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Was it really necessary to delete the 'How BIS Dropped The Ball' topic? It definately deserved to be locked, but deleting it is quite strange?

Was it really necessary to delete the 'How BIS Dropped The Ball' topic? It definately deserved to be locked, but deleting it is quite strange?

Merged the How BI dropped the ball with the official complaints thread, which I should of done yesterday.

The wiki bug/wish list is being reviewed by BI regularly and hopefully those who contributed will see their bugs fixed.

hoz

official complaint to BIS

Yeah sorry, it dissapeared 5 seconds after i posted a post when i refreshed the page, i though it was deleted (searched for "How AND BI AND dropped AND the AND ball" but must have searched before hoz made that post so i didnt get any results

Do this if you want to raise the quality of your forums.

Alternatively, we could just build a time machine and go back to 2001-2003.

LOL, you already forgot how it was back then :-). What a madhouse.... Don't you remember Wobble?

Don't you remember Wobble?

We remember the banned moo-cow too

Back on topic, please

Hey Shadow, you like FIsh?

I've lost track of the number of times in the past few weeks that I've used the search function to attempt to find an answer to a question, only to find that I'm supposed to look through 50 or 100 pages of several threads before I can hope to find an answer.

I just hit a classic example of this. I've got the demo, and I've spent some time flying around in both choppers. I've noticed something. When the chopper is airborne, I have to maintain constant pressure on my joystick down and to the right to hold it steady. There's a little white dot on my display visible in my upper left quadrant which shows up once I'm airborne.

As I've found over the years that there's almost always someone out there who has had the same problem who's probably posted in a forum somewhere, I thought I'd search here for an answer. I wanted to know if this was might be a mis-adjusted stick, or was it part of the flight model, or something else. So, I went to the search forum, put in "joystick" as the only word to search on, and chose the top level ArmA forum. I saw about a page of answers. Not too bad.

However, several of the threads were well over 20 pages long. This included the "Helicopters in AA" at 55 pages, which, by the way, was also a thread that a moderator used as a reference after locking a thread after only a couple of posts.

Now, I can understand that it might seem like a good idea to keep all of the relevant information in one place for people to look at. However, when a thread gets to be that long, it becomes very clumsy to search it by hand. Heck, no one wants to read a thread that long from start to finish as it is. If the search engine pointed right at the pages in a thread where a search term turns up, this wouldn't be a problem.

With those points in mind, I'd like to ask that either the moderators work to keep thread lengths reasonable or get the search engine improved so we can quickly find the answers to our questions. BTW, IMO a reasonable max length is no more than 6 to 10 pages. Any more than that gets pretty aggravating to go through.

TIA

I find the search results clumsy here too. I can give you some advice on decreasing the time it takes to comb through giant threads... a method I've been using...

You can try using the find command in your browser, and just flipping through the instances of the word or phrase you're looking for. If you're looking for 'joystick', you're going to find a lot of them in the helicopters thread, but just reading the gyst of the sentence they're mentioned in and moving on to the next one can be pretty fast. You can probably get sorting through a page looking for mentions of your problem down to a couple of second at most. Flipping through the 50 page helicopters thread, then, should only take you a few minutes... less if you're less thurough, more if you're more.

You can use the 'print this topic' link to get the whole thread on one page to make searching easier.

You can use the 'print this topic' link to get the whole thread on one page to make searching easier.

Nice one Keg, I never thought about hitting that button ever, thanks.

Yeah, good idea, Keg. I'll keep it in mind for my next search. Thanks!

I still contend that the desire on the part of the moderators to force all conversations on to long threads isn't necessarily a good one. It's still too easy to get lost when doing a search because you tend to lose context by jumping deep into a thread when a specific search term turns up.

I would also argue that Keg's suggestion, while a good one, is obviously not one that is immediately obvious to people. Therefore, the need for either page specific search results or much shorter threads is needed.

You can use the 'print this topic' link to get the whole thread on one page to make searching easier.

Thanks for that tip!

Though some of these threads are HUGE.. wouldnt it take ages to load?

I'd definately request that the search function is upgraded... there must be a newer ikonboard version...? It seems this version is from 2002

I never understood the reasoning behind using only one thread for topics. It's silly. I've heard people say "to conserve bandwidth" but that is rediculious. You can make a gazillion threads and the internet is not going to crash. It might cost BIS some money, depending upon how the ISP they use bills for bandwidth but that is their problem. This is a customer service/public relations tool. It's the cost of doing business. I think they know that, so none of the above can be it. Maybe it has something to do with the moderators expecting us to make their job easier at the expense of our ease of use? If that's the case then BIS might be pissed off at the amount of potential customers their mods are liberating them of with this obtuse one thread crap. It makes no sense I tell you. It's illogical to make your customers put up with this kind of hassle. It's stupid. I know the attitude here has caused several of my friends not to "hassle" with dealing with ArmA. Way to go Mods/BIS. Really customer friendly.

Moving & merging.

Well if that isn't the biggest "slap in the face." You move our complaint about mega-threads to one. That's fine, I'll just make sure to hit ya in the pocketbook. BIS isn't going to be around much longer at this rate.

Quote[/b] ]It's stupid. I know the attitude here has caused several of my friends not to "hassle" with dealing with ArmA. Way to go Mods/BIS. Really customer friendly.

I can't imagine that looking through 150 threads about exactly the same subject is very satisfying. That is why the "Search before posting" rule exists, to prevent dozens of threads about exactly the same problem popping up. If we have a new thread for every bug that is reported over and over again by every new user, we would soon be flooded by them, don't you think?

If that upsets people, or a moderators decision keeps you up at night, prevents you from enjoying the games...please grow up, the world is not a perfect place...

As the former PR manager used to say: "A lot of people are forgetting that having a thread on the offiicial BIS forums is a privilege not a right. ".

Closed.

Use new thread.