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Guild Forum Removal

Lady Gato

Well-Known Member
BOO - considering Inno limits the number of important threads to 5 -- I don't know if that's 5 per tab or total -- this is unworkable. Guild Rules, GBG tips, GE tips, Event tips, Battling tips -- that's 5 topics right there. The change from adding a person by hand to a thread to auto adding a new person to a thread saved the guild leaders some time. Now you are taking the time savings away.
 

Arklur

New Member
What is even worse, it seems to me that even active threads are deleted after 60 days if they are not marked as important. An active guild has many threads Arc threads for example, marking everything Important just to prevent them to be deleted makes no sense, so even if you increase the limit for Important messages, that might not be a good solution.
 

Coach Zuck

Well-Known Member
What is even worse, it seems to me that even active threads are deleted after 60 days if they are not marked as important. An active guild has many threads Arc threads for example, marking everything Important just to prevent them to be deleted makes no sense, so even if you increase the limit for Important messages, that might not be a good solution.
You misread. This is the same as the old message system, but with the added ability to prevent the automatic message deletion after 60 days.

The individual messages that are older than 60 days in a thread that isn't marked as important are deleted; after that happens, if no messages remain, then the thread is deleted. That means a thread will only be deleted if it isn't marked as important AND there have been no messages to it in 60 days. Your 100fp swap threads are safe, small guilds on old servers!
 

Coach Zuck

Well-Known Member
I appreciate that the announcement we are feedbacking has told us a bit more about the inner workings - that important threads won't get auto-expunged.

That makes the limit of 5 more understandable, but perhaps still not realistic as Lady Gato pointed out. Regardless it's an improvement over what was there since the guild forum wasn't visible for the majority of players, we never bothered to use it.

I suggest: rather than having the important flag prevent auto-expunge, make the lock flag prevent it, and then allow marking infinite threads as important.
Inno's concern is probably data usage, consider this - we're marking our GBG and lock threads as important, that's 100s of messages per day per thread that will never get deleted + are useless to look back on.
The threads we aren't able to mark as important due to the 5 thread limit are our instruction threads that are a post or two each. Those are also locked. Those are the ones we don't want to have deleted. I have them saved to a text file because until now I assumed that they would be deleted every couple of months.
 

DadLander

New Member
Regardless it's an improvement over what was there since the guild forum wasn't visible for the majority of players, we never bothered to use it.

As a new player, I was expecting the Guild Forums to have a fountain of knowledge (instructions, age specific examples/strategies, etc.) which I could access after I joined the Guild (like the historical Guilds that closely protected their trade secrets) I know it is water under the bridge but humor me with a little insight into why the guild forum was not visible to all the guild players and why the guilds did NOT bother to use the Guild Forum?
 

Agent327

Well-Known Member
As a new player, I was expecting the Guild Forums to have a fountain of knowledge (instructions, age specific examples/strategies, etc.) which I could access after I joined the Guild (like the historical Guilds that closely protected their trade secrets) I know it is water under the bridge but humor me with a little insight into why the guild forum was not visible to all the guild players and why the guilds did NOT bother to use the Guild Forum?

App players have no access to the Guild forums. They can only be accessed on PC. How much is on the forum and how much is visible for PC users is up to the Guild.
 

kouldbeme

New Member
The new message system looks great. I think that there should be a Swap Tab added to the list. This guild and I believe many other guilds have moved their swap threads to the Guild Tab plus a few other items of information. Limiting the number of Important information can't possibly be enough for the items in our guild forum plus the number of swap threads. I also think that other guilds have the same problem. The removal of information after 60 days is not a good thing.
 

PackCat

New Member
How will this effect Polls?

I think first, they need to enrich the new message system to incorporate a few settings:
Allow Polls and set thread messages retention time.
Some threads are only useful in the current time, such as Swaps, and should cut off after a few days or a few pages. Others such as Guild notifications should be pinned permalinks. (at the top)
 
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PackCat

New Member
I appreciate that the announcement we are feedbacking has told us a bit more about the inner workings - that important threads won't get auto-expunged.

I suggest: rather than having the important flag prevent auto-expunge, make the lock flag prevent it, and then allow marking infinite threads as important.
Inno's concern is probably data usage, consider this - we're marking our GBG and lock threads as important, that's 100s of messages per day per thread that will never get deleted + are useless to look back on.
They could add a retention setting to the thread, say a week or a month, depending on how fluid the discussions are and how frequently used.
 

XENA27

New Member
This is a nightmare, my guild has around 50 documents to transfer. Also why mix them in with other guild messages, makes it messy and confusing. I would like to see a separate tab for the guild forum in the message center. Very time consuming to transfer it all with such a short deadline, I rather be playing than doing tons of admin!
 

Wildelk68

Member
I don't know if this has been discussed but along with the limits to important messages there does not seem to be a way to edit them by the forum administrators. This is just unworkable as stated previously guilds have many important messages that need to be updated and changed from time to time. Just more of the rush to combine mobile and PC platforms, which in my opinion has done much damage to FOE and will continue to do so. The two platforms should have been kept seperate!
 

Wildelk68

Member
Just to add a comment, It never ceases to amaze me how very little the so called devs actually know about the workings of FOE!
 

Cptvkirk

New Member
Before dumping guild forums. lets change this forum to the message center format and see how it works. If message center replaces it and is an upgrade, should be done here too right?
 

Tyranna Wrecks

New Member
I agree with many here - We just recently added all kinds of instructions on Fighting, Great Buildings, Beginner Tips, 1.9 Threads explained, etc. so we wouldn't have to repeat these over and over to each newbie. We had not used the Forum previously and now it is a thriving learning and reference center. Either allow guilds the ability to continue to post how-tos that are never deleted or devise another way to utilize this capacity. This is very frustrating.

And limiting the number of characters per post does not allow for a guild to have their instructions grouped under one heading...thereby making it impossible to limit the number of Important messages.
 

McBluefire

Member
Discord is not a replacement, either. I worked up copying all of my guild's forum entries to Discord a few months ago to give our non-PC owning members a way to browse our etiquette and information threads. We have 27 threads that were deemed important enough to place them over on Discord. The guild has been around since the creation of G World and our etiquette/rules are constantly evolving and being updated.

We happen to have 5 major categories which fits nicely with 5 important threads. However most of these include links, text formatting (bold/underlined/lists), hyperlinks, and more than 20 lines. Our "General Guidelines" thread alone takes 11 posts on a PM (or discord) in order to make it flow naturally while losing all the other features of the forum.

Getting back to Discord - that adds a new layer of guild administration which the Guild Message tab was supposed to remove. For every member that joins the guild we have to explain that we use Discord, how to get Discord, where the link to Discord is, that it is an app as well as a website, and how to change their Nickname(for our server) to be like their FoE Handle. About 1/3 of the guild has joined the server so far...so it is not a great solution for all the work we've put into it. Additionally we have to remember to check it every time a member leaves to remove them if they didn't remember to do so themselves. This is not in keeping with the spirit of simplification that the Guild Message area was created for.

The Guild Message area needs these abilities before guild forums should be removed:
1) hyperlinks
2) edit existing posts in important marked threads (for any guild member with Moderator rights).
3) More than 20 lines per post

Since FoE seems to think they have provided a useful replacement solution (you have not) we are just going to go with a third-party solution that is insecure (easily reachable via a link) for 90% of our information and then push the round peg through the square hole for our "sensitive" information of which there are only a few threads which will be left on guild messages.

Lastly, here is the process for updating a message, say for instance "Friends and Foes". Our list takes 3 posts to make the message. Since none of the posts can be edited that means the person updating needs to:
1) Copy and paste the three posts to some where (likely outside the game) to edit.
2) Make the edits.
3) Create a new thread and add the three posts. Lock the thread.
4) Remove the old thread.
5) Mark the new thread 'important'.
Alternatively just the portion that needs to be updated could be copied, edited, and posted to the existing thread, but then how do people reading the thread later know where to find the other two parts and what is updated and what is not?

We understand that not everyone uses the guild forums and it is a system that should be phased out, but why not add more features to the guild messages tab before removing it? The new solution is not even close to a replacement for a decently featured forum and that feedback was provided thoroughly on the beta forums and is being conveniently ignored.
 
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