Posting under my Forum name instead of my real name
Yeah. This new forum is a joke. The old one was exponentially better. I seriously doubt I'm going to continue wasting my time here.
How did you set a profile picture next to your name? I cannot find where to do that, although obviously you have done it so there must be a place. Speaking of terrible forums....
Granpaw Broon
My profile image was setup in the original forum but like you I can't find how to change anything in my profile.
Dan Willard
Thanks gentlemen for your feedback. There are foundational reasons we switched over to this format and with that big of a change, we know it won't meet everyone's expectations. There is currently not a way to post anonymously unless you change your account name to what you want to post as, but we are looking into allowing you to change your profile picture. We'll let you know as soon as we have an answer.
I just joined, so I am not very familiar with how the old forum was, but this new one is clearly intended to have a "support forum" vibe (as opposed to a "user community" for example).
I had originally found (via Google) a couple highly-relevant-to-me threads in the old forum, which was what prompted me to join.
But then I got this apparently-new forum... and there's no way to reach out to users from those threads, no way to find other posts from those users to learn more about their setups that's relevant to me... no way to do... anything, really.
This "new" forum is blatantly more of a support ticketing and knowledgebase article system than it is any sort of user community, which isn't what I had hoped I was joining. I'm doubtful I will end up staying around. I think I might try the vMix forums as they might be more relevant to me.
My biggest gripe about this downgraded forum is that there doesn't seem to be any organizational structure to it. With the old one threads were arranged by date with the threads with the newest posts on top and older ones below that. Plus you could sign in, click on new, and see what posts had new posts in them no matter with of the sub forums they were in. The layout we have here is a mess. It takes way to long to find newer posts. I'm not nearly as interested in a thread that was created a month ago and the last post in it was 3 weeks ago. We need to be able to prioritize the threads by date of last post so we can help the new posters that are still looking for assistance. I have a limited amount of time to spend in forums and with the way this is structered I doubt I will be spending much, if any time here.
Dan Willard
Understood. We talked about that before switching over, but other factors presided over that. We would like for you to participate, but completely understand if you don't want to because of the new format. Actually, it does put newest posted and newest replied at the top of each category and shows who replied and how long ago.
Dan, it might help if you explained the "foundational reasons" for the change that you mentioned above. Perhaps there are other, greater, things to come which have necessitated this change? Or perhaps the old forum was being abused in some way? Whatever the reason, the more that Softouch engage with your user base and share information with the user base, the more we will understand, feel included and wanted, and ultimately stay loyal.
Dan Willard
There were a few things we looked at. One being the user interaction. We were getting a very low interaction of users on the old forum. The old one seemed to be intimidating to most people and therefore they would not post anything. We have had more posts on the new forum in the past week than we have had in the last couple of months on the old one. Another thing we looked at was our ability to moderate and maintain the forum. Since the new forum is part of our ticketing software, it is much easier for us to be able to maintain and moderate and answer questions here than it was before. The third reason is the ability for us to make the forum look more like our site and keep the look consistent.
I do understand it's different, but we believe that with these new changes it will be an even better place than before for customers to ask questions and find answers.
I know some of you are already a part of it, but if not, we do have a Facebook user group that is very much community driven. If you want to be in a place like that, I would very much encourage you to join that group.
EasyWorship User Group (Official)
Thank you! It's good to hear that there is more interaction now. If you could add back functionality to change my name and avatar, and to keep track of new threads so that I can quickly see which topics have been updated since my last visit, that would be very helpful.
Granpaw Broon
Agreed. Other companies have no problem with community forums operating using aliases and avatars or having every message scrutinised before being displayed. This being a Christian software forum I'd have thought there would be more trust not less.
Dan Willard
David Ramage replied
7 hours ago on Thu, 19 Nov at 2:41 AM
It has nothing to do with trusting more or less. The software we are using for the forums doesn't allow us to use aliases and we do have a feature request logged with them to be able to.
Granpaw Broon
Why does my real name display instead of my original forum ID name? I would prefer my own name not to be display like all other forums.
Thanks
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