Quote: "And no Jeku, they aren't niceties. They're usability flaws. "
Okay:
Quote: "1. Signatures are hard coded into forum posts"
Nicety. not a flaw, as stated some prefer to have old signatures appear in older posts - I have myself managed to retrieve URLs this way - I mean I forget the URL, but I remember the sig I clicked to go out on.
Quote: "2. There no pagination, just a dropdown of pages"
Pagination is another method, it doesn't mean 'dropdown' is a flaw. Both are functional. So again, nicety.
Quote: "4. Links are not automatically hyperlinked in posts"
Not a flaw. A nicety. A lot of forums I visit don't automatically hyperlink and I'm happy with it. It doesn't make the forum difficult to use, either way you need to get in the habit of using BBCode to format your posts anyway.
I find on some forums, a lack of use of BBCode tags or HTML tags is an easy way to notice if something might be spam.
Quote: "5. There is no preview post function"
A nicety. Not a flaw. Because it gives you an optional feature of proofreading your post. I try to do that before I hit submit. But I always miss something...even when having used a preview feature and have often gone back to edit regardless of the existence of a 'preview'. So for me, 'preview' does nothing extra - so it maybe 'nice' to have, but it's not a 'flaw' to be without one.
Quote: "6. No ability to sort table column headers"
I can see having one being an advantage, but not a necessity. So the lack of is not a flaw, but a nicety.
Quote: "7. The code tag is a joke. Plain and simple"
The code tag works like a text editor, even DBP has long strings; long strings are the fault of the coder and it'd appear them same. I see that as a good thing, I don't like it when code wraps. The lack of syntax highlighting, I don't think it'd do much for me, because A: my code snippet may be my own script, B: it may be not using DBP code but C++ (for Dark GDK) or C# or even LUA. To accommodate for the syntax highlighting of language people use would require a great list of options, like in SciTe, my opinion is that it'd be a cluttering feature: Code - selected from a nice long drop-down menu, paste code, end code. And perhaps, repeat.
I think all of those features aren't, again, a necessity, but a nicety. So they're not flaws.
Quote: "No auto-generation of thumbnails for uploaded images"
Can't say it makes much of a difference to me between this forum and a forum with them, in some forums the 'thumbnail' feature is pretty crappy and inefficient. I also may not wish my image to be thumbnailed, but shown directly. But it's not really a 'necessary' feature, it's not a problem causer and thus, it's a nicety.
Quote: "It makes no sense that you have to scroll up, highlight text, scroll down, then hit the quote button to quote something. It CERTAINLY isn't made clear anywhere in the interface that you can do this. You need to add a QUOTE button by each post that quotes the text AND shows the original author. "
Never had an issue with not knowing who the author is, because people tend to quote within context and I find it is actually easier to type: "Geoff: [insert quote]" because if I click 'quote' like on other forums, I have to snippet out everything I don't want. So I don't ever use 'quote' unless I want to quote the whole thing and on some forums this feature is actually abused, for example on a picture thread, people may not be bother to cull the image from their quote and if they're quoted somebody's comment on an image and using that to discuss, then it can get
very cluttered.
Having one is nice and can be convenient, but not a necessary feature. So it's a nicety.
So not all are 'usability flaws', as a user I've not found them to be flawed and actually quite like the way the forums works, I'd find those features to be niceties that I wouldn't want and is a reason why I prefer Apollo over any other forum system.
The forum achieves the purpose it sets out to do and in my opinion it does it effectively. So I dismiss your 'problems' as not being 'problems' at all, but things you'd prefer to see. And regardless, it's a forum, it does its job and I don't think there's much of a big deal to kick a fuss up about...I mean it's a forum for goodness sakes.
