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Surrender Artist wrote:

Agent355 wrote:

I think you guys are doing a great job in general. Just never, ever switch to Disqus.

Seconded emphatically. Disqus is wretched.

For the love of god, don't. I don't know what software blu-ray.com uses, but it's my favorite forum as far as usability that I've seen. Their integration of releases, the database and Amazon prices is also something I'd really love to see ANN be able to do, at least the first two (or perhaps replacing Amazon with Rightstuf). It just makes keeping track of your collection, and potential additions to it, much easier.

A bit of poking around and I managed to get the site to cough up the phrase "vBulletin Message". I only really have experience with phpBB(including administration with phpBB3), so I can't say much beyond I believe it uses a subtly different syntax, which would take some getting used to.

Of course, any modern forum software would be more extensible than phpBB2 and sport a more pleasant user experience, so I'll happily learn to cope once I can start set Chagen to permanent ignore status.

And ten thousand hells to Disqus. The only advantage it has over a real forum is the lack of a need to register, which will almost certainly cause more problems than it solves. If you really want under-article commentary, embed the forum thread in an iframe or something.

lys wrote:

Nonaka Machine Gun B wrote:

What about being able to view shows by year, as opposed to only in alphabetical order, on an actor's page? Not worth the hassle? It'd be useful for anyone wanting to see if their favorite actor did something this year.

If I'm understanding you right, that's already possible. Under the "Encyclopedia" menu, going down to Tools > Personal Settings, I set my preferences for displaying staff/actor names (FAMILY, Given name) and listing their work chronologically.

That's only available for English staff/cast, not everyone.

Nonaka Machine Gun B wrote:

What about being able to view shows by year, as opposed to only in alphabetical order, on an actor's page? Not worth the hassle? It'd be useful for anyone wanting to see if their favorite actor did something this year.

In the same vein, I have a wish, but about the shows themselves..

..If there ever was a way to implement grouping anime entries by seasons, with a year divided roughly into four distinct parts, tagged accordingly?

As it is now, having a collection of 'season charts' (available from several places on the net) gives a far more clearer picture of, well, the overall anime 'landscape', how it develops, where resources are being concentrated, which trends grow, or succumb, and so on.

Of course a dive into the encyclopedia here, or other sites one might frequent, probably yields far more information. However doesn't come nowhere near enough to give as a comprehensible/easily approachable overview in comparison. Even a year-filter wouldn't be much of an improvement (though easy to implement).

Unfortunately, the requirement to sort through the past makes this idea pretty unlikely ever to get implemented because of the sheer effort involved. But as I said, it's a wish, and it wouldn't even have to be this site to implement it.

Sometimes it's just hard to see the forest for the trees... Razz

Surrender Artist wrote:

Agent355 wrote:

I think you guys are doing a great job in general. Just never, ever switch to Disqus.

Seconded emphatically. Disqus is wretched.

Agreed. Any sites I visit that use it seem to struggle to get it to display properly a good chunk of the time. I've given up on trying to comment on anything that uses it.

Overall, this was a pretty good survey. Picking just one for things I'd like to see added or old columns that I'd like to see return was tough. There were plenty of good options. If nothing else, this survey confirmed that my interests are extremely narrow, but that isn't such a bad thing. I was talking to a friend a while back who has lots of interests but he doesn't really enjoy any of them enough to call them a hobby, so he is always kind of hard up for entertainment.

Blanchimont wrote:

Unfortunately, the requirement to sort through the past makes this idea pretty unlikely ever to get implemented because of the sheer effort involved. But as I said, it's a wish, and it wouldn't even have to be this site to implement it.

Depending on how its all actually stored in the Database, the "vintage" field should make this pretty plausible to do.

Dessa wrote:

lys wrote:

Nonaka Machine Gun B wrote:

What about being able to view shows by year, as opposed to only in alphabetical order, on an actor's page? Not worth the hassle? It'd be useful for anyone wanting to see if their favorite actor did something this year.

If I'm understanding you right, that's already possible. Under the "Encyclopedia" menu, going down to Tools > Personal Settings, I set my preferences for displaying staff/actor names (FAMILY, Given name) and listing their work chronologically.

That's only available for English staff/cast, not everyone.

My settings page has a checkbox with "For Japanese cast/staff, sort titles by year instead of alphabetically"; did you mean that it's unavailable for English cast/staff? Differentiating between Japanese and other cast/staff makes some sense, as foreign releases don't follow the same publication chronology as the original Japanese ones (like if a title from 2009 is released in English after something from 2012—there'd need to be a way to input what year each staff/cast job was done for a series).

relyat08 wrote:

Also, I'm not a huge fan of most of those other comment systems, but it would be nice to have the talkback directly with the articles rather than linked like it is.

Nooooooooo! ^^;

Please don't have responses directly under the articles. In a forum, I can see when new posts are added to threads that I'm interested. If responses are with the articles, I'll have to keep going back to the articles to see what, if anything, has been added.

Quote:

I don't dislike the forum format, but sometimes it can get a little cluttered if peoples' conversations start branching out within the thread.

That might be solved by using a threading-capable forum. You'd be able to ignore the branches that go off-topic.

varmintx wrote:

I don't know what software blu-ray.com uses, but it's my favorite forum as far as usability that I've seen.

The blu-ray.com forum visually reminds me of vbulletin, which AnimeonDVD/Mania & Fandompost use (and wasn't one of the survey options, IIRC), but maybe that's just a fairly standard format. I didn't see any software branding visible, like it is at the bottom of the page at AoD and FP. Maybe only because of my limited forum exposure, but vbulletin's my preferred software. ANN and those other three are the only forums that I visit with any regularity, and I find ANN's forum to be the most annoying to use (primarily due to the lack of threading; even though most of my forum reading is in 'flat' mode. I occasionally switch to threaded reading, and properly-used subject lines can make a big difference, threaded or not).

Quote:

Their integration of releases, the database and Amazon prices is also something I'd really love to see ANN be able to do, at least the first two (or perhaps replacing Amazon with Rightstuf). It just makes keeping track of your collection, and potential additions to it, much easier.

I've never paid attention to that part of their forum. Whenever I use RightStuf, I use a URL that credits FandomPost, even though FP is my third- or fourth-visited forum at the moment. I don't think that blu-ray.com's had any credit for my Amazon purchases, but I don't feel sad about that because they've had little influence on my purchases.

lys wrote:

Dessa wrote:

lys wrote:

Nonaka Machine Gun B wrote:

What about being able to view shows by year, as opposed to only in alphabetical order, on an actor's page? Not worth the hassle? It'd be useful for anyone wanting to see if their favorite actor did something this year.

If I'm understanding you right, that's already possible. Under the "Encyclopedia" menu, going down to Tools > Personal Settings, I set my preferences for displaying staff/actor names (FAMILY, Given name) and listing their work chronologically.

That's only available for English staff/cast, not everyone.

My settings page has a checkbox with "For Japanese cast/staff, sort titles by year instead of alphabetically"; did you mean that it's unavailable for English cast/staff? Differentiating between Japanese and other cast/staff makes some sense, as foreign releases don't follow the same publication chronology as the original Japanese ones (like if a title from 2009 is released in English after something from 2012—there'd need to be a way to input what year each staff/cast job was done for a series).

It must've been changed, because I know in the past I thought for sure it was it was only for English credits...?

Ingraman wrote:

relyat08 wrote:

Also, I'm not a huge fan of most of those other comment systems, but it would be nice to have the talkback directly with the articles rather than linked like it is.

Nooooooooo! ^^;

Please don't have responses directly under the articles. In a forum, I can see when new posts are added to threads that I'm interested. If responses are with the articles, I'll have to keep going back to the articles to see what, if anything, has been added.

Quote:

I don't dislike the forum format, but sometimes it can get a little cluttered if peoples' conversations start branching out within the thread.

That might be solved by using a threading-capable forum. You'd be able to ignore the branches that go off-topic.

I must say that the thing in this survey I'm most adamant about is having the talkback be in the forum and not under the article, for several reasons: first, on every other site where I see things in a topic: comment format, the comments are usually completely useless, and deemphasized. It's just harder to have a real discussion a thing that's formatted that way, which leads me to the second thing:

I really hope that ANN never adopts any kind of branching comments, or any social media-esque upvoting and the like. I like this place partially because it's one of the last forums still currently in use. See, here, where there's only one comment thread, and it's displayed linearly by time, a post is a post, and it inherently carries some weight to it. The other way, discussions get lost and a lot of posts go unseen and unread. I think each individual post should have equal potential power to guide the direction of the discussion. As for multiple discussions going on at once, that's what quoting is for.

I definitely agree about the voting stuff. I don't want that at all. On the other hand, I don't dislike the forum format either, so I suppose I'm happy either way.

Galap wrote:

I really hope that ANN never adopts any kind of branching comments, or any social media-esque upvoting and the like. I like this place partially because it's one of the last forums still currently in use. See, here, where there's only one comment thread, and it's displayed linearly by time, a post is a post, and it inherently carries some weight to it. The other way, discussions get lost and a lot of posts go unseen and unread. I think each individual post should have equal potential power to guide the direction of the discussion. As for multiple discussions going on at once, that's what quoting is for.

Having threaded enabled in forums doesn't necessitate that it gets displayed like that, but it's there for people that want to use it. It can be particularly useful for episode-by-episode discussion within a single thread. This is what AoD/Fandom Post does; it still displays in flat-mode like this for those that want it, but following some basic rules allows for organized discussion and not needing to cover the whole thread in black. If there is a long back and forth in a thread, one can easily find most or all of the previous posts because they would (or at least should) be in a single thread. But normal reading of the thread wouldn't have to be any different than what it is right now.

TL;DR: threaded forum posts are not the same thing as forced branched discussion you might see in some article comment systems.

HitokiriShadow wrote:

Having threaded enabled in forums doesn't necessitate that it gets displayed like that, but it's there for people that want to use it. It can be particularly useful for episode-by-episode discussion within a single thread.

I completely agree. The lack of a threaded view makes the ANN forums the worst that I have ever used for a series discussion.
Unfortunately phpBB does not offer a threaded view option, so unless ANN switches to vBulletin, or something similar, threaded view is not possible.

Not that it matters but I actually do prefer the flat view. Even when threaded view is available I normally use flat view for everything except series discussions.

Calathan wrote:

RightStuf/Nozomi/Lucky Penny is my favorite anime company, but that wasn't one of the choices. I voted for my second favorite company, but I just wanted to let you know that I would have chosen RightStuf if that was a choice.

I'm with you on that. I voted for Sentai but Nozomi would be my actual choice.

Touma wrote:

HitokiriShadow wrote:

Having threaded enabled in forums doesn't necessitate that it gets displayed like that, but it's there for people that want to use it. It can be particularly useful for episode-by-episode discussion within a single thread.

I completely agree. The lack of a threaded view makes the ANN forums the worst that I have ever used for a series discussion.
Unfortunately phpBB does not offer a threaded view option, so unless ANN switches to vBulletin, or something similar, threaded view is not possible.

Not that it matters but I actually do prefer the flat view. Even when threaded view is available I normally use flat view for everything except series discussions.

Yeah, I prefer flat as well. I only ever used threaded to go back and find posts later. Threaded still had its uses in flat mode though. I guess flat mode uses subject lines too (though I never pay attention to them on ANN since they're completely irrelevant here) but threaded simplifies it a bit since people don't have to type it in themselves, they just have to respond to the correct post.

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