We appreciate you giving the new forums a try.
One thing to stress from our side - this is a new forum. Yes, we migrated existing forum threads over, but it's still a new place and it will need time to grow and we need to nurture it. There's a lot of things we are testing at the moment, and we are discovering issues that will need to get fixed. That's okay. The Sims forums were over 5 years old, when they originally launched there were also kinks to be ironed out.
On avatars, as previously communicated we plan to add a lot more avatars for now so that users can better distinguish themselves.
Long term, EA is also working on new avatar functionality, once that becomes available we will revisit avatars.
Our team wants more agency regarding how replies in threads are displayed. We currently cannot change it. That said, we have requested changes, but they will take time. I posted about this previously, from my perspective, 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 different use cases)
- 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.
On ranks, we appreciate your feedback. Based on our research we did want to provide a ranking structure with more achievable ranks for new forum users and also account for those users that are active but just read and not really post. Instead of creating a ton of ranks where its hard to understand the hierarchy, we settled on using modifiers to help with that.
Related posts - totally agree with you, we don't like that either. We've asked to get an option added to allow us to constrain to the current area.
Tags - We are still tuning these. Thanks for your suggestions, we will consider these in our next review round.
Not being able to post pictures - that seems like a technical issue. Can you take a screenshot on that device, send it to your desktop and post it from there so we can take a look? Ideally include the OS of the device (e.g. iOS or Android).