31 replies to this topic

[drewface]

First off, I have run a vBulletin board for a year now, so I am very familiar with that software. I recently launched a new board and decided to go with IPB because of it's more modern look. There are many things I prefer with IPB and many things vBulletin does better, but one thing about IPB has bothered me the most.

The horrible Emotion Management system. My forum has over 200 emoticons so far and keeps growing. On vBulletin, you can organize your emoticons in categories. It also tells you the code for the emoticon by hovering over it, so others know how to use it. These are basic features.

in IPB, there is no organization system. If you want to organize your smilies, you must drag them one by one over another. I have over 200 smilies, this is a chore. What prompted me to make this thread is because for some reason after I uploaded a smiley, it completely changed the order of my smilies, removing the organization I set up. Now it displays my smilies in a random order every time.

I'm really hoping smilies are addressed in the future.

[jackflash]

I agree with you 100%. I have a few dozen boards and each has dozens of emoticons. I've given up on trying to made them as each site takes over an hour to do.

The previous versions of IPB were way better to manage.

I too hope and believe IPS will fix this issue.

[saturnus]

+1

[Perhonorificus_merged]

IPB also gave up on the very handy emoticon pane it used to feature, which made it very easy for users to browse through many emoticons at a glance and at full size. The tiny bar at the bottom loads much slower and makes some large emoticons impossible to discern. Of course, IPB also trashed post icons, which I believe vBulletin still has. Anything that has to do with users expressing themselves is quite possibly IPB's biggest weakness.

[Rhett]

I would agree it needs some work in this area and thanks for your feedback.

If it helps you can click the "Show all" link at the bottom of the smilies and it will display a pop up of all of them, with the proper code to use for them as well.

Here is a link for an example here

http://community.inv...section=legends

[Rimi]

If it helps you can click the "Show all" link at the bottom of the smilies and it will display a pop up

The little sidebar they had in 3.1.4 was much better. I'll admit that this tray looks really nice and high tech, but popups in the editor are very intrusive and everything about how dialogs were handled in 3.1.4 was better.

Not arguing, just adding on...

[jackflash]

I would agree it needs some work in this area and thanks for your feedback.

[superi]

Yes, that dragging thing one by one is a pain if you have a lot of smileys to organize. Posting smileys(in the editor) is better in IP.Board than in vBulletin, I think. Maybe there could be more smileys visible before you have to push the small arrow to view more smileys.

[The Old Man]

Been asking for years!

http://community.inv...eeded-overhaul/

[ørret]

This is from a support ticket 25 dec 2010:

Actually, all the emoticons will be copied to Default. That's the way it works. (Don't ask me why, it puzzles me too.)

... it's obvious emoticon management needs to be worked on, especially when IPS official reply "it puzzles me too" lol... ticket is 1,5 years old and nothing has been done since to fix issues.

[Michael]

it's obvious emoticon management needs to be worked on, especially when IPS official reply "it puzzles me too" lol... ticket is 1,5 years old and nothing has been done since to fix issues.

You shouldn't take a random sentence from a support ticket as being an "IPS official reply", not all of the people who work on support tickets are privy to the reason why the products are designed the way they are.

[Angel Knight Phil]

As the webmaster of a community that is focused around its emoticon system (it's a gaming-focused community that has many of said game's images as emoticons so they can be easily called), I totally agree. IP.Board 3.0 and 3.1 at least had okay emoticon management; the grid layout made it easy to scroll through everything, and you could add emoticons in bulk all at once (not upload, actually add). The new management screen is overly space-consuming, extremely difficult to use for forums with large amounts of emoticons, and painstakingly time consuming to add emoticons in bulk. My current plan is to keep upgrading my forum until our current six-month support cycle runs out and then go with that, but a revamped emoticon manager would earn another renewal purchase from us.

[ørret]

You shouldn't take a random sentence from a support ticket as being an "IPS official reply", not all of the people who work on support tickets are privy to the reason why the products are designed the way they are.

Well, obviously they know the forum in and out. MH is great when it comes to support so I think he knows what he's talking about. When he himself get confused why the system is made like it is (confirming my issue), that's reason enough to bring it on the table for the official IPS coders. When you import a custom pack, some icons are forced into the default folder, because you have no option to choose "none" from the drop down box, instead you're forced to use "default". That's just one example, it took me many replies in the support ticket to explain this so I'm not explaining it here again. The fact that nothing has been done for years, even after multiple threads addressing issues, is shocking. I'm a patient person, but years, seriously? I wish IPS took us more serious so it would be worth our time posting issues here. IPS is doing a great job on anything else, but the emoticon problem seems to be such a pain to fix for IPS that they keep ignoring the threads, I suspect.

[Ryan H.]

IPS is doing a great job on anything else, but the emoticon problem seems to be such a pain to fix for IPS that they keep ignoring the threads, I suspect.

Or the complaining hasn't been very loud, and they've deemed other development far more important.

[saturnus]

IPS is doing a great job on anything else, but the emoticon problem seems to be such a pain to fix for IPS that they keep ignoring the threads, I suspect.

Or the complaining hasn't been very loud, and they've deemed other development far more important.

Agreed, and I just want to say the same for IP.Chat as well (sorry, I'll never let that go, I love IP.Chat and want it to explode)

[jackflash]

Actually, I am surprised that IPS has let the current emoticon system live this long. 3.2 and 3.3 are so advanced, but the emoticon system is really old school.

[ørret]

Or the complaining hasn't been very loud, and they've deemed other development far more important.

So what you're saying; If they've not done anything for 2 years to improve the emoticon system, we might as well wait 20 more years, because during those 20 years there will always be more important tasks to spend the time on than an emoticon system? ... It doesn't work that way, sometimes you need to spend time on less important features to make the functionality better in those areas. Well, the complaining has been going on and I can only imagine how many support hours IPS team have wasted on customers, hours that could be used to develop a more efficient emoticon system not leading to so many tickets. I must have stolen like 20 minutes from the support guy MH because he had to log in etc. to test himself and confirm the issue. Problem was solved in a non-efficient way, and the issue still persist in the emoticon system to this day.

[Michael]

Well, obviously they know the forum in and out. MH is great when it comes to support so I think he knows what he's talking about. When he himself get confused why the system is made like it is (confirming my issue), that's reason enough to bring it on the table for the official IPS coders. When you import a custom pack, some icons are forced into the default folder, because you have no option to choose "none" from the drop down box, instead you're forced to use "default". That's just one example, it took me many replies in the support ticket to explain this so I'm not explaining it here again. The fact that nothing has been done for years, even after multiple threads addressing issues, is shocking. I'm a patient person, but years, seriously? I wish IPS took us more serious so it would be worth our time posting issues here. IPS is doing a great job on anything else, but the emoticon problem seems to be such a pain to fix for IPS that they keep ignoring the threads, I suspect.

IPS gets thousands and thousands of melodramatic topics like this about issues that people think are the most important things for them to be fixing. Emoticon management comes up extremely rarely. That's because it's a task that is generally done once, and then maybe revisited every few months. It's not a critical task that absolutely has to be working seamlessly for ever admin for them to be using it frequently when they're managing their site.

You're implying that it's just too hard of a problem for them to fix, so they're ignoring it? That's laughable. It could be fixed up in an afternoon if they decided to devote the time to it. It's simply way down on the list of important features that just have to be fixed up.

[tenaki]

Get rid of them altogether

[jackflash]

IPS gets thousands and thousands of melodramatic topics like this about issues that people think are the most important things for them to be fixing. Emoticon management comes up extremely rarely. That's because it's a task that is generally done once, and then maybe revisited every few months. It's not a critical task that absolutely has to be working seamlessly for ever admin for them to be using it frequently when they're managing their site.

You're implying that it's just too hard of a problem for them to fix, so they're ignoring it? That's laughable. It could be fixed up in an afternoon if they decided to devote the time to it. It's simply way down on the list of important features that just have to be fixed up.

Emoticon management is a novel issue as it should be. The simple fact remains though that IPB is an outstanding product and the emoticon management piece is a wholly dysfunctional piece.