Obsidian Portal Launch Feedback

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Comments

  • tetrasodium
    tetrasodium
    Posts: 26
    links directly to to forum topics are important for all kinds of reasons & no longer seem to work. For example, If I tell a prospective new player "you can look at http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/skype-fae-shades-of-grey/campaign_forum_topics/so-what-are-you-thinking-of-playing to see the process everyone went through getting their characters ready" or any number of other reasons I might want someone to see a specific thread. Right now, those links all go to the main forum.

    In addition, I have no idea if forum posts are sending emails, or if they just stopped telling the poster that they made a post.

    It's not much of an issue to me, but adventure log comments seem to have gone away with no option to make them now, that might be important to someone.

    All of the characters in my campaign who had images now have a broken image on the main character's page (http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/skype-fae-shades-of-grey/characters/). If you copy & re-upload the existing image (cyax had that to fix his) or upload a new image (like xivv's), but it seems like something that should have happened automatically, there are games with a _lot_ of NPC's.
  • tetrasodium
    tetrasodium
    Posts: 26
    With a bunch of people above having lamented the missing adventure log comments, I'd like to request an option to add them to wiki/character pages too. Wiki is great for keeping track of info, but it's terrible for discussion. if it was possible to make a wiki/character page & have people discuss its content as needed, it would be a great improvement.
  • mistaya
    mistaya
    Posts: 3
    My hyperlinks just look like regular text now, (they are no longer underlined or a different color) which is a huge problem being that my game is hosted on a separate forum and I use Obsidian Portal as a hub to keep track of Character and NPC data + a chapter listing linking to that forum.

    Also I cannot seem to get the default Orange color back for the buttons, I'm stuck with the Midnight blue scheme (which is too dark) and the Hot Pink scheme (which does not fit the game at all.) I think if you are going to lock even the ability to change the button colors behind the paid service you need to at least offer 2-3 more default settings that are more appropriate/applicable than those two. I've used OP for over a year now and gotten a half dozen friends to use it for their campaigns but this is seriously off-putting. A default white background would be nice too.

    The new font is not as clear as the old one was, there's very little difference between .h3 and .h2 etc, so now I have to go and redo all the formatting, and the amount of actual text space is tiny and shrank all of my pictures, they don't look nearly as good now.
  • ZombieDragonPrincess
    ZombieDragonPrincess
    Posts: 9
    So far not caring for the new stuff. My GM pays for it to and yet I feel like we lost some of the options. Like the commenting on adventure logs. That was a big part of our games. And the fact that all of the coding is off and none of the music works anymore. I haven't even looked through everything, but I am not to satisfied. Only thing that it has going for it is it looks prettier. I would rather something work well then look nice. Just saying...
  • Veovondi
    Veovondi
    Posts: 2
    Number_Six you said it perfectly: "I'm sure some of the minor snafus in terms of layout and appearance will be ironed out shortly, but that's not my concern."

    I was, until today, an ascended member. Pre-Update I loved the scheme. The way it looked and flowed.

    Now it is something new, something built for tablets and smartphones at it's core.

    Microsoft tried that, and look at their Windows 8 update, adding back a feature to make their OS make PCs feel more like Desktops again - and not like tablets.

    I am not saying it's a bad thing! I am saying it is a bad thing for ME. As a now free user, I will of course check back in every few months.

    My players, and a GM I play under will not be back until OP works and looks more like it was meant for a desktop PC. Again, thank you guys for the privilege of using OP prior to this update.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    Number_Six: That's what the Vanguard program is for. Also, if you actually did most of that stuff via CSS rather than direct HTML it should be pretty easy to fix up your site so that it displays nicely - it shouldn't require re-editing your entire site. If you did it via direct HTML editing (rather than using the CSS options an Ascendant membership gives) it'll be much more difficult to do, though:(

    JTanzer: The CSS code for making the edit boxes have a decent black text instead of stupid gray text is this:

    textarea, input {
    color:black !important;
    border:solid 1px black !important;
    }
  • Nagryph
    Nagryph
    Posts: 2
    There were a lot of things I didn't like about the old Obsidian Portal. Some things got better after I started paying because things were easier to find. That was my main issue. But this is terrible. I couldn't afford to pay much or the Kickstarter but I paid what I could because I thought it would make things better. I've been waiting for an improved OP for months and I am very disappointed. My main issue with this is the boarders. The text is so cramped. Also, it messes up the layout of pictures and things on the sides. I also don't like the white on grey for editing. That's very hard on the eyes. Who thought of that? And what about comments in the adventure logs? I wouldn't mind an option for it, but that's something I award good stuff for in my Amber DRPGs. And why are PCs mixed in with the NPCs now? Not a huge deal but I still don't like it.

    Some things I do like though, the editing button at the top. I've wanted that for a while. The top bar always being there so you can quickly jump from one thing to another. Being able to see when your PCs last logged in. That's nice. The dashboard setup is good too.

    I watched the video and it said that the wiki and adventure log pages look better without going to the pages. I highly disagree. That alone could convince me to cancel my subscription.
  • jtanzer
    jtanzer
    Posts: 5
    Thanks Langy! I had planned to do a few things at lunch today, but trying to read white on grey on my crummy work monitor was a nuisance.
  • monstro95968
    monstro95968
    Posts: 4
    Why this? I just don't get it. First off, you can't have white writing on grey background. I'm losing my eyesight updating the wiki. Second, what happened to the dice function? Is that now hidden somewhere? Third, every time I try to tag things, which seems to be part of the point of this new thing, I find that I've done it wrong. Finally, why would you get rid of the functionality of wiki links that led somewhere being one color and wiki links that were unfinished being another. It allowed me, and I assume others, to better know where they had planned to expand on their campaign. I don't like this.

    Also, what in the world were you thinking with the right hand gutter that takes up a third of my screen with empty space?
  • AquaMan
    AquaMan
    Posts: 8
    "4) Tags visible on the wiki front page was very useful. I like the new tag search, but if there's any way to make the list of tags more readily available (like it used to be), I'd appreciate it."

    I agree with this especially. I liked having the list of tags on the right of the character page.
  • willowpolson
    willowpolson
    Posts: 2
    Also, white on light gray text is not ADA compliant for those with vision problems who need a certain amount of contrast in order to see the text at all.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    Monstro: When tagging things, make sure you put a comma after every tag.
  • tetrasodium
    tetrasodium
    Posts: 26
    @Langy that's awesome, thank you!


    On an unrelated bug note. I don't know if it's with the sheet's css or something the update did. Prior to the update, characters using the fate core sheet had a section near the top for description i.e. https://skype-fae-shades-of-grey.obsidianportal.com/characters/cyax/ had one filled using the data from the description textarea, but after the update, the description box is blank & does not display the description for any characters
  • dr_venture
    dr_venture
    Posts: 32
    Apparently I posted my original message to the wrong part of the site, so I'll repost it here. Some of it is a repeat of what others have said, so obviously feel free to ignore.

    I am a backer of the reforging and was very excited to see the new site today - now I am just crestfallen at a few major, *major* bad decisions. There are certainly some very cool things, but they are hidden behind an interface that is overly slick and/or unintuitive. The three biggest problems right off the bat:

    1) Who in the world thinks it's a good idea to have to edit page code and data fields with white text on medium grey?!?!?! Did you actually spend much time editing page code via the tools on your own site? Please be advised: different monitors have different tolerances for color/tone contrast. Holy crap, it's like 1000% harder to edit pages now!!! The code is incredibly hard to view, which is extremely irritating because there is no functional value, other than to "look cool." Flat out, unless this changes, you just lost my business. There is *no way* I'm going to strain my eyes to update my campaign.

    2) The page resizing is a real double-edged sword... on one hand, some of the elements shrink down very nicely to smaller screens. On the other hand, I have a 2 page monitor, and rather than getting more info on many of the pages, I seem to just get gigantic scaled up versions of page elements. Literally, almost *half* of every page is the damn banner and dragon logo and the grey menu bar on the top, no matter what size I make the page! My campaign banner is being blown up about 30% bigger than I uploaded it, so that it is both very blurry and *waaaay* too big on the page. I can't believe that with a 2 page monitor I have to scroll down on virtually every page to see the contents. With a 2 page monitor I am tempted to use the keyword feature to find characters that are off the bottom of screen... and my game only has about 10 characters!

    3) The campaign sidebars now have no background - this lets you see more of the background image, but makes the text in the sidebars really hard to read. I suppose there may be hooks in the HTML for using CSS there, but I really didn't want to have to dig that out just to read the sidebar text!

    Guys, you made the interface way slicker, and far less useful. The core things I do on OP is to view pages, and edit page code. Both have been made exponentially more difficult. God, please tell me you have a fix in mind, or I just paid to have you guys take a pretty decent campaign management site and flush it down the toilet - I'd never sign up for this as it is.

    You know what? The old site wasn't that bad - you got totally carried away with site 'slickness', and lost sight of basic functionality and usability. I don't *care* if the site looks like the control screens on the USS Enterprise: I want it to have features that are useful in running my game, and are easy to navigate (jury is still out on that for me). Jeez.

    Hope to hear about some changes in the near future - I'm sure not going to put up with this for long.

    PS: Jeez, who did your UI? text fields, titles, and buttons are all simply represented by (often low contrast) rectangles, with little consistency... I have no idea what is a button to click or a field to edit. Making the interface intuitive is UI 101. Now everything is work to figure out what its function is. A normal HTML page is not as slick, but it *is* very easy to use and know what to click on... I'd choose that over 'slick' a thousand times over.
  • ChrisAsmadi
    Posts: 1
    If I try to add tags to something (a wiki page, an item), they don't seem to save.
  • dr_venture
    dr_venture
    Posts: 32 edited October 2013
    Oh my God - you got rid of unfinished wiki links not showing a different color?!? Who in the world thought that was a good idea?!? On the negative side: it makes it nearly impossible to keep track of what's done and what isn't on your wiki. On the positive side: it looks "better"? That is yet another deal breaker for me: without that feature, the wiki has been demoted to a pile of junk and is either unusable, or far, far less convenient to use... I have to have that back (or something like it) or the product isn't even worth using for free.
    Post edited by dr_venture on
  • Jonathonathon
    Jonathonathon
    Posts: 9
    Bit of Feedback on initial reactions:

    Pros
    Drop down for campaigns is useful, I like that.

    Cons
    Not a fan of the new color scheme, it really hurts my eyes. Yellow? Really? Ugh.
    All my CSS and custom coding based off the old site layout is now a train wreck. A lot of which I coded before CSS became available. That basically ruined a few of my campaigns I was wanting to pick back up and trashed days worth of coding.
    The whole site looks like someone saw Guild Wars 2 and tried to copy the motif.
    There are broken links everywhere (Pictures, Profile Icons, etc).
    The wiki pages seem to be more narrow width wise now than they were before, why in the world would the site update give us less room on each page?

    Overall not a fan of the new changes.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    I'm almost certain several of those complaints will be fixed over the coming week, Venture. Don't decide to run away just yet; like with any tech rollout there are bound to be some teething problems. We're just having a few more than we could have hoped right now.
  • dr_venture
    dr_venture
    Posts: 32
    Ummm... why should I have to make the editor text readable by editing the CSS? Since I'm a paying customer, isn't it supposed to be readable on it's own without my working to make it so? Can you name me one single code editor anywhere that uses white text on a light grey background? Because I can list probably a dozen that use black or brightly colored text on a light background because of ease of use. If this is a temporary fix while the OP folks untangle this mess, that's fine, but if the answer to these horrible UI problems is "you fix it in CSS" I'd like to know so I can make plans to leave ASAP.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    More color schemes are going to come around soon enough, and broken links are almost certainly to be fixed. I think they're looking into the page width issue, too, though I'll note that if you have CSS you can reasonably make it 200px larger than you used to have on the old site without much difficulty (and you can certainly make it even larger than that if you'd like).

    Campaigns that were heavily-customized in pure HTML, not using css style sheets, are sadly going to be majorly impacted by the change:( There are some things that can be done in CSS to mitigate the damage (the primary big one being expanding the content area to the previous size), but other things just aren't going to be compatible with the new site:( How much will need to change depends on what you did, exactly.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    Tetra: The update combined the 'description' and 'biography' boxes in the character page. Dynamic sheets that made use of both will need to be edited so they work properly with the new site, I think.
  • tetrasodium
    tetrasodium
    Posts: 26
    @dr_venture It's been in place less than a day. There are probably still plenty of bugs for them to work out. I'm sure setting the text color to a more readable one will happen. In the mean time, you can fix it in a couple seconds for your existing game(s) using the code Langy posted
  • Jonathonathon
    Jonathonathon
    Posts: 9
    Hey @Langy, I'm pretty sure one of those posts was directed at me? Maybe? If so, thanks for fielding my feedback.

    | More color schemes are going to come around soon enough
    Blizzard soon or GGG soon? =)

    | I’ll note that if you have CSS you can reasonably make it 200px larger than you used to have on the old site without much difficulty
    So you can directly adjust the size of the middle div on the wiki page? Great, glad to hear it. Would have thought that would be standard, I think you'll get more positive feedback if you give your customers more space to do their thing, not less.

    | Campaigns that were heavily-customized in pure HTML, not using css style sheets, are sadly going to be majorly impacted by the change
    Heh, yeah you aren't kiddin'. I saw the warning the day before which mentioned substantial changes but I didn't know the wiki page formats was going to be changed entirely. If I missed that notification (I went back through my emails and didn't find anything leading me to believe it was coming) then I apologize, but an email heads up indicating major site changes so I could run damage control prior to would have been appreciated.
  • dr_venture
    dr_venture
    Posts: 32
    @tetrasodium - I do appreciate your comment, and I hope you're right. I appreciate your sane voice in the conversation. I've been doing software dev a long time, and I totally sympathize with their situation... it happens even with the best of plans and intents (though... white on grey? Really?). Anyway, there does look to be some really cool new features underneath it all that I'm anxious to get to.

    I am happy to fix these problems as they come up, as long as they are really band aids and that I won't be fixing this stuff forever, but I worry when I and other point out a pretty obvious error and are simply given code to fix it ourselves, with no mention of anything like, "Yeah, that looks to be a problem - we're looking at the best solution for that problem, but in the short term, here's the code to fix the problem." I'm not walking out the door yet, but I'm really worried and waiting to hear from OP about how they thing the rollout is going. Right now, it just seems like my campaigns that I've invested a ton of time into and which I rely on OP to run might be really up a creek.
  • saethone
    saethone
    Posts: 153
    On the character list page there are a few tags (css classes) with the word "description" in them.

    The portal's CSS filter blocks anything with the phrase *script* in it, could these be changed to simply desc so that we can edit these?
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    Jon, the fact that major site changes were going to be required was brought up way back when the kickstarter began. They may not have mentioned it enough, I suppose, especially for anyone who joined between the kickstarter and now, but it's been known that this was coming for quite a while.

    Venture: The people tossing code around are pretty much solely users like me, not actual OP administrative staff. I have no way of forcing OP to change their house CSS - but we _have_ been told a number of things are being looked into, including the (admittedly pretty dumb) white-on-grey issue.
  • Langy
    Langy
    Posts: 364
    Saeth: Ugh, I remember that issue. That's been there since the original site. No idea why their script-blocker doesn't let through things with 'script' in them that aren't actual scripts:/
  • dr_venture
    dr_venture
    Posts: 32
    @Langy - thanks for the info - I suspected as much, but wasn't sure. I certainly don't expect you or any other power users/helpful people to answer for the OP folks - to the contrary, I want to thank you folks for spending your time helping out folks like us! I *do* think that the OP folks should get in front of this and explain their position on these issues, rather than just letting this all play out without them. I'm more than happy to cut them some slack once I hear what their plan is and what they think needs to be fixed, etc. Until they make a statement, all I can do is guess. In the mean time, I hope none of the volunteers here take anything I have to say about OP personally - I absolutely don't intend that!
  • WhiteHaven
    Posts: 2
    I'm going to be fantastically blunt for a moment: Please hang up and try again.

    This level of 'what were you thinking?' response begs a simple question: why is this a no-opt-out alpha test of an absolutely unready new website, as opposed to an opt-in test of an early-development alpha test of a new site design? This? This is simply /not ready./ Go away, polish it up, set up an opt-in beta, and try again when you have something that isn't, well, this.

    'Naah, it's cool, we can fix this' is a totally acceptable phrase during development. When it's not an opt-in beta but a full launch service, that ceases to be the case. I obviously don't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm not in any big hurry for the 'new' Obsidian Portal. Take the time to do it right, or don't do it at all.
  • Pexx
    Pexx
    Posts: 1
    Well unfortunately my first post has to be a negative one.

    The new design of the site is meh I and my players liked the simplicity we had before this horrid update.

    Is there a way we can change this back?

    If not or unless this dramatically fixed me and my players may opt to go elsewhere too bad we subbed for a year and money down the drain.
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