New Sims Forum Feedback

I miss polls. 

Wow. Y'all are awesome at giving all your feedback/suggestions/complaints. 👍🏻😀 I add my voice to ALL of them! ⭐

*Definitely have custom avatars for ALL! 🙌🏻

**And the constant logging out needs to REALLY be fixed. 😣

***One thing I would like to stress the most to be fixed - or more preferably, done away with - is that whole: "You've reached the maximum number of posts you can share, please try again later" message after you've made like, what, 5 simple replies to people's posts??*** 😐

I mean, I get it, it's an anti-spammer feature. But really, it severely limits how much us good and normal people can interact with each on here. (And some of us have been friends for almost 20 years chatting on here...)

I make a comment for just about every post that is posted on the main Sims 3 'play and share' thread because I want people to feel they are always welcome there and that someone appreciates what they are sharing. 💗

So my dear Forum Techs: If y'all can't do away with that anti-spammer feature altogether, can you at least make it to where if someone does over 30 posts and/or replies or something like that, that's when they get locked out for a few minutes? That would be great. ⭐

This forum is really starting to annoy me...

Tried to make a post in the "What happened in your Sims 3 game today" thread and the post isn't posted...

Try to post it again, and I get told that I've exceeded some limit when I haven't even posted.

This is nonsense.

The only positive thing I have to say is that my post seems to be auto-saved, but as long as I can't actually make posts, this forum is useless...

If I'm going to repeatedly run into this error when trying to make lengthy posts I may just as well leave... 

Here is some feedback of things I'd love to see return to this new forum from the old one.

Click here link when your at the bottom of the page click this to take you back up top.

Bring back custom avatars. I want to use my Turkish Cat avatar on here.

Bring back the speculation sub forum for speculation threads.

Make it to were everytime I click on a topic I've read stay on newest. I prefer to start were I left off.

Make it to where we don't have to re log in everytime we come to this site.

Make it to where we can link from Twitter/X again. I do understand this is being worked on.

Please bring back bookmarks.

Please bring back awesome and insightful.

Make it to where we can bookmark every section of this forum to our phones and pc's. I especially want to bookmark the Sims 4 General section to my phone and pc.

What I like so far. In some ways this forum is better.

The bold automatically works and you don't have to place your words between two b's.

I like how we can now see who likes our post now.

I like how we can delete threads now.

FreddyFox1234 wrote:

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.

FreddyFox1234I don't think that possible unless we as forum users stop using the nested reply function and just use quotes to reply to one another. (like I did here)

Where to even begin. I was so worried about this. I had this gut feeling that we'd get "AHQ"/Reddit forums... and they... disappointed. I have never used that site and I don't mind reddit for things that I'm searching for, but it's hard to keep up with conversations/comments there, too.. And yet, here we are. 

First thing. I can't even tell what a "Thread" is anymore. It all looks so clumped together and unorganized. With the old forums, you could TELL a thread was a thread. It was all separated by a small line/box/html tables. While I think it's "okay/great" that we can "reply" to players specific comments... it's like a reddit post and makes it SO difficult to actually follow the conversations now. While the idea.. is 'okay'.. it's just not good here.. endless scrolling is for things like.. Tumblr, or.. Other apps. I'd rather have a next button and pages to click on. Maybe there is a way they could do this differently to give it a little bit of a modern feel, but I don't know.. 

The avatars are too small. 

I also use an extension that gives me "dark mode" and because of the background.. it's keeping that white image.. while the other part is all in a darker color.. and makes it difficult to be on here. The old forums, I was able to get the background to also be in dark mode and it made it easier to navigate the forums. 

While I do think that it's nice to have those little tabs, I guess they're like hashtags? So, if you click on them, you could find all similar threads/posts with say.. "Screenshots", and thankfully that's nicely designed and doesn't actually add the "#". Keeps the forum clean, at least, in that regard. 

I also don't like this whole, "Most liked". I don't like that over on Reddit and always change it to New because I want to see what new comments are saying, etc. While I have come to like a little bit of Reddit for somethings.. it as a forum is not ideal, which is why I preferred the old forums and enjoyed visiting them, even just to lurk. 

Individual arrows on each post is nice to kind of "hide" posts so it doesn't get too long, but there should be a way to hide up to x with different options, because clicking them individually takes awhile. Especially if there are a lot of comments.

It's also hard to *know* if there are more comments.. the show more doesn't let you know how many posts there are and it takes a while for the next group of comments to load. Then if someone comments on a post that was already read.. you miss that comment? I don't know.. 

While I do like that it's easier to post screenshots now as I love looking at everyone's pictures and game-play and seeing how they play their games. It's so hard to find the threads. Everything just seems so cluttered up now. :(

I do like that it is easier to add things to the posts..  like using asterisks allows for Italic font and it'll stay like that. So, that's an interesting feature... but now.. I don't know how to get out of it, unless you just click.. the icon? lol. :3

So, while I like those little features for making posts clean and what not.. (It would be interesting to see if they would have added maybe a basic color palette, but I suppose I could see why they might not do that..? Would that cause lag maybe? I'm not sure.)

I also like that there are more emojis to use. Was there like 9 in the old forums? Maybe 12? I forget. 

And I suppose.. I do like the more rounded edges of the design, as it is a more modern look. 
I miss the old avatars because you could really customize them and you could tell Simmers apart and they all had their own uniqueness, or something to them. I know that might take some time to figure out, but ..if the size still remains like this.. it won't really matter, because you can barely see them. Lol. I enjoyed seeing the details of an avatar. Maybe a Sim did something funny and they had that as their avatar. It was just nice to see - gave the forum a bit of personality.

I understand the move had to happen... but some redesigning features needs to be on the road map.. 

In addition to things like our own avatars, I would really really appreciate a dark mode for viewing these forums. Hard to read otherwise, and I haven't be able to find anything to set it up that way if it already has it. 

FreddyFox1234 wrote:

Nope, I'm afraid I have no idea how others have been able to get username wrote to show at the start of quotes. I've just been adding the post author's name manually (as in this post).

FreddyFox1234I messed around a bit and I think I figured it out.  It looks like the way you do it is first start your comment (you just need to click inside the comment text box to get a cursor, you don't need to type anything), then go to the post you want to quote, highlight the part you want to quote, and that quotation marks icon will pop up above the lines you highlighted.  Click that and  return to your own comment you started.  The quoted lines will be there with the name of the person you're quoting, as in the above quote from your post that I have here.

There's a problem with making new threads on the forum. I tried to make a new thread, but ran into an error. And when I tried again a few times, with nothing being posted, and then I ran into a spam filter..... really? Come on...

Also, the very limited choice of avatars is starting to annoy me. I dislike all of them, and I want a custom avatar.

And.. the Sims 3 forum still needs sub forums. I'm gonna nag about this until I see it happening. I'm not gonna quit!

EA_Nilsthank you so much for responding. 

1. Profile Customization
   We hear you. As this is a new site we are currently very conservative to enable customization that can be misused by malicious users. Like making any change that replicates quickly in a lot of places. We do want to offer more customization though. In the short term, that means adding at least more avatars from different themes to choose from. We also have plans to improve the profile pages. This won't be in the short term, there are other things that we need to focus on first.

I understand your position, on the topic of the short term solution I was really disappointed that I'd gone to the trouble of changing my AHQ avatar to a Sims 3 character (since that is 99% of my content and forum use) and then it wasn't available when I got here. I know there is no one person responsible for all of this but can the team please stop forgetting about Sims 3 and 2 players? It's getting to the point where we're the last to be included or not included at all which is just wildly saddening. With short term in mind - would it be an option to add colour customisation to some options? Just so that we can differentiate as much as possible, even if it is just by the colour of a plumbob or a character's hair. 

The Sims 3 Tags
We are very much open to suggestions here. Tell us what kind of tags you'd like to see (ideally with examples) and we will consider them.

I'd happily let the community chime in on this one too but I'm quite simple in my approach - whatever you give to Sims 4, give it to the rest of us. We had subforums on the previous site and for some reason only Sims 4 discussions warrant this privilege now? So the tags I'd want to see are the exact ones given to Sims 4 but if I were being specific I'd say: stories, legacies, packs, tutorials, Create a World, Create a Style, Mods, CC, funny, screenshots, bugs, fixes, Sims 3 Store.

I do think at this point having been part of the Stories & Legacies side of the forums for 15 years that putting them under Sims 3 and 4 separately is a mistake. It separates the community or forces things to be hidden in the franchise discussion which isn't actually for either of those games. The storytelling and legacy community is cross-game so if it were up to me I'd give it it's own forum and let people who create discussions/threads signify which game they are using. Threads like The Art of Sims Storytelling, Writer's Lounge, Share Your Stories, Legacy Directory, are not discriminatory on which game you use and used to be huge communities until this forum threw everything up in the air. 

Changes to formatting threads & replies

• Show more filter
• Nesting replies
• sorting chronologically.

We are very much with you on the show more filter. We've already made inquiries for changes to it. Currently it loads another 10 posts per click. That isn't feasible for long threads. Something like 30 or 50 would be a more realistic trade off.

While reply nesting is bound to stay, we also want to change the sorting.

We'd like to sort chronologically globally for the site.

Sorting by likes has advantages in some cases, which is why we'd love to be able to enable it at board level. But in the examples you and others have brought forward like story content or troubleshooting it isn't helpful.

Additionally, users should have control to overwrite the settings our team sets. It should be a preference that can be saved.

I'm glad this is being explored, thank you! I think reply nesting definitely has some uses, it's probably more about making notifications work better with these and the show more etc than it is abolishing it completely.

Bookmarking threads
Noted but not as high on the list as some of the other items.

Thank you for acknowledging this, I think I've got a workaround for now.

Rank list
Had posted the link earlier, but just for completions sake: Level up with EA forums ranks!  

Yes I saw this thank you 💛 I'd really like rankings to have some sort of added ability like reduced limits on posting and replying, I think a ranking is evidence that someone isn't a malicious user and therefore can be trusted. It's really hindering my use of the forums to constantly have to wait to respond to the numerous conversations I am in because there is a limit. 

Edit: this reply has taken 3 hours to post because I got hit with so many max post limit notifications as well as watched it disappear every time I posted it. In the end I've had to make a two sentence reply, then edit that in chunks to copy in my original response over a series of 8 reposts. I have tried so hard to be constructive and supportive of this new place but honestly this is just a disaster at this point.