While the consolidation of the forums to a single one does have its advantages, it can have some downsides: for instance, Hybrid's sections amount to probably half the combined forum's content, but is only relevant to those playing Hybrid.
Ryan mentioned something about adding in some better separation, and I hope that fixes a lot of this. One thing I'd like (and many others) would be a profile setting to, by default, filter out specific forum sections, since I don't really know if anyone here actually PLAYS all four UOGamers shards. The filter should apply to both the "what's new?" button, and also to the default search.
Can you guys at least add an option to take away all the fail off of it?
While not perfect, there IS an option to change to at least 1 other skin; the blue bar at the bottom has a link labeled "Default Style." Clicking it will pop-up a dialog that will let you change it to the possibly slightly-more-tolerable "GrayXen" skin. Hopefully Ryan will see about providing more skins, and perhaps making one that more resembles the old forum style (one of them, at least) the default.
And for the record, the large amounts of whitespace and Times New Roman default font gives it more a WordPress look than anything.
Ryan said he will save about 1000$ per year this way.
Not to mention it saves him the headache of having to deal with vBulletin's owner, Internet Brands... Which has quickly established themselves as possibly one of the worst companies to be a client of.
Think about these words when you crawl in RunUO section or Demise bugs/fixes section.
To be frank, I also hope that they are words that the entire "official" RunUO team takes to heart as well.
edit: why forums are becoming Facebook-like?
From what I've gathered, Ryan
hopes to make the whole thing more "community"-oriented, and many of the features remniscient of FaceBook appear to be what's selected so far.
Also Ryan
is already getting sick of people commenting on this subject, apparently; you're hardly the first person to comment on this.