Kill frilly post formatting with a simple option!

[Alice]

I thought we already had this. I turned it on like 5 months ago, and then turned it off because I thought it made things a little boring.

This is a re-rollout of the same feature we had, and broke somehow before.

Oh. I never noticed the brokenness.

 

[Lycaeus]

Hasn't this been an option for like, a really long time? Aha. I remember seeing it forever ago...

 

[wingman11]

Pull it together, admins!

That's a little too complicated and specific. This feature is for people who don't want all extra formatting features. Some people want to hide bold, the italics, underline, the size, specific font color, all of it, half of it - where does it end? It's much simpler and easier to go with 'all or nothing.'

Really now? You're using THIS as an excuse? "It's too hard and we're too lazy to try!" That's the vibe I'm getting from you guys. Users are giving you valid input, helpful suggestions, and great ideas for improvement, and you cop out by saying it's too complex?

Bull crap.

You wanna know what this kind of sounds like to me? DeviantArt. You who say that it's not easy or not possible are just like some of the staff members on DeviantArt who really need a slap in the face. I don't know if anyone remembers the scene on DA during the period in which accounts were hacked and deactivated by an outside force, but it seemed just like this. Users giving suggestions for solutions and admins saying that it's not possible, sometimes denying that there was a problem at all.

What has this world come to where people can't take a suggestion with good intentions and try to make something out of it? When did "It's too complicated and specific" become a valid excuse to not try and do it anyways?

In other words, when did the goal of our society as humans in general stop being improvement; how did it change into "How can we get something done with as little effort as possible?"

And don't tell me that it's already just fine and can't be improved, cause there are plenty of users who beg to differ. I can't be the only one slightly ticked by this defeatist attitude. We are not a bunch of Archeops. We are humans who don't settle for the bare minimum.

To tell the honest truth, I have NO clue how website formatting works; but let me tell you this too: if I did know how to program a website and someone pointed out a potential flaw or potential improvement, I would say "Challenge Accepted" while crossing my arms and squinting like a boss. Then, after successfully impersonating that meme, I'd edit the website to see if it can be done before saying that it can't. None of this "simpler and easier" bull sh*t crap.

That is how human nature works. That is how stuff gets done and done well.

That, my friends, is how it should be.

Now, you look at that rant and tell me how effective it is to people who can't un-hide bold, italic, underlined, enlarged/shrunk, and strike-through text styles if they wanted to.

-exits stage left-

/rant

 

[colcolstyles]

When did "It's too complicated and specific" become a valid excuse to not try and do it anyways?

Welcome to PC, bro. :(

Sadly, that (along with an apparently never-ending lack of free time) seems to be the reason that a lot of ideas get shot down or flat out ignored. You can try all you want to promote change but, at the end of the day, the administrators have final say. It sucks but you get used to it after a while.

 

[wingman11]

I will NOT bow.

Welcome to PC, bro. :(

Sadly, that (along with an apparently never-ending lack of free time) seems to be the reason that a lot of ideas get shot down or flat out ignored. You can try all you want to promote change but, at the end of the day, the administrators have final say. It sucks but you get used to it after a while.

"Welcome to PC, bro." Ya know, I've heard those exact same words somewhere before. OH YEAH. Only every community I've been a part of.

Why is it that this kind of crap is happening all over our beloved world of Internetia? It's like the people up top stop seeing the worth of the suggestions. It's happened at FurAffinity as I'm told, and it's happened at DeviantArt-hell, it's happening right NOW-and, lo and behold, it's happening here too.

And you know what the worst part is? Those same admins who won't try also dodge the subjects entirely! We give suggestions and they throw excuses - probably invalid excuses, by the way - at us and don't tell us why.

"Why not try this?"
"It's too complicated."

Oh, well that makes sense.

...wait. NO IT DOESN'T.

Then they say they lack the proper free time. I've heard that way too many times. Do you know what that is a sure sign of? YOU'RE UNDERSTAFFED. GET MORE PEOPLE TO DO THE MAINTENANCE WORK WHILE YOU WORK ON THE NEW STUFF THAT PEOPLE SUGGEST. Or, if you're too attached to the constant-ness of keeping something the same until it's been beaten to death by over-exhaustion, get people to work on the new stuff for you.

Seriously, what's so hard about that? No money to pay new people? Get a monkey. There's easily people who will volunteer here to do it for free as a labor of love for the site. Hell, like I said, if I could do ANYTHING with website upkeep and design, I'd jump right in on it. No charge. Just because I want to see some goddamn progress here.

There's no way that I'm just gonna sit here and watch this place fall to pieces like DeviantArt is. I chose to trust the staff there and believe that they'd fix it all. Now DeviantArt is on a decline in the eyes of many current users (and users who are now no longer users). I'm not saying it's all my fault for not speaking up, but I feel I could have helped if I did say something instead of "getting used to it."

So I'm not gonna get used to being ignored. To quote Breaking Benjamin (by the way, AMAZING BAND), "I will not bow, I will not break."(Song-"I Will Not Bow") I will continue to press this idea of actually being personable with your users and I will not let constantly being turned away stop me.

Because this place is just like a business. Yeah, cheesy simile, but hear me out. You see, there are plenty of other places to bring our forum posts to. And if the admins here aren't gonna listen, then we have the choice to use one of those other forums, therefore causing the admins to flail around and try to get us back as their website falls to crap and turns into a ghost town. We are not gonna let them shut us down; we'll "shut their world away."(Again, Breaking Benjamin, same song. It just fits, doesn't it?)

Because there's nothing more that I hate than a community like this transforming into a dictatorship.

Except for clowns. Those creeps scare the living sh*t out of me.

NOPE, NOTHING ELSE.

 

[Oryx]

lots of stuff

I would rather have them work on things like the double posting and load issues than making a specific script to block font color but not font boldness, honestly. It's less of "it's too complicated and we're too lazy to do it" as it is "it's too complicated and we have more important changes to make to the site", as far as I can see. PC isn't going to fall to pieces over post formatting.

You should calm down a bit. This isn't even a big issue, and even though I agree that a more specific filter would be preferable, I understand that there are more things worth spending a long amount of time writing rage-filled posts about.

 

[Mika]

"Welcome to PC, bro." Ya know, I've heard those exact same words somewhere before. OH YEAH. Only every community I've been a part of.

Why is it that this kind of crap is happening all over our beloved world of Internetia? It's like the people up top stop seeing the worth of the suggestions. It's happened at FurAffinity as I'm told, and it's happened at DeviantArt-hell, it's happening right NOW-and, lo and behold, it's happening here too.

And you know what the worst part is? Those same admins who won't try also dodge the subjects entirely! We give suggestions and they throw excuses - probably invalid excuses, by the way - at us and don't tell us why.

"Why not try this?"
"It's too complicated."

Oh, well that makes sense.

...wait. NO IT DOESN'T.

Then they say they lack the proper free time. I've heard that way too many times. Do you know what that is a sure sign of? YOU'RE UNDERSTAFFED. GET MORE PEOPLE TO DO THE MAINTENANCE WORK WHILE YOU WORK ON THE NEW STUFF THAT PEOPLE SUGGEST. Or, if you're too attached to the constant-ness of keeping something the same until it's been beaten to death by over-exhaustion, get people to work on the new stuff for you.

Seriously, what's so hard about that? No money to pay new people? Get a monkey. There's easily people who will volunteer here to do it for free as a labor of love for the site. Hell, like I said, if I could do ANYTHING with website upkeep and design, I'd jump right in on it. No charge. Just because I want to see some goddamn progress here.

There's no way that I'm just gonna sit here and watch this place fall to pieces like DeviantArt is. I chose to trust the staff there and believe that they'd fix it all. Now DeviantArt is on a decline in the eyes of many current users (and users who are now no longer users). I'm not saying it's all my fault for not speaking up, but I feel I could have helped if I did say something instead of "getting used to it."

So I'm not gonna get used to being ignored. To quote Breaking Benjamin (by the way, AMAZING BAND), "I will not bow, I will not break."(Song-"I Will Not Bow") I will continue to press this idea of actually being personable with your users and I will not let constantly being turned away stop me.

Because this place is just like a business. Yeah, cheesy simile, but hear me out. You see, there are plenty of other places to bring our forum posts to. And if the admins here aren't gonna listen, then we have the choice to use one of those other forums, therefore causing the admins to flail around and try to get us back as their website falls to crap and turns into a ghost town. We are not gonna let them shut us down; we'll "shut their world away."(Again, Breaking Benjamin, same song. It just fits, doesn't it?)

Because there's nothing more that I hate than a community like this transforming into a dictatorship.

Except for clowns. Those creeps scare the living sh*t out of me.

NOPE, NOTHING ELSE.

I could be wrong and I'll gladly accept any sort of correction here but... I don't really think what you're asking is feasible. Not because they don't want to put more people in those positions, if they could they probably would. Having people dedicated to the new features would be awesome! I don't think anyone on staff would disagree with that.

However

I do not think this is something that is feasible on a short term happens next week sort of basis. In order to change code of that sort (new features etc) one has to have access to the Admin CP. It's been awhile since I've seriously mucked around with Admin CP stuff on a vB based forum but I'm pretty sure a moderator alone can't get into that area.

...You're talking about just hiring more staff members to go into that area, one of the most delicate areas on the whole forum, to just work on stuff? When they're not very well known? Because baby mods, with some exceptions, to the best of my observation skills, are not part of the intimate friendship trust circle that is the High Staff. It's not a level of staff that's just awarded to people. It's earned. The levels of trust the higher up you go are incredible, I know that some of them would seriously put themselves on the line irl for eachother. They're that close. When you have a friendship that tight, you can easily trust them with something like PC's Admin CP. ^^;; You know, where something simple mistake-wise could do very very very bad things.

To the best of my knowledge, there are 2-3 staff members who are experienced enough with coding [One's an AA, One's an SA] to really do anything serious in that section. One has a full time job, the other is a full time university student.

Even with freeing up the other jobs like closing threads and dealing with drama, there isn't a lot of time to get the stuff done. They're not going to just quit working or quit attending to their studies. As we've already established, they can't just hire random lackies to work code, it's not easy ****. Not everybody can just pick it up and learn it and, again, there's the whole admin cp is sacred and only AAs and above can touch it thing. Also, how are they supposed to come up with a standard as to what's an acceptable level of skill to be allowed into such things? It's not something most people know but there are definitely people who think they know it when really, they don't have a freaking clue what they're doing.

I understand that you're frustrated and your point is valid. If you didn't care about PC, you wouldn't be as adamant and well spoken as you are. I just wanted to throw two cents in. ^^;;; *slinks back into the darkness*

 

[Rukario]

This is only a simple format stripper.. there was never any intention of making it very specific and user settable aside from on or off.

Wingman11, if you want more then that open a suggestion thread and make your suggestion / proposal.

We, the staff, try our best to meet ALL the member's needs and some of their wants as well, but there has to be some middle ground.. as we can't please everyone with each new feature or change we make. (see what I did there?)

 

[インフェルノの津波]

Well, this site would have more people dedicated to it if we didn't have

Lives
Family
Life
School
Lives

Believe me, I would love to have this site progress more. Hell I was all into it, until life decided to smack me in the face and maturity sank in.

Wingman, what you're asking is not impossible...it's unfeasible. If the moderators chose anyone to be a moderator, or who they think is adequate enough to be one, this site would go to pieces. Why not ask Rukario/any other moderator the list of ex-staff members?

Plus, the Moderators themselves are growing up. I'm surprised some are still here, considering what's going on in the world today. Hell, the fact that the Moderators here are silly boggles my brain.

And finally, having a tantrum isn't going to help anyone around here. PC, and other community sites because they're a community. We're a collective. A multi-toned voice. A Hydra.

If a single part of the brain of something breaks down, it's someone else's job to fix it. That's us. Moderators and up are the brain, we're the helpers/supporters. They take care of the complicated stuff, we help them along the way, and suggest things.

What I'm trying to say is PC isn't some kind of club. It's COMMUNITY, got it? The fact that it's origins is Pokemon has nothing to do with the fact that we're all a COMMUNITY.

Wanna help? Then please, by all means shut up and help them fix the "problem"!

[if this post was too complicated please tell me, I'm on something today]

 

[The 100 Mega Shock]

its only a pokemon forum man. relax, have fun.

 

[Bluerang1]

The colours can get annoying, but I do like the bolds, italics etc. But nice feature here!

 

[wingman11]

Clarifications and Apoligies

We're understaffed, you say? There's a simple reason behind that - we're very selective of the staff we put on PC for security reasons, and it's true! We can't exactly tell who's proficient with code and whatnot. If people want to contribute their bit, they're free to do so. However, the way the staff ladder works, we don't simply take contributors left and right (not even through a resumé or anything like that) and throw them in admin. Do you think we should?

I know you've just mentioned admins "dodging the question" and so, you asked for transparency, and you'll get it here - it's simply going to take a while to do. Maybe someone else can do it - maybe one of the other admins. Right now though, you have a basic feature. Maybe you don't want that, but I don't have the time to be focused on it right now. I simply have other things to do. If you want this to be some sort of promise, and not some flat-out election promise of sorts, I'm sorry, but I really can't promise anything (and nor have I thus far.)

By all means, no, that's not what I'm asking for. Actually, I didn't want that at all. Throwing more people into the cogs willy nilly is not what I meant by getting more people to help. I honestly meant to find one or two more people to take care of things that you, meaning you as in an individual and you as in the group, can't handle yourself.

It's just a proven fact that group work, when done correctly, can far outshine any work done by an individual. And sometimes, at least I hypothesize, adding the assistance of one more person can push it even further. Of course, I'm not asking for a random Joe Schmoe to come in and start pushing buttons, but rather a person you trust to do the things that you have a hard time finding free time to do.

And one more thing about random contributions, just quickly: if someone contributes something to improve the site, whether it is a suggestion or a full working feature, then take it and try to roll with it. Nowhere did I say that contributors should be made into admins, and if it seemed like that, I did not mean it to seem so.

About your answer to my initial question of why not - THANK YOU. I wasn't asking you to do it right now, I just wanted to hear some form of "We can't do it now, but we will TRY." Try being capitalized because that's all I'm trying to promote at this time. And remember, I'm not asking for any specific promises for a concrete feature that is coming, nor am I looking for a promise from any one person.

I'm searching for a collective promise to TRY. A statement that says "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday we will try to implement -insert idea here-." I'm patient, I can wait. OK, I'm not patient at all, but it's as they always say, late is better than never.

One last comment before I finish; I never meant to offend or insult anyone, and most certainly was not throwing a tantrum. A tantrum would have been written like this:

"WHY CAN'T YOU DO THAT YOU GUYS ARE SUCH JERKS I WANT THIS FEATURE TO HAVE EXACTLY WHAT I WANT AND ONLY WHAT I WANT WAH WAH WAH"

Also, I was not trying to rage over anything, and if it seemed like that, then I apologize. It could be my natural cynicism coming out because of the gap between me and the staff and admins. Maybe it's just an accidental lack of clarity. Darn the internet for not being able to transfer over my facial expressions and tone of voice.

And to you who think I don't know that it's a community here, I do know, did know, and have known for a while. That's what communities do. They have great times, they fight and argue, they get problems and then find solutions, and they move forward. Who's to say that heads 65-132 of the Hydra aren't arguing with heads 582-639? What if head 388 (poor guy, stuck in the middle of a Hydra argument) had a great idea to solve the problem, or a suggestion to help things move forward again? If he just held his tongue, heads could still be arguing. Of course, saying something has the exact same chances of escalating the issue, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Staying silent usually has a worse effect than speaking your mind.

Wow, that was a long last comment. For those of you who suffer from TL;DR syndrome, STOP BEING LAZY here's the summary. Thank you to Hiroshi for telling me that they can try, and you may think I don't know what I'm doing here, but I do.

 

[RedWar]

Wingman... I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say that you have never modded, admined, ran or owned a forum?

Now I am sort of new here (read a lot, joined awhile back but rarely actually post so look a lot like a newbie) so take what I have to say with a pinch of salt. But I do own a couple of forums (busy ones, but sport not Pokemon related) so have some knowledge there

1) It is VERY time consuming. It's all well and good saying 'take on new people'... but you have to be able to trust them. Trust them to do right by the community (if not their modding will drive people away, not grow it). Trust them to get the job done, trust them to come back, trust them not to just back their mates or go against those they don't like. finding new staff members isn't THAT easy

2) Real world. You demand (and let us be honest that is what you are doing) that people learn how to code this. The odds are this feature is part of the latest VB (my copy is a bit behind), or some sort of plugin or work around - which has been implemented to help. What you are demanding is not just finding something useful but taking a huge amount of time to learn what is needed and implement it.

Another shot in the dark but I am guessing you don't have a real world job (school maybe?). Again I do not want this to sound insulting, but explain what it is like at the other end (and again I am nothing to with PC)... with real world jobs you get up at 7ish, get yourself together, go to work, get back sometime between 6 and 8, make yourself dinner, spend time with other half, unwind etc. This doesn't leave a lot of time to do this sort of thing.

The sheer amount of time the people behind PC put into this place eats into that precious spare time, something most don't have much of. You can't just magic up some more time, or tell the other half you don't want to spend time with her for the next week.

This limited amount of time means prioritising. What you see on most forums is that people take on board suggestions but do what they can in time allowed. In this case a workaround was found that didnt take too long (I'm guessing). some people suggested they hate formatting used, so that got addressed. Now people say 'hang on, we wanted a halfway house that tailors EXACTLY to what I want'. Great. Really a great idea - but that limited free time is probably better spent on other aspects, not knuckling down on something that is peripheral at best.

3) You say things like "If I knew how to do websites I'd try" and "I'm looking for people to say they will try". That is a MASSIVE sense of entitlement. You are demanding that they look at a small (and let us face it, this is very small) feature even though you offer nothing but the suggestion and admit your own ignorance.

Entitlement is often an issue on forums...people think that they deserve exactly what they want. Can you explain why they should drop working on things like growing the community, setting up other features, addressing problems (and trust me, the VB software can get very buggy and needs a lot of maintenance) to address this problem?

I know I sound a bit preachy here, and I do apologise for that - seems my skills with the English language aren't enough to be able to get my point across in another way, trust me when I say I don't mean it like that. But I do mean I don't think you appreciate the time and effort many put in, especially those at the top, and demand for things, good points or otherwise, are not going to help.

 

[LatiasSoulDew]

Thank you, now I have more options to choose. for free.

 

[Alex]

This is like an individuality on and off switch. lol

 

[Snegurochka]

has this been disabled? i've enabled the option to remove the ~speshul snowflaek~ formatting but i'm still seeing tiny text and eye-burning colours. D:

 

[AmethystEEVEE]

Thanks, this was changed before I joined, but I'm pretty sure after using this same purple color on every single forum since I discovered formatting, I would've been confused if I didn't have the option...
@Snegurochka:
EYE-BURNING COLORSSSSS Try clicking "Go Advanced." It brings up more options. If it still doesn't work, you might just be working with the formatting a bit wrong.
@ Wingman and everyone talking to him:
I'm no mod or admin, but I've been on other forums before, it might not be the best idea to make suggestions/argue (yes, I said argue :U) here?

 

[Serperior]

"Welcome to PC, bro." Ya know, I've heard those exact same words somewhere before. OH YEAH. Only every community I've been a part of.

Why is it that this kind of crap is happening all over our beloved world of Internetia? It's like the people up top stop seeing the worth of the suggestions. It's happened at FurAffinity as I'm told, and it's happened at DeviantArt-hell, it's happening right NOW-and, lo and behold, it's happening here too.

And you know what the worst part is? Those same admins who won't try also dodge the subjects entirely! We give suggestions and they throw excuses - probably invalid excuses, by the way - at us and don't tell us why.

"Why not try this?"
"It's too complicated."

Oh, well that makes sense.

...wait. NO IT DOESN'T.

Then they say they lack the proper free time. I've heard that way too many times. Do you know what that is a sure sign of? YOU'RE UNDERSTAFFED. GET MORE PEOPLE TO DO THE MAINTENANCE WORK WHILE YOU WORK ON THE NEW STUFF THAT PEOPLE SUGGEST. Or, if you're too attached to the constant-ness of keeping something the same until it's been beaten to death by over-exhaustion, get people to work on the new stuff for you.

Seriously, what's so hard about that? No money to pay new people? Get a monkey. There's easily people who will volunteer here to do it for free as a labor of love for the site. Hell, like I said, if I could do ANYTHING with website upkeep and design, I'd jump right in on it. No charge. Just because I want to see some goddamn progress here.

There's no way that I'm just gonna sit here and watch this place fall to pieces like DeviantArt is. I chose to trust the staff there and believe that they'd fix it all. Now DeviantArt is on a decline in the eyes of many current users (and users who are now no longer users). I'm not saying it's all my fault for not speaking up, but I feel I could have helped if I did say something instead of "getting used to it."

So I'm not gonna get used to being ignored. To quote Breaking Benjamin (by the way, AMAZING BAND), "I will not bow, I will not break."(Song-"I Will Not Bow") I will continue to press this idea of actually being personable with your users and I will not let constantly being turned away stop me.

Because this place is just like a business. Yeah, cheesy simile, but hear me out. You see, there are plenty of other places to bring our forum posts to. And if the admins here aren't gonna listen, then we have the choice to use one of those other forums, therefore causing the admins to flail around and try to get us back as their website falls to crap and turns into a ghost town. We are not gonna let them shut us down; we'll "shut their world away."(Again, Breaking Benjamin, same song. It just fits, doesn't it?)

Because there's nothing more that I hate than a community like this transforming into a dictatorship.

Except for clowns. Those creeps scare the living sh*t out of me.

NOPE, NOTHING ELSE.

More pew pew, less QQ. The more time you spend typing a wall of text, the less time you have to get anything done.
Irony, I love thee.