[2021] Exiles forum revamp

Hi! As you may have noticed, the Exiles forum has had a facelift recently. The goal of this update is to reduce clutter on the Exiles forum frontpage and open specific sections for each platform to make things easier to track and report.

The revamp is not 100% complete as of this writing (we still need to migrate some topics to their new, appropriate sections), but it’s mostly done.

Changelog here: Conan Exiles forum facelift

Let me know what you think/rip my work apart here

We’ve certainly considered it; if there is enough demand for a whole separate modding section, we can do so.

Your bookmarks should be fine? That’s a good question actually. If you’re saving threads by the actual topic URL then you’re fine, as the actual URL of each topic will not change.

Are these not visible to you? I checked the settings and they should be visible to all and open to posting.

Sure thing, sorry for the confusion!

Oh my bad, yeah, the actual bookmarking feature of the forums

Yeah, the actual URL of the thread won’t change, so you should be able to access the topic anyway. We’ll do our best to recategorize as many of the existing Server/Clan threads as possible, and we won’t delete the category, it’ll just be delisted.

Any specific threads that we miss that need to be moved can always be done so individually if someone lets us know.

Quick update: Updated patch notes icons and added console brand logos to the Xbox and PS icons to make it easier to tell apart, hopefully.

I appreciate the (perhaps slightly cynical) banter personally, but yeah, should probably keep this thread on-topic moving forward. If you notice any issues, formatting bugs, or oversights, or if anything else jumps out at you, let me know. Thanks

Ah, yeah, I’ve made some minor changes to the profanity filter too. ;D

I agree that we can make it clearer that you can post in the main category, or just rename some things (General Discussion → Community, Feedback → General, for example) as some of those categories may be redundant. I’m not sold on Testlive needing its entire own category, but if that’s something that’s needed down the line, it would be very easy to do so. I also don’t think I can mix and match styles like you propose.

Either way, at this time I think I’d like for the changes to settle in and we see how things end up getting used, and then we can make further adjustments as needed. We’ve already shifted things around a lot and I’d like to minimize further major shifts so quickly.

I like the icons but don’t have strong feelings about the center alignment, but I’m not sure what you’d rather see. Mind, I don’t think the current layout is perfect by any means and I’ll probably continue tinkering with smaller details.

As for navigation, we are aware that the breadcrumbs at the top of the page don’t display the overall ‘Conan Exiles’ category if you’re in a sub-subcategory as you scroll down, and that’s something we’ve brought up with our forum provider. Unfortunately I’m not sure if that’s something we can fix or change on our end directly, but hopefully it can be adjusted on their end.

Yeah it’s a totally fine suggestion and I get what you mean in general. I definitely agree General could be made more streamlined or more clear of what each category is really for.

Pretty much anything allowed by CSS editing. What you suggested would look more pleasing, I agree. I did want to try that but haven’t had the time yet to dive in to if it’s possible to adjust the shape and size of those category markers from within those boxes. It probably is. Will check again next week if I have time/brain cycles. Thanks!

Alright quick and dirty test:

Needs some alignment tweaking and a couple things but this is more what you were talking about, right?

I agree. I’ll see what I can do to make something more like this happen.

Yeah, thought about that too. Will do, I think.

Alright, I had some time and brainspace today (bah, I need to take weekends more seriously)

Updated category boxes to have the category badges display in a uniform length, aligned icons:

PC Discussion categories condensed to a single row:

The intent was to use as many icons straight from Conan Exiles’ UI as possible. The wavey hand icon is probably the weakest of the bunch; a flag is a good idea. I’d like to keep the icons as minimalist and straightforward as possible, so they read when made small or viewing on a small surface (such as mobile).

Admittedly, the Funcom logo doesn’t look fantastic when scaled down to 32x32px and I’m not sure blood splattered would read well either.

Made it a banner with a magnifying glass in it. I think that looks a little better personally. I really should stop doing work on a weekend

I’m glad to hear it’s easier to navigate on mobile! I’d love to take the week off, but we’re about to go live with Siptah and Gamepass, so…it’s all hands on deck with the community team this week and weekend

I’m not entirely sure that’s possible, but I don’t know enough to say it’s impossible. There’s also the matter of how the info is communicated because there’s a lot of servers and listing them all would make for a huge page.

We do have an internal server status list we can look at, so such a thing does sorta exist on our end.

Worth considering, thanks for the suggestion!

A post was split to a new topic: Is siptah really coming out thursday?

As requested by a few folks, moved the General section to the front (top for mobile). Should make News more easily accessible.

And yeah, this was kind of the angle I was thinking. This is not a promise that this will be implemented, but it’s something I’ll inquire about and look into.

xpost from main changelog but added a floating ‘New Topic’ button for mobile users that stays with you as you scroll through a category.

Update on this: Discourse, our forum provider, is looking into addressing this in the near future. Will probably only be for desktop since space is at a premium for mobile users, but hopefully this should be added soon.

I think it’s an important bit of usability feedback, but we needed Discourse to help us out with this. For what it’s worth, and certainly not trying to diminish your pointing it out, but some others in our other game communities (specifically Secret World Legends’ players) had brought up the same issue. I agree with you all, so we wanted to push for it. Thanks for the feedback

Update is live, breadcrumb extended for sub-subcategories on desktop:

Hmm, interesting to hear. I use an older Pixel 2 XL with Chrome and I haven’t noticed anything too bad. It’s occasionally choppy compared to some other Discourse sites I’ve seen, which I’ll inquire about, but it hasn’t killed the browser.

I’ll inquire with Discourse to see if there’s anything I can do about performance issues for lower-end hardware. The custom CSS or images on this site could probably be cleaned up or optimized, but I’m not sure it’ll completely solve the issue you’re having.

I’ve personally never run into autosaving causing issues with typing out a message, but it’s something I can bring up to our provider. What’s the model of phone you’re using and what are its specs?

Xpost:

• ‘Dev Tracker’ button at the top of each category now only displays posts from Funcom staff within the category you’re currently in. So if you click the button while viewing #conan-exiles:exiles-playstation it’ll show posts in that category. If you click the button in #exiles-playstation:playstation-bugs then it’ll only show posts in the PS Bug Reports category, and so on for all other categories in the Conan Exiles section. I’ll work on expanding this function for the other games later tonight.

• Also added some cute little chat bubbles next to the reply count so it’s hopefully easier to tell which number means what

Testing Dev Response tag on thread, not 100% done with it I think so it won’t go fully live quite yet, but this’ll give you an idea of what it might look like. Clicking on the tag will take you to a search for all posts with this tag on it.

Dangit, I can’t use custom emojis in the text field for the tag. Oh but I can use regular ones. Hmm

Weird. Try refreshing/clearing cache.

Yeah, that’s how the plugin works. It’s not quite the functionality I want, but we’ve requested the ability to be taken to at least the first post in a topic that’s marked as an official reply. It’s not certain this will be added, but at least it’s out there. Right now the way we have it set up is that we can manually mark a post we make as an ‘official reply’ that will then add the tag to a topic.

Yeah, I think that’s hard-coded into the plugin we’re using from Discourse. It’s a modified version of Discourse’s own ‘Category Experts’ plugin so I think the search field is not something we can change. However, I just did hear back that we may be able to get an option to have the Response icon take you within the thread instead to the search - should be completed in a few weeks.

The symbol will probably undergo some more changes/iterations as we finesse and nitpick, by the way.

We’ve had Exiles bug reports end up in the Secret World Legends, Moons of Madness, and The Longest Journey categories. We’re still not sure how that happens, but it goes to show you that no matter what you do, it’s never 100% effective and edge cases of user confusion still occur.

Hah, nah, I hear ya. It’s relevant to the topic anyway since this is basically the user experience thread.

New badge functionality test

ugh, OPERA BROWSER

Okay, thanks

Turns out it’s not just Opera and it was an issue with a :hover selector. Should be fixed/not possible to cause the flickering effect now.

Replying for testing!

Alright, so a couple new things xposting from the forum news section;

• Adding #Report-Received tag, which can only be added by Funcom staff and is used to mark a bug report as seen and reported internally, without necessarily requiring a Dev Reply. This tag has a custom icon and color, ideally making it more visible compared to regular thread tags.

• Updated Funcom staff post styling; adjusted border and added background tint and logo. It’s really dark so this may still undergo adjustments - let us know what you think!

• “Solved” button and icon is now blue instead of green, and the checkbox icon that indicates a solved topic should now be much more visible at a glance when looking at the topic list.

  • Before:
    

  • After:
    

A big part of the revamp was that we only recently had the ability to add another layer of subcategories, which made everything much smoother. If you have specific thoughts to share, you can use the #general-discussion:exiles-suggestions I would say. If you’re talking about bookmarks that is a separate thing the forum does support.

It’s to make it look better and make it easier to use, and to have specific sections for each platform.

Thanks! A big focus of the recent iterations was to improve visibility of important info or to show that things have been acknowledged.

Late reply, but good catch. I’ll bring it up with Discourse.

Heya @CodeMage, the search issue is now fixed. \o/

I’ve been out this week, but just poking my head in to mention that Discourse is aware of the issue and it is suspected that certain browsers like Edge on Android are bugging out… If you aren’t already, we recommend using Chrome in the meantime.

Will DM you

An issue causing the menu to not load on some mobile browsers should be resolved as of last night.

Minor update October 26 2021:

• Moved topic navigation bar down to a consistent position and added a background to it so…
  • …the text is more visible against light backgrounds,
  • it shows in a consistent position on all category pages, which means…
  • …the New Topic button remains in a consistent position as well

image1159×115 55.8 KB

• Added highlight to New Topic button on desktop
• On narrow browser windows, New Topic button now gets big and moves to fixed position on the bottom right of your window (similar functionality to what’s already on the mobile version)

image720×423 68.3 KB

Minor update October 27 2021

Pardon our dust! You may have seen some flickering on the forurms tonight.

• Performed some cleanup/optimization on the above logic, should now behave more consistently across all categories.

  • There may be a few cases where the tool buttons overlap with the navigation bar, it’s to such a minor degree that it’s not a high-priority fix right now, but I’m aware of it
  • extremely narrow browsers may see some oddities with the category breadcrumb, but unless you, for some reason, browse at 20% width, you probably won’t encounter it

• Removed category logo and description on narrow browser windows and reclaimed some vertical space (similar to current Mobile version)

• Removed gap at top of topic when browsing threads on narrow browsers

I am not able to reproduce the issue on my Pixel 2 XL. Could you please DM me with your phone model, browser, and mobile OS version?

.jpg should absolutely be a supported file format here though.

testing:

Looks fine to me here, on desktop.

Hi friends while I love me some weird banter I’d really like to keep this topic focused on forum nitty-gritty

I will say I do like cauliflower crust on pizza though

Hi thread!

Small updates; updated some category icons, most notably the #general-discussion:exiles-suggestions category. Also it’s pink now

Added a new little emoji which we’re gonna try using a little to highlight posts.

Hello again, sorry if you ran into the forums glitching out for a split second. That was me once again pushing updates to live

Today’s updates:

• More icon updates, should be finished now
• Bug fixes, layout fixes (including an odd case where some users will see stretched out icons when viewing the forums from a preview from a messenger app)
• Finally fixed size on the breadcrumb navigator so it’s no longer narrow
  

Discourse recently pushed a major update to the forum software, which probably caused some unforeseen formatting problems. I haven’t had a chance to look at it but will do so this week. Thanks for the heads-up!

Made some alignment changes for the quick access menu for mobile. Shouldn’t be cut off the margins like that anymore.

Hm, okay. I tested on my Pixel 6a and an iphone 13 which are both midsize devices. I don’t have a smaller device handy at the moment.

Made a couple tweaks, let me know how it looks.

Ah yes, marginally smaller, I understand. How does it look for you now?

Sent you a DM.

Fixed some alignment issues on desktop and when resizing the browser to narrow proportions.

Also testing out out a new location for the navigation menu on the left side of the window. Please note this means the menu icon is on the top left of your screen instead of the top right. Mobile users still have the button on the top right, but the menu slides in from the left side of your screen. I’m very sorry for any ruined muscle memory. Please let me know what you think!

I’ll have to take more time next week to delve into mobile display issues. Thanks for the report.

It takes some getting used to, for sure. I’d like to keep it on by default because otherwise I’m worried folks won’t use it or know it exists.

Hmm, I can only think it happened because you used one of the new reactions and then I did one on your post right around the same time. I’ll have to check in to that, thanks.

Yeah, mobile accessibility issues are something I need to look into next week. It’s a pain. Thanks Vomher