I'm sure many others do as well. We need pagination because it's so annoying and hard to navigate. This forum is a huge downgrade from the original Sims forum in every way. There was nothing wrong with the old forum.

Please, please, stop the conversation replies being nested as they currently are. My notifications are starting to become meaningless now. For example, I get a notification saying 17 people have replied to a discussion, but when I click on it, sort by newest first, there’s only maybe one new post at the top. I don’t have the time or inclination to reread an entire long thread to hunt out the remaining 16, so this number in my notifications will only increase and will never return to zero!

I want to see everyone’s replies to every thread I follow.

This simple change would make a huge difference to the way this forum feels and works.

I'm not sure if a similar post was made already or not, whatever I decided to sort the thread by "oldest" or "newest" it would reload after a few "load more" and start from the start again.

Anyway, elsewhere in the forum I was having a conversation about my impressions on the problems of this new forum specifically for people posting stories and legacies, which ended in this list which seemed relevant to this thread. Thinking about it, many of these points apply to long threads in general I think.

• The forums are hard to navigate and it's very easy to miss threads and posts I would be interested in reading. It took forever to find again all the stories I was following, and the fact that the Creative Corner section is merging several formal sub-sections is causing threads to be submerged even quicker than they used to
• The whole forum is slow to load and full of glitches (to me the most annoying are the forced log out, even when I'm still writing or editing a reply, and the page reloading at most "load more" (usually showing the first post again))
• The new "load more" layout makes it very tedious and confusing to navigate long threads and is painful to apply to the creative corner, as it doesn't use chronological order and it doesn't get along well with long posts
• Sadly, I didn't find any indication in this section that hints to a reintroduction of pages in threads
• We don't have spoiler tags in replies (as far as I know), which makes it difficult both to hide long posts under a spoiler (like we used to do when posting many pictures or walls of text in stories updates), or also to hide the comments to new chapters to avoid spoiling other readers
• I'm losing hope about custom avatars, and even more so about custom signatures. The resulting mood kills the joy of any creative exploit! 
• The forum is in general slow to load

The new and different template, less suited for the creative corner activities and long threads in general, and possibly the frequency of annoying bugs, are in my opinion worrisome enough to foresee a decrease in the activity of those who post and read stories and legacies in the next few months. This would really sadden me, I liked a lot the community on the old forum and I would find it very sad to notice people were quietly starting to move away.

So the question becomes: are you planning to implement any change that may make navigating long threads and stories enjoyable again, or do we have to look for some new place where to spend our time?

Unfortunately, I think that it’s going to be impossible to use these forums to truly foster a Sims community because we cannot even read one another’s posts here.

Customized avatars and signatures would be nice, but fundamentally, I think we need pages and an easy way to sort things chronologically. “Show More” does not work.

Some topics/threads already have hundreds of posts. They cannot be navigated via “Show More.”  Theoretically, we can sort by “Oldest” and click “Show More” until we get to the newest post, but it’s far too tedious and time consuming. Often it even glitches and sends us to the top of a page and then we have to scroll down for ages, hit “Show More” again, scroll again, hit “Show More” again, scroll again, hit “Show More” again … Throughout this process, there’s no indication of how many posts we’ve scrolled through, if we’ve reached something we haven’t read before, or if we’re close to end. Also, every single time we visit a thread, we need to do this via either sort by “Oldest” or “Newest.” It creates an awful user experience. For comparison, the old forums ordered things chronologically, remembered where we left off in each thread, and automatically took us to our last read post. 

But, more importantly, with these new forums, I don’t even think it’s always possible to make it from one end of some threads to the other end of them. For example, is anyone able to get from the oldest to newest post in the What Happened in Your Game thread (which isn’t even 2 weeks old) at all or without “Show More” glitching at least once?

I understand that Community Admins are working to improve things, but unless they change quickly, longer discussions and story posts will likely die out because the forum structure does not allow us to have them here.

Unfortunately, increasing “Show More” to showing 30-50 posts probably won’t do enough to make all posts in a thread reasonably readable. “Show More” is already glitchy and if there are a lot of posts with images, etc. it may be more likely to break/glitch (and we’d still be without a reasonable way to know, and navigate back to, where we were before). 

Some more observations:

I get an error message when I try to like other people's comments, and it does not update to give them a like.  I was able to give one person a "like" and then it would not let me like any more comments after that.  I assume this is a glitch, but it should probably get fixed. 

I tried to make some changes to my profile and preferences via the "settings" option (found in the drop down menu when I click on my name in the upper right corner).  I can make changes... but then there is literally no save changes button.  I looked all around the screen, I asked my partner to look and he couldn't find one either.  I tried just going to a different tab, and it told me my changes were not saved.  It asked me if I wanted to go back and save them.  The only options were "go back" and "discard changes".  I clicked "go back" so I could save my changes, but there still was no save changes button anywhere.  I tried many times, I finally gave up and left the settings page without being able to save the changes I wanted to save.   If there really is a way to save changes we make to our settings profile and preferences, please make it way more obvious and easy to find.

I would also like to add my voice to those who have commented that having the default sort method be "by most liked" rather than chronological really does feel like a popularity contest is considered more important than having a flowing conversation.  In my experience, when posts are set to be sorted by popularity, it becomes extremely hard to follow what is actually being talked about, it makes some people look way more important than others, and it often degrades into people just trying to get lots of "likes" or upvotes by performing to a crowd rather than having thoughtful and considerate discussions.  Having this type of popularity sorting method set as the default sets the wrong kind of atmosphere.  I think it can still be an option, but I don't think it should be the default option.

Okay, I do like that when I click "like" on someone's post, the button changes color.  On the old forum I was frequently forgetting if I had already clicked "awesome" or whatever, and accidentally removing an awesome instead of adding one because I had already done it earlier and forgotten.

Small things.  Small things.  😆