It burns!

[Brynne]

Retardo Land frightens me. It's bbs-obsessed. It's disturbing. Boring and disturbing.

Indeed. Beating up the kids on the short bus gets *really* old after a while. PV

Nice way of putting it 

Lk, I wasn't directing anything personally at you. I hope you didn't take offense to what I said. I just can't stomach Retardo Land, but that's my opinion. Apparently many can stomach it just fine. What bothers me is that Retardo Land is the only impression some have of MATY, which makes us all look like fools with a serious superiority complex. I know that shouldn't bother me, but it does. 

[dizzy]

Now that I've gone back and taken a fresh look at it, I think I see where the problem is with the new MTS2 design:

1) You cannot see who the most recent poster was.
2) There is no indicator of which "Show" and which "Sort" is being used.
3) Requests are mixed with the posts (which makes it confusing in the Testing Grounds especially).
4) The navigation links don't remember your "Show" or "Sort" settings (and sometimes don't make sense).

I think those are the major problems I have with the new design.

[LK]

Lk, I wasn't directing anything personally at you. I hope you didn't take offense to what I said. I just can't stomach Retardo Land, but that's my opinion. Apparently many can stomach it just fine. What bothers me is that Retardo Land is the only impression some have of MATY, which makes us all look like fools with a serious superiority complex. I know that shouldn't bother me, but it does. 

Don't worry, I know you weren't (although I like to pretend like that I do; it makes it more fun).  And, yes, I've noticed that some people do think all MATY is is RL--I playfully remind such people that they should cork up their ears, lest more brain cells leak out.

[nectere]

I admit, I hated the new layout at first, but I hate change in general. And Firefox was horribly broken when MTS2's new layout first hit. Currently it's been working well the last few weeks and I have gotten used to the new layout for the most part. (IE blows chunkies, don't ever ask me to use it, I will quit first)

I do agree though, I miss the part where you could see who the last poster in a thread was, so I don't have to keep clicking back in the thread to see if my question may have been answered or not. I don't like the testing ground area, because of all the requests. But I do like the core pages because it lets me see everything at once and I can see what is new at a glance without having to drill down. I don't particularly like the front page, but that is because I already know what I want and where I am going. Not a big deal, just bookmark a different page.

I guess what I am trying to say, is yes I was irritated  when MTS2 first introduced the new layout, it didn't work correctly with my browser, and I had had a few drinks at the time when I complained in chat so I was shall we say, a little too candid or abrupt. I saw I hated, end of story. But since it now works with firefox I have gotten used to it. I am sure it will never be exactly the way I want it because I didn't design it.

We will always have to deal with ten and eleven year olds no matter where we go, that is just the nature of being an adult and being a gamer. That's why I don't particularly care for RL, I don't see the point in poking fun of children in such a spiteful hateful way, I would be really annoyed if my kid was being treated that way simply because she isn't as mature as the "adults" on that forum.

O, and I am a woman faemidwife.

[Sagana]

With a site as big and popular as MTS2, you have to nip bad posts as quickly as possibly, before they turn the thread into a bad one.

For me personally, Mod the Sims2 is over-modded. I don't care much for heavy-handed moderation and I noticed one day that more than half/3/4s of the first page of the sims2 chat section consisted of locked threads of one sort or another (complete with little "you can't say that here" messages, and who cares if someone says "yeah I'm first to say thanks" before they say "thanks I love this dl?" All the content of a post like that is fluff anyways (good fluff, but still noise, not signal)). I think it would actually be better to deal with the "issues" privately - probably that many PMs isn't feasible, I guess, but... even just deleting some stuff without saying anything would be better in many cases (imo, of course - not that my opinion is of any import) than making it so obvious.

I still don't like the "chat" division anyway - I suspect if one wanted discussion on that site, it would be more interesting discussion if it wasn't so divided all up. Go here for this one, and there for that one. Then, I'm not sure the site wants to be a discussion site at all, and in that case, might be better off not even bothering to try to cater to that aspect, but leaving that for other chat sites.

As for the new format, I like some aspects of it quite well. It is, imo, overly and unnecessarily graphics heavy which makes it slow to load and clunky (and clunky-looking, not as streamlined professional as it could be - the opening screen pics look like tarot cards to me) and it "requires" things of its users (a certain large browser window size, and when someone said they didn't like that Delphy said something like "bigger screens are the wave of the future, catch up" which doesn't much take into account those of it who prefer not to give away our entire valuable screen space to one window, even if our monitors are plenty large enough (I tend to do many things on my computer at once). It still doesn't work well with my mac (netscape and/or firefox depending on which computer I'm on, IE doesn't get along with my mac either), actually (or didn't, I haven't been over there in a bit) but I didn't see any reason to mention it as the earlier posts said it was or was going to be worked on and I didn't see anything saying it was supposed to be fixed. When I mentioned an aspect of the old system I'd like to see included in the new, I was told to just use the old one... well, uh, I was saying I'd like to use the new and it just had something missing for me. Using the old one wouldn't provide the options of the new I liked - I mean... I dunno, that's a kind of strange response.

It's a strange board, really... I'm still sorry about the decision that seemed to dump a large number of the best builders and think the building area suffered for it. It seems to be coming back some now... and it's still the best place to go to find out new stuff or how to do something, or for some good downloads. but I've only been on this one a few weeks and have no idea what moderation and information and other such things are like over here or anything like that, so dunno about comparisons.

[aussieone]

Retardo Land frightens me. It's bbs-obsessed. It's disturbing. Boring and disturbing.

Indeed. Beating up the kids on the short bus gets *really* old after a while. PV

Nice way of putting it 

Lk, I wasn't directing anything personally at you. I hope you didn't take offense to what I said. I just can't stomach Retardo Land, but that's my opinion. Apparently many can stomach it just fine. What bothers me is that Retardo Land is the only impression some have of MATY, which makes us all look like fools with a serious superiority complex. I know that shouldn't bother me, but it does. 

I'm glad that there are others who feel the same way I do.......

Retardo Land is obviously a lot of fun and entertainment for some people and I'm not one to criticise anybody's choice of that, but I find it less than entertaining and yes, the superiority complex does seem to be alive and well in there 

[sanmonroe]

As someone who only uses a very tiny number of hacks outside the critical ones, I rarely looked at MTS2, less than 10 times total in the last year. After NL came out I went looking for updates and the new system was horrible, unorganized, difficult to use, and not logical in any way.

So its not just the people who use it all the time and are used to a certain way.

If you want to keep this useless confguration with broken searches mixed with requests etc, at least make a list of direct links to complete hacks and in testing hacks that is easy for anyone to find.

As for the increase in traffic, more is not always better. 

[Shivani]

Unfortunately, no one has told us that Mozilla is still playing up. Firefox and Mozilla are supposed to use the exact same rendering engine and firefox is fixed (at least, no one has said otherwise) [et. al.]

You know, you'd be right in saying someone like me never bothered to post at MTS2 about the problem.  Then again, I so rarely actually say anything anywhere that it'd be a miracle indeed if I had.  I won't reiterate earlier comments I made--you've already read them.

I will, however, wander off that way shortly to see if it's corrected itself now.  Danke.

[bairy]

dizzy-two,
I've passed your suggestions on to Delphy. I don't know when/if they'll get implemented (I know that hack requests are going to be moved back to the requests section)


nectere,
I agree Firefox did rather botch the site up. One of the problems was trying to figure out exactly why it did it, and it took some time until there was time to actually consistantly reproduce the bug and track down the reason for it.

"IE blows chunkies, don't ever ask me to use it, I will quit first"

IE gets a lot of bad press. Yes, it's awfully designed, slow, sloppy and generally crap. However it does do what it's supposed to (barely) and isn't unsafe to use so long as you have various protection in place, just in case. The only reason I suggested people use it is because we couldn't even figure out why the Firefox bug happened, and in a toss up between bad page rendering, and proper page rendering on an badly thought out browser, the browser won because after all it was just one site for a short period of time.

"I saw I hated, end of story. "

You and about 500 others...

"I don't particularly like the front page, but that is because I already know what I want and where I am going."

If you edit the options, you can choose which page you want as the home page. And with new code upcoming, you'll be able to skip the core pages completely and be taken straight to the "old" version (i.e. the forum itself)

"I don't see the point in poking fun of children in such a spiteful hateful way"

This is a catch 22 in a way. Some of the kids don't know the better and some of the adults get pissed off due to lack of tolerance/understanding.


sagana,
Firstly, thanks for such a well thought out post. It's nice to get a geniunly constructive post we can actually work with.

I don't think MTS2 is over-moderated. There are occasions when a lot of threads are deleted within a short space of time for various reasons, and it does look heavy handed however this isn't a regular occurance.
This is the thing. Comments aren't really there for "I'm first!!" posts, they aren't even there for "thank you!!!!!" posts (there's a button for that), they're there in case there's a problem with the download, or in case someone can offer something constructive. If the "I'm first" and generally useless posts were allowed to run rampant then there would be several pages of rubbish and the one comment saying something is wrong could be missed, which means someone misses out for the sake of someone else boasting about being first.
The idea of just making posts disappear is good in principal, but then there would be an in-flood into Site Issues about it and we know from experience that people will happily smack the new thread button to ask a question that already has 15 threads on the main forum display ergo a ton of "where did my post go???" threads pushing the real site issues out.

I can't really comment on the "chat" element or the build comment because I joined 3 months ago when the site was more or less developed (forum wise) and so I had no say in either.

With the new format, I do agree that the core pages can be rather overwhelming at first, however they are improving all the time, the help one, although still quite fully packed, has been reduced quite a lot from the original one. I think the others need simplifying too. Again, it all takes time to really sort out. I would also say though that I still think it's a lot better than the previous version in the sense that each section is now actually explained instead of you just getting thrown into a forum listing.
A problem is that when we ask people for feedback on the design, we get "it sucks ass majorly" or "yeah it rocks" (as my reply to sanmonroe below will testify). No one is actually specific on what they do or don't like, so it's difficult to judge what is and isn't wanted.


sanmonroe,
"After NL came out I went looking for updates and the new system was horrible, unorganized, difficult to use, and not logical in any way."

I don't know what to do with that info because it doesn't really say a lot. What did you find difficult to use, how do you think it could be organised better or more logical?

"So its not just the people who use it all the time and are used to a certain way."

Fair point.

"at least make a list of direct links to complete hacks and in testing hacks that is easy for anyone to find."

Good idea. I don't know how easy that will be to implement or maintain but it's certainly worth looking into.

[Mendota]

Well, I find the new interface to be a bit daunting myself, but I think it is unfair in the extreme to bash Mod2.
 
1. They were the first real Sims2 site to come on line. They are responsible for paving the way, so to speak for many of the later sites. Many who have their own sites now, started out at MTS They were the real start of the Sims2 community.

2. They host their site for free and the also support others
.
3. Delphy and Mod the Sims are the ones that created the tools that so employ in their making of objects. If we had to rely on Maxis we would be still waiting.

I enjoy this site myself, but I don't feel the need to bash MTS in order to show my appreciation for this siete. It is one thing to say you don't care for the new layout, and quite another to say they "suck". etc.

[dizzy]

3. Delphy and Mod the Sims are the ones that created the tools that so employ in their making of objects. If we had to rely on Maxis we would be still waiting.

Much as I love MTS2, I don't think it's fair to rob the real authors of the tools of their due credit. Quaxi, myself and several others created the tools. MTS2 just made them popular.

[aussieone]

3. Delphy and Mod the Sims are the ones that created the tools that so employ in their making of objects. If we had to rely on Maxis we would be still waiting.

Much as I love MTS2, I don't think it's fair to rob the real authors of the tools of their due credit. Quaxi, myself and several others created the tools. MTS2 just made them popular.

So are you saying Dizzy-two that you don't get credit for your creations over there?
That's not fair at all!!

[laeshanin]

Mendota: MTS2 was the best site for any piece of information for a great length of time, and I still go there to do just that, as well as for the downloads. I won't go to the exchange unless I really have to, and MATY is the only other Sims forum I'm even remotely interested in. Various Simmers has also gone down the pan somewhat, and there is a distinct air of bitterness about it... So what are we left with?

I really enjoy the discussions and repartee here. People are intelligent, thoughtful and witty, without being abusive, and that is my big gripe. You can make a point without resorting to adolescent name-calling.

[bairy]

Aussieone,
I don't think dizzy-two was saying that, I think he(?) was just pointing out to Mendota that MTS2 hasn't created every great tool out there, which is true. So far as I'm aware, everyone who creates good stuff gets credit.

laeshanin,
I can't comment on VS or the BBS because I very rarely visit either. I can't even comment with any solid confidence on MTS2 outside the Help section because most of my MTS2 time is spent buried there.
I can comment on your last part though. This thread has been nice, there have been some good constructive posts we can actually work with and it's (largely) void of pure insults, which means some progress can be made.

[bairy]

Just to update everyone, we have now implemented a set of options so you can effectively skip the "new" design and go back to how it was.

Please see the "In other news" part of post 1 of this thread

Of course you need to be registered to actually have a user control panel. But once you are you're free to adjust the settings to your liking

[laeshanin]

By the by, bairy, are you the geezer from Brum in the UK? If so, which bit? I live in Acocks Green.

[Mendota]

I stand corrected on the creation of the objects tool. I actually thought Quaxi, and dizzy two were a part of MTS. With so many migrations it is hard to keep track. I certainly do not want to rob anyone of well deserved credit. Whenever I go to Sims Resource, the tool used to create objects was sited as coming from MTS. They may have changed that now.

[bairy]

laeshanin,
Yes, South Birmingham.

Mendota,
I'm assuming you mean the CEP. I'm not fully aware of how everything on that subject works. So far as I know, full credit has been given but I might be wrong. I really don't want to get into it here because I don't have the full story, and this topic is about MTS2 as a whole

[nectere]

oh yeah. Because apparently now you have to be really really really careful about crediting who made what and how, when, where, why and if your cat helped and the tools you used and the idea you got from some random post somewhere...and heaven help you if anyone finds out you didnt credit the whole freaking universe for allowing you to live in the first place. It makes me so glad I am not the sharing type.

[Motoki]

There was a big hullabaloo when CEP and such first came out because TSR was crediting MTS2. Some people thought the individual modders and not the site should get the credit. I know Inge was really big on this. At the time, I didn't think it was such a big deal. MTS2 was A LOT smaller, had a lot more of a savvy, respectful and intelligent (if not always the nicest ) crowd and it was more or less like a small community of modders all helping each other to figure things out. In retrospect, I now have to side with Inge on this. Since there has been a mass exodus of talent from MTS2 and most of the old timers have been replaced with BBS refugees whose contributions include "First!" posts (not to mention a lot of behind the scenes drama that has gone on at MTS2 of which I will spare everyone the details.  ) it's probably better to credit the individuals as most have since moved onto other sites.

While I do think the Sims community it rather overzealous and ridiculous with the whole 'rights' issue and it's a game and we should share and be happy, I think when pay sites were brought into the mix and profiting from tools and discoveries that others made it's only fair to at least acknowledge those people.

At any rate, TSR pretty much credits Quaxi, Numenor, RGiles etc individually now and it's been that way for months.

[nectere]

Motoki, I am almost entirely referring to the current behind the scenes blowout among certain creators of certain items and certain tools and the "new" issues surrounding them. I think its great to credit people and all, but it seems currently its getting a tad out of hand when some of the things that are going on as of late. When the focus becomes more about getting credit where credit is due rather than the creations themselves, its seems a bit contrived, egotistical and like you aren't really doing it because its something you enjoy doing, but to get some sort of fame. I don't know, I guess I am just really bummed about so many things going down right now, not just sims2 communities but the pervasive attitudes I see inflicting more and more people on a regular basis. It's almost frightening. Everyone wants to be right at all costs, look at me look at me, tis all about me! I guess it's because we have become a disposable generation and folks feel they must get their due before they are disposed of I don't know. I see more and more people fighting for no good reason, getting really bent out of shape over the simplest of things. Knee jerk reactions are common, but when it permeates your every thought and actions for days on end, at some point it becomes destructive. ok I have said too much.




***Bairy - do you think you guys could bring back the last poster indicator though? So we can see if the creator has posted last in the thread without have to open the thread and clicking to the last page? I ahve to say I really like the feature that keeps the main post on every page, I hated having to answer questions over and over that were answered in the first post but people too lazy to go read the first post. Thus I dont share! (problem solved)

[Motoki]

I must have missed this current round of issues as I've been isolating myself here lately and trying to stay drama free.

[striker]

I'll have to admit, MTS2 is a lot better now. 

I use Firefox and the screen was giving me a lot of problems. 
I also did not like the requests being in the same area as the mod threads. 
Thanks for moving those out of there.

Nectere is right, I want the link to go to the last post in the thread back.  It's a pain the way it is.

[bairy]

The last post indicator is in place on the "downloads section" page. It isn't linked to anything, would it be more useful if it was?

Also, would it be useful to have the Last Post on the Create and Game Mods pages?


Yes, it was decided to move requests out of Testing Ground, and rename it to lessen the confusion, and as I said in a previous post there are now options to go back to the "old" style too.

See, we do listen when people request

[nectere]

I am not sure we are talking about the same thing or not. When I clicked into the forum in the old style there used to be a column that gave the time and name of the last poster, so at a glance you could see if there were any new replies and who the last one to reply was. So that if you asked the creator (or thread starter or whatever the case may be) a question you could quickly see whether or not they replied without having to click in the thread or actually subscribe to the thread and be notified via email. Just a quick visual check.

I reset my front loading page last night, the problem I encountered however is that anything I clicked on (that should have taken me to the main page) kept me on the my revised setting page. i.e. I would click on the logo or what have you to get to the main page but it kept putting me back at the page I set as my start page. Is there any way around that? I didnt realize it would affect it that way so I put it back to the new style.

I went and revised all my settings to the old style, but I got stuck in the sort by functions or room area when I went to downloads, I dont like that way of searching/viewing so I ended up resetting everything back to the new style to get the core page back which has all the stuff in that area in a list (with the sort titles on top that you can use to drill down) style format so I can see right up front whats new and whats not regardless of category.