Forum changes

Hi guys!

We are changing some parts of the forums right now due to feedback and experience that we got over the last months.

This is a work in progress right now, we will change things. We thought it might help document things a bit so you are not completely left out.

What we changed so far:

• Removed gender throughout the complete website. If you find any gender related terms anywhere, please let us know!
• We deleted over 150 empty forum's that were leftover of deleted groups - took us some hours X|
• We tried to improve the ratings system: Post rating was nice and all, but some users just tried to score really high by spamming the forums. The system is disabled for now, the data is still existing, no ratings are lost. We are looking into a more balanced way of having the user collect points without them turning the whole forum into game to end up in some leaderbord.
• We removed the members tab: We do not want bots/other users to walk our member list and collect data of that. We removed the 'Notable members' as it was - this needs to be changed or sthm, we will see. We do not want to have users exploit themself by setting the birthday publically visible - risking themself unknowingly. We moved the 'Find members' into the 'Forum' tab - as this is the only function we would like to retain from that.
• We removed quite some drama threads:
  • I am not sure why some people think we do bullshit just to annoy the shit out of our people. We are trying to improve the overall situation. Accusing us of bullshit, harassing/attacking us and creating more drama is not helping the situation at all.
• We limited signature sizes: Some people had a signature longer than the whole page, increasing load times drastically for everyone. There is in our opinion no reason to put so much text there. Please use some simple text and use your profile's 'about me' page if you want to write more.

More changes were done in later date. List can be found here:
https://www.beamng.com/threads/forum-changes.51276/page-28#post-804833


TODO (To be done):

• We need to solve the problem that the 'Social Groups' Addon slows down the forum and everything around to a halt. The more we use that feature, the worse it gets. This is why we disabled creation of new groups a while ago and started cleaning them up. For example changing an administrator could easily take up to 30 minutes due to the way the plugin works X|
• We have some serious maturity problems with some members: They shitpost, get warned, banned and attack us - in an endless loop - to the point that one moderator ragequit already. If we cannot get you guys treat the people nice that are there for you, then we will need to change the tone we will interact with you as well.
• Forum changes: we want to get rid of some forums/merge some to reflect the usage
• <WIP>

TL;DR / FAQ:

• Why did you change a running system and ruined everything?
  • The forums were very toxic lately due to the behavior of the 'regulars' on here. People got harassed, stalked, bullied and attacked for no reason at all other than people feeling entitled to do so (in combination with too much time on their hands). We are changing some aspects of the forums to have people behave properly - with the ups and downs. We want to have a friendly environment that is not spoiled by the folks who hang around here all day long. You are shaping the experience, and as of lately, its utter crap.
• You know it better on how we should run everything?
  • Cool! Let us know, so we can get inspired - but do not expect us to follow your orders or trying to force or pressure us into anything. We run big communities since 10+ years, thanks!
• Why was the change so shit / what happened?
  • We should have communicated the changes upfront better, some changes were expected to be against the opinion of some users, so we decided not to. Yes, we could have managed it better, lesson learned

Sorry for the late post and keeping you in the dark about this, we simply underestimated the chaos these simple changes would produce.

 

It surely was a problem for some females on here that were stalked, etc. In our opinion there is no need for anyone to know your gender on here - we are not a dating platform

 

wow, that makes me feel a lot better having invested the time to write all this. Maybe reset your hate mode for a bit and acknowledge that i am another person sitting in his living room, working on this at 1:20 am in the night on a public holiday.