New Forums
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
I added forums to our Rust website a while back. The idea was that if I got the foundations of a forums implemented and being used, it could be incrementally improved over time into something that is better than our current vBulletin forums. vBulletin is pretty standard when it comes to forums. Or it was, 10 years ago. I don't know if they still update it, but our version is feeling pretty old.. missing a ton of features that you'd want as standard in a modern forum. So here's some of those features.Passwordless
No signup forms, just use Google/Facebook (Twitter/Steam/Etc coming soon).
Post Editor
WYSIWYG editor. Has keyboard shortcuts for most stuff. Uses a customised version of Quill, so the post's json should be much more easily parsed than bbcode. https://files.facepunch.com/garry/2018/01/06/%202018-01-06%2021-01-59-994.mp4File Uploads
If you view a thread from a couple of years ago the one thing you'll notice is that most of the images and videos are broken. It seems kind of fucked that in 2018 people are having to upload their shit to another service to post it on the forums. File uploads are limited to 128mb, aren't limited to any file types, and support drag and dropping onto the post.Following & Notifications
In the old forums people "followed" threads by viewing them and then not marking them as unread. Now we have the ability to follow forums and threads.


Search that isn't shit
For a long time search in forums has been treated like a new thing, rather than a normal thing. It would be kind of hidden, hard to use and a single search regularly take 10+ seconds. Things have moved on and search can be used a lot more casually now. So an example of this is being able to link to search results. Because searching is that fast that it's no problem. And finding what you want is even easier. Want to view all my posts from December in the Unity Forum? Easy. All those posts where I said the word yellow? Just as easy.Levels
The current forums are gamified. People don't realise it, but they are. The post date and post count showing under your avatar are your xp. The people on the forums are very protective of those things. So lets formalize that with levels. They show next to everyone's name.


Currency
Ratings are great, but wouldn't it be great if we had a currency that we could accrue and give to each other as a reward for good posts etc. That's what coins are.


Design
The design is pretty contentious. I don't love it, and it'll probably change. It was expected that people don't really like design changes though, so I added a feature that lets you have custom css. Some guys are already putting it to good use.Future
The new forum isn't perfect. You could argue that it's not even a functioning forum yet. But it's a foundation for us to build on over time. So I hope that the old timers from the old forums will give it a try, point out things they do and don't like and help us get there - or just quietly drift off to 4chan.
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