Your Thoughts: New Muppet Central Forum Features

[D'Snowth]

We weren't notified that the change would be this radical. So actually nopers, we weren't notified. If anything most of us assumed this would be one of the many times the forum went offline for a day to come back looking and acting relatively the same.

Are you serious? Are you really serious? Phil told us we were moving to a new forum service, what did you think that was going to mean? I mean really.

 

[frogboy4]

Are you serious? Are you really serious? Phil told us we were moving to a new forum service, what did you think that was going to mean? I mean really.

Yes, I'm serious. I knew we were moving to a new service for months so the recent notification was redundant. But never were any of us informed nor did we expact just how radical the change would be. I guess you can pretend that you expected this amount of change or all the bumps people have been having. I thought you hated the facebook format anyway.

 

[dwmckim]

I'm with Frogboy here. There's been countless times when the forum was being closed for maintenance or minor updates and this was announced ahead of time. Each time, we just patiently wait for the forum's downtime to be over with and we return to essentially the same forum with no huge change. We were all expecting that to be the case this time too - not to come back a day later to find a largely unusable, inconvenient format that some people CAN'T EVEN ACCESS. Some people are saying "but Phil worked so hard on this so we should all shut up and like it" I'm sure the designers and manufacturers of nuclear warheads worked very hard on them too but i'm not about to sing their praises. I don't have much time to post right now otherwise i'd go into specifics about how everything should have been handled contrasted with how it was...but suffice to say if a website's set-up makes the purpose of why it exists in the first place inconvenient and secondary to bells and whistles, it can score no higher than a C-. If said website is so flawed in that it actually PROHIBITS people from accessing it and accomplishing its basic purpose, that my friend is a solid F.

 

[newsmanfan]

Ok...to preface: I know nothing about programming, so maybe this really is the smoothest, easiest format from a behind-the-scenes standpoint...BUT.

Can someone PLEASE put frickin' boxes or borders or whatever around each post on a thread? I mean VISIBLE ones, not this weird ghostline...it makes the whole page look like one giant chaotic text ramble with pics on the side, and even some of the signatures are run in with it. POOR DESIGN CHOICE. Sorry. I haven't looked at the rest of the site yet, and I will grudgingly get used to the style, I suppose...but THAT part is really hard on the eyes, slows my reading speed, and annoys the crap out of me. PLEASE BRING BACK REAL TEXT BOXES!

 

[Slackbot]

A suggestion... make the default post font something sans serif like Arial or Verdana? It's easier to read sans serif text onscreen. I'd like the default post text to be a touch smaller, too.

 

[newsmanfan]

Okay...this is REALLY hurting my eyes to read. It's too ****** LOUD and BRIGHT and CHEERFUL! I shouldn't have to adjust my screen brightness or contrast for ONE site, ya know?

And how does one set the threads to go automatically to the NEWEST post, so you don't have to then TELL it to skip ahead? Feels like WinDoze...you have to tell it everything twice...

Not happy.

 

[frogboy4]

The lack of "Preview Post" options (unless you go to "Other Options" and all that needless excess) should be changed.

 

[Beauregard]

Question, did the Font Size just increase dramatically? Or am I imaging things?

 

[dwayne1115]

No it changed a whole two siezs i think.

 

[Nick22]

My Take on the Muppet Central's "Improvements"​

This is what I've taken issue with for a long time at Muppet Central. I am here because of most of the lovely forum members and not because it's Muppet Central Forum. We have managed to cultivate a sense of community here regardless of who's running (or absently running) the show.This place doesn't exist without us fans.

The fact that we weren't notified about this abrupt change sends a message to me this place isn't really ours. This after-the-fact "concern" doesn't fool me. We all contributed to making this forum's content what it has been. We've helped build revenue by posting in the advertising-heavy place, but when it comes down to it - we don't really matter to the webmaster. Our efforts mean little to him and that's why I quit creating graphics for this place. Don't worry. I'll go elsewhere and I encourage creative people here to do the same. I know that Ryan at the Mindset would be ecstatic to have more contributors and that is what these sorts of places should be about. I feel used at MC. We're all being used.

If any of our MC suggestions were taken into account, the forum would be one of the last things on the list after fresh website updates, a cards section, new fan reviews, more op-ed pieces and other such practical improvements that many of us tried to contribute but were ignored!!

While some of these improvements are nice, the ones that many people wanted on the forum included free usage of punctuation, maybe some more smilies and maybe a themed-looking page.

And what's with all this activity now? A Muppet fan is a fan all year round, but MC finally gets around to making these improvements when there's a movie coming out? That, my fellow forum members, is the precise definition of a fair-weathered friend. This is not really a forum or a community. It is a business for this webmaster to get sent free marketing goodies and to make revenue from the ad space. To make bank off of us! That is the frog's-honest-truth! Don't be led to believe otherwise. After 10 years on staff here - I'm disappointed.

Can this be mended? Well people rarely change so MC will operate how it always does and hope that we fall into a complacency and overlook the shady way things are handled. Where do we go from here? That's up to each MC member. I wish we had an alternative place to go with a rich history that includes all of us, but we don't. We will probably keep posting here and hope that something better comes along.

I'm going to have to agree. I'm grateful for the new forum and all, but of ALL the things that needed changing...why change the forum? The forum was/is the only un-dead thing on MC.

And I absolutely agree that a Muppet fan is a Muppet fan all year round. So after the movie comes out, then what? No more MC improvements?