Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General forums need a serious upgrade

I do not. That doesn't mean I can't be persuaded to change my point of view. Which functionality do you think is missing?

I meant the one who is specifically tasked with directing the upgrade.

Recent forum downtime seems to be (mostly) due to excessive bot activity so it is at least a known problem but I don't have information about how or when it'll be properly addressed.

*makes a small sacrifice to Tymora that the bots will stay away*

I just wanted to add, that I do like the retro look. Visually only the smileys aren't my cup of tea, they could be cuter or cleaner.

I did actually think about replacing them with some nicer ones ages ago, but I couldn't find out who owned the copyright, sadly...

Wouldn't making new smileys be a nice subject for a friendly competition here on the forums? A wholesome way to channel those dark fan art urges?

Not for me to say, but I could mention it to a handy community manager. I think potentially gnarly copyright issues would need checking over first, I know of e.g. fanfic causing problems elsewhere (not something that involved Larian, though) but hopefully, it's a cool idea.

For starters there is posting images without a third-party site. Then we could add notifications.

I'm so old I didn't even know the look was retro. It just looks normal to me.

The external images can be considered a minor inconvenience, yes, if one happens to post images often. As for notifications, I have just turned them on in my preferences. I have yet to experience if and how they work.

Lots of people post lots of images on lots of fora. It's been a thing for years.
The only notification thing I can see in Preferences is to send an email when a member you have previously marked as a friend posts. This is another third-party requirement/unnecessary step. I was thinking more in terms of clicking on follow the thread and, if necessary, clicking a notifications icon whenever I log on to the forum.

A reply window with all the necessary formatting options present rather than having a bare-bones window and a "full editor" window would be good too. Being able to quote just a specific piece of text rather than the entire post . . .

I'll have another rummage in the settings to see what it offers in terms of notifications; I think it's email-only but I'll check. AFAIK it only does on-screen notifications for PMs, and even then you won't notice if you have animated GIFs turned off. Actually I should change that to something else.

I've wondered about activating user-accessible galleries and have raised it as a possibility for the replacement forums. The issues with that at present are that I'm not entirely up to date with the state of the actual server, but I suspect surplus capacity is probably rather limited; and how best to manage it, as there will be problems and some may need to be dealt with urgently. The other matter is that the gallery software isn't the most intuitive thing I've ever encountered.

For the general appearance, I'd personally like to keep the theme more or less as it is, perhaps slightly streamlined but not by much. Maybe I'll just add a few more rounded corners and claim it's a modern-day interface! Actually I did have to change some bits to make it usable on mobile phones and I'm not keen on the contemporary "mobile phone applications should be monochrome and look that they've been designed as a children's toy" style, so hopefully we won't be facing that. But ultimately, most of that stuff isn't my decision, all I can do is be stroppy and sulky enough until I get my way.

Anyway, tl;dr: I'm broadly in agreement with the feature requests and other stuff, while being mindful about how it can be run and managed without causing us more interesting times.

I toggled "Send me an email when a new post to a forum, thread, or by a user within my Follow Lists is created" to yes in my preferences. It seems to have worked, because I got a notification for your latest message by e-mail. To follow a thread, you have to click the bookmark symbol next to "Thread Options", top left of the thread.



OK, some things can be made easier, but I would sooner book them under QoL (less mouse movement/clicks) then under missing functionality.

Haha. So you must get emails about my posts all the time. Right? Right?! Right???!?!

I don't know about rounded corners, but there's gotta be some web designer out there who could make the forums look less like other things I've seen before, and more like the home of Baldur's Gate 3 Dungeons & Dragons.

For functionality, passive engagement features would be nice. I think upvoting is good for forums because things like that are pretty feel good and innocuous. Downvoting is not, since it just encourages mean spirits.

Emotive stuff is cool, but I also don't really need hearts and smilies, when we could have like Dragons and Owlbears for that. I mean right?

Just seems like a job for the art department to me as much as tech support. But I am glad it exist at all. So I'll take whatever as long as it loads hehe

I had just assumed these boards were being DOS'd like every few hours, or that the game was just so insanely popular that my time zone/sleep schedule was always getting the raw end of the deal there.

For image attachments or a gallery I do think that would be a very useful feature. But that's just cause I'm a terrible rambling writer and an even worse typist, and images are often just much simpler and a more direct way to communicate.

But then if it's a server load issue, I dont know, cause that could be a lot of weight. The problem with the 3rd party image hosting is that those spots tend to go defunct every couple years, so the image links are bound to bust eventually which is kinda sad. I don't know that I need more notifications or anything like that really, cause I'd probably just turn those off anyway, but couldn't hurt I suppose.

I think anything they don't want to deal with they should just offload to some spot that's better for that. So like pushing over to the discord for some stuff where that makes sense, like just with signposts and such I guess perhaps.

Oh and a way to scale the embedding for video. That would be nice! Cause they still go pretty jumbo on the desktop display there.

Not sure, but I think any sort of love for the boards would surely be appreciated! Fingers crossed!

I don't think I am quite ready to follow users just yet. But if someone would post something in their messages that really can't be missed? A joke, or an interesting riddle, for example?

Looking at the banner, that would require the rounded corners to be inverted and spiked (and the borders would have to be a slightly different colour).

That's probably beyond my dubious artistic skills; maybe one of the actual artists will do something like that for the upcoming forums, but at this point I'm none the wiser. In a way I kinda like that it still looks like Divinity 2's in-game menu; I mean Ego Draconis, not Original Sin, so quite retro now.

Right now seems I'm more likely to get the 504 timeout when linking from the main page to the main directory, whereas if I just bookmark a thread directly seems to load more reliably.

The main reason I enjoy this spot compared to the aggregating platforms or the socials is that it's long form and primarily just about the one thing - BG3. TLDR dunk culture and too much sprawl is like the total bane for anything of this sort with me, which sucks cause that just seems to permeate most spots these days. I think if that's the sort of dynamic peeps enjoy most then there are other formats that make that sort of engagement more manageable, but a forum is primarily for reading, so having a place that feels more like a zine is what I like. I mean I know it's unavoidable these days to dodge some of that, but perhaps breaking it up a bit by medium might work here. So for example, might have like a shortform video friendly section where embeds are enabled or a gallery type section for smaller still images, but not necessarily across the board. For a zine vibe maybe having the option to do thumbnails could be fun, or you know like those old 8x6 or 4x3, 3x2 wallets, like a BG3 microfiche version. I mean right now I can do something like this with the bbcode, or that, or with the thumb from 3rd party host.


But then trying to say attach an image from the wiki using the full editor "insert image link" more likely to get something like this happen...


as opposed to this... which is the same image from the wiki just pinballed to ibb to have it formated with the initial url link that the boards seem to need.


I mean that's probably what the typical user is going to have happen right?

I've seen that thread more than a few time times, and then the edit with the user asking about why it's not working. I think it took me like a year just to puzzle out how to display an image here heheh

I don't know, but like if there was the Baldur's Mouth illustrated Sunday funnies and we could cut it up, even with smaller images, might be cool. Maybe a full screen would be good in the bug section though. Idea being to just have the images all way downscaled generally unless the user clicks through similar to what I did with spoiler tags. But just without the clickthrough going to a place that's awash in adds and other nonsense. Similar to the wiki, but I honestly don't know how that would be set up, just kinda imagining what might be cool for the illuminated manuscripts take.

Avatars I think it would be cool if that could key off more of the in-game stuff, just to make the experience of signing up and going through that whole process feel somewhat more gamefull. I enjoy the classic throwback smilies and such too, just trying to think of what else might be fun.