The new EA Sims Forum
I am a member of the soon to be Sims Forum. I have also raised my concern in the Forum and will repeat it here. Perhaps this debate has already started somewhere else, but forgive me for not seeing ...
Forum Discussion
EA_Nils
Community Admin
Community AdminMonaSolstraale Thanks for all your feedback!
Outside of addressing bugs, I also want to highlight that we are still experimenting.
We have intentionally enabled many of these features, so that we can gather feedback like yours.
At a forum/board level, seeing a list of threads sorted by Most Recent is essentially what's the default for forums since the dawn of time.
The other options are there to potentially help find trending discussions, or popular posts. Whether these turn out to be the right thing for different contexts (say game discussion vs technical support) - we'll learn.
As for ordering replies in a discussion / thread itself, there is one global setting, which is set to "sorted by like" and cannot be changed by us yet. There's also the option to manually override this for each thread, but it has to be done every single time. This isn't user friendly.
Our goal is to provide more agency. The ideal state should look something like this:
- For our team: Global setting to set a default.
- For our team: Ability to configure an override at board level (e.g. to account for those different context mentioned before)
- For forum members: User-profile setting to set their own preference (e.g. Use default, oldest first, newest first, by likes)
- In thread: To change it on the fly without affecting your default settings.
If I may weigh in, as a story writer, most recent is horrible and newest only slightly better. Imagine reading a book where each time you opened it up, the chapters were in a new order, or reading it from the back to the front. No, you like your books in chronological order.
Now giving us options to choose a default for ourselves would be brilliant, then we could choose oldest to newest if we wanted to. However, with the current system that too is unpractical. Say you are reading Anna Karenina, a monster story of close to 1000 pages, and each time you opened the book you had to start at page one and skim through the pages until you got to where you left off, and for each page the page turning got slower. Would you finish the book? No matter how good it was? Most likely not, nor would you read a book that way. You'd put a bookmark on the page where you left off, and start at say page 678 or 712 or whatever.
We need something similar here. A way to jump to first new comment, and then read them chronologically from there, rather than start over all the time. So while I like your suggestions on how to structure threads on various level, there also needs to be a way to pick up where you last left off.
- EA_Nils
JesLet40 Understood. Needed is:
- Jump to first unread.
- Does not exist yet.
- Deep link to a comment to continue at a certain spot.
- This exists either via the ellipsis menu (copy link) or by right clicking on the timestamp and copying the link address via browser context menu.
I hope I've misunderstood something, but timestamps still need to be improved because they don't navigate to new/unread posts in a thread.
For example, on the Recent Discussions page for Questions & Feedback on EA Forums' functionality, clicking on the timestamp related to your comment (pictured below) doesn't do anything but take me to the first post.
It's annoying to know that there's a new comment, but that it takes wading through a maze of nested replies to find it. In this case, sorting by Newest, Oldest, or Most Liked was not helpful. I had to click Show More an unreasonable number of times to find your comment, even though this thread has relatively few of them. In a longer thread, I wouldn't bother. Unfortunately, "not worth bothering with" is becoming a more popular sentiment regarding these forums as weeks pass with no improvements being made to navigation and no clear timeline.
Anyway, I see that the timestamp on the actual comment works, but that's not particularly useful, because finding the comment in the first place was the problem.
I just want to restate how important it is to easily get to new messages. I received notification that there was a new message in this thread. It took me scrolling through a few see more links to finally find this message. If there is more than one message left I never know if I read all the updates. Presently I don’t feel confident that I am following threads.
- Jump to first unread.
