Dear OOO.
I've done a lot of forum lurking up through the years and I must say this is one of the worst forums I've ever seen. It might only be beaten by the League of Legends forums. I understand the company might have been/is still running on a limited budget and thus Drupal - which is free - would be a good choice in adittion to being open source, but this is not really something which should overweight how the forum itself is.
Of course, everything isn't bad with Drupal. Here are some things that are positive:
- The interface and readability of the forum itself. This is good. Posts are easily seen, nothing to be said here.
- Clean interface, mostly since there's no posting interface at all. This could be positive for those who's familiar with using HTML tags, but looking at the playerbase of this game that must be lmited.
- It's Open Source.
- It's free.
Sadly, the positive sides of Drupal ends here. Even though you might say; "Isn't that enough?", the negative sides of the software pulls the overall impression more down than the positive sides can pull up.
Then to the bad sides of Drupal:
- Firstly, the posting interface is horrible. This alone should be enough to make a growing company switch it out. The fact that users are forced to Preview their posts before posting (and only posts, not entire topics!) is just plain weird. Additionally the posting interface should have buttons for formatting etc.
- Forum Profiles! You should be able to PM people at least. Commenting on people's profiles would also be good but of course this would mean more server pressure.
- Better Search Function! Advanced Search etc.
- Feature that lets you see New Posts from all or a few chosen boards.
This is what I remember at the moment. Feel free to comment with both negative and positive feedback.
And lastly, do you agree?
Also, for those of you interested I might add that OOO doesn't really earn much by using Drupal. A pure Forum License for a vBulletin forum costs as low as 200$ per licence. vBulletin is by far my favorite forum but there are of course other options. Neither of them cost as much as many people think.
PhpBB.
On another note, Am I the only one whos noticed this annoying mislink?: Click Here