Suggest FORUM SUPPORT Category For Feedback on Forum, Bugs, Suggestions for Forum Itself

As a newbie, I tried to create a post containing a link to a post in another thread on this site and got a “Sorry! You can’t include links” message. I perfectly understand this for links going outside the forum but REALLY, no links allowed by newbies linking WITHIN the forum?! Especially when the forum software offers the links to individual posts. Being able to cross-reference things and refer folks to already ongoing discussions helps avoid endless redundancy on a forum. I’d like to suggest that you set the forum software up to at least allow links between threads within the forum, even for newbies like me.

I also think having a FORUM SUPPORT category where both forum admins and users can discuss suggestions and issues related to the forum software can be posted, e.g., when the LIKE button suddenly stops working after a forum software update, etc.

Good evening @JALxml

Our forums are powered by Discourse, which uses a trust level (TL) system to mitigate spam. Some privileges are locked behind trust levels, as an example, you cannot post images until you reach trust level one. You can view a guide on how we use trust levels within our forums here.

Unfortunately, the restriction on links does not have a distinction between internal and external URLs.

I agree, have you tried the quote function? The quote function allows you to quote a portion of another users post, just as I have above. Quoting is easy, simply highlight the section of text you want to quote and hit the quote button.

You can even quote text from another thread. Simply copy the desired text and create a quote block that looks like this:

[quote="JALxml, post:1, topic:127952"]
As a newbie
[/quote]

The quote block takes three parameters:

  1. The name of the author you are quoting
  2. The post ID
  3. Finally the post number

I can certainly take this suggestion to the community team tomorrow, and discuss it with the other moderators. In the meantime, if you need to contact us you can mention or send a private message to @ moderators.

If there were such a category, I might suggest that MS/Asobo look at having distinct server infrastructure for the forum. Having resources apparently shared with the download/game servers appears to be making the forums very slow, if not totally unavailable, at a time when they should arguably be most needed.

I’ve only just been able to access the forum, after trying for over 4 hours and that can’t be good.

1 Like

Bottom line is the overly complicated trust level setup is not friendly at all to the influx of new forum users. I hope it can be reconsidered. For example, what’s the difference between these 2 requirements to hit “Trust Level 2?”

  • Enter 100 topics
  • Read 100 posts

The difference between these two is relatively simple, the first one requires you to open 100 unique topics, a topic being a collection of posts such as this one. Each reply, as well as the original post in this topic, are considered posts.

To meet both of these requirements, you could open and read the first post in 100 topics, or you could read 100 posts in one topic, and then open 99 other topics.

Edit: We have been tweaking a few of these requirements, and we will continue to look at it over the next few days.

I have participated extensively in another Discourse forum, forum. hearingtracker. com. So I’m reasonably familiar with many Discourse features, including the Quote function. Hearing Tracker has customized its Discourse forum in a number of ways so they might be a source of advice if Discourse itself or a community forum for other Discourse site users is not full of helpful advice.

But since the Quote mechanism itself is a form on internal linking, why not just put the Quote mechanism linking behind the link button associated with each post and arrange it so that no text is actually quoted in the quote style link or a hidden token is used as the “quote” of the post being referenced. The it-does-not-compute aspect of the current FS 2020 site is that a link is provided with each post but a forum member can’t use the link, i.e., the LINK button is effectively useless. If that’s going to be the situation forever with the FS 2020 forum, the forum admins should at least hide or remove the useless link button. It’s hard to believe that one cannot program only relative internal links allowed and external links banned into the FS 2020 site backbone internals.

BTW, apparently by putting spaces into any link text and breaking the automatic HTML functionality, one can include a facsimile of a link in a post as I just did with forum. hearingtracker. com I will see if that type of internal linking has any utility relative to the quoting mechanism. The trouble with the quoting mechanism is that users are trained to view it as specifically referencing what one’s post is replying to - except maybe one is NOT replying at all but just wanting to provide the whole post behind the quote as a reference or more discussion on the topic of one’s post.