Forum Discussion

HermioneSims's avatar
HermioneSims
Seasoned Adventurer
3 months ago

New Sims forum: worries about creative corner

The new forum shows many new features, but as someone who spends most of her time around the old "challenges, stories and legacies" section, I cannot help but worry about the applicability of the new layout to this typology of content. 

In particular, I'm worried about the removal of threads' pages in favour of a "load more" and of a "sort by..." feature. This new layout seems suited for short threads made of short and quick responses, where missing some posts isn't a tragedy and that always gives you something to read. In the creative corner section, instead, we thrive with very long threads, that take years to be completed, our update posts tend to be long and detailed (i.e. the kind of posts we don't want to see getting lost among the newer or more liked posts), and we need the post to be displayed in chronological order. Similar comments can probably be made about the thread where the users showcase their custom saves update by update, or for some very ambitious build/buy mode project. 

To be less vague, I'd like to make an example, using the "Aliens stole my alien parents" challenge posted by @myghtysprite (sorry if I'm using your story as an example, it is the first one I could think of where the updates were made directly on the forum and not on an external blog!)   The story thread on the old forum is here -> https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/1003023/aliens-stole-my-alien-parents/p1 , while the same thread on the new forum is here -> Aliens Stole My Alien Parents | EA Forums - 377899 

Now, I'd like you to try to find a specific update because it's the next one I want to read, let's say it's the one titled: "Act 2, Day 2" (hint: it's around the middle of the thread).

  • With the old forum, you select page 5, scroll down a bit, and there you are.
  • With the new forum instead, whether you choose to sort the posts by "Oldest first" or "Newest first", and whatever you know where the post is or not (more or less), you need to click on "load more" forever before finding the post you're looking for (and note that this is a quite short thread for that section!). Also, if you decide to sort by "Newest first" (for instance, because you're looking for a chapter close to the end), you must scroll through the most recent posts (which you haven't read yet), spoiling one or more chapters you haven't read yet.

Summarising, stories and legacies are the kind of threads that users can access at any moment, even years after the posts were actually made. The posts have to be read in chronological order to make any sense, and the readers need an easy and quick way to navigate the thread in its whole length (for instance, when they return to the thread to read some other chapters another time). As a reminder, the old forum remembers the last posts you read, but I didn't notice the same feature in the new one (?)

For the moment, the only two solutions I can think of to make stories and legacies easier to navigate (both not ideal) are:

  • for the original poster, to make a  very lengthy index with all the links to the chapters' posts in the opening comment of the thread (but the links can really be a lot. For instance, my current legacy has about 180 chapters for the moment. That's a lot of links!)
  • for the reader, to save or copy somewhere the link of the last update they read, and use it as a "bookmark" to know where to continue from.

I'm starting to worry about how this would affect this section of the forum, in its current form the navigation of long threads is way more tedious and I'm afraid it will push away both posters and readers. 

Is there some function I'm missing that could make the navigation easier? Is there some change that can be made to the forum to make it more SimLit-friendly? Is this forum just not meant for this kind of use? Any other thoughts on what I wrote?

 

PS: I'd also like to point out that the creative corner section is being hit particularly hard by the issue with the migration of pictures' links, I guess that's quite evident. In addition, I think that other users from the creative corner have other perplexities about the new forum, so feel free to add your comments on the topic.