These forums need improvement: suggestions
1. Increase the 1,000 characters limit, for other languages than Japanese, to 3,000 or even 5,000.
I’m assuming this is the reason why it’s set so low, since words in Japanese use much less characters, but it’s really not enough for english, french and deutsch. Increasing it for these languages would be nice, and equivalent to 1000 in Japanese I believe. Yes, a workaround exists, but it’s a pain to use since you can’t preview before you post, if you want to edit your first post quickly.
2. Remove the daily post limit entirely.
It’s just not right that we can’t post as much as we want… - It forces us not to engage in discussion since at some point it's bound to break.
- Since we don’t see the counter (remaining posts for the day), we’re restricting ourselves just in case another interesting thread pops.
- Some people choose to edit their posts after they read an answer, making it hard (puzzling) to read these threads.
- How many times did I see someone asking a question, or saying something simply wrong about the game, but I just couldn’t say anything…
- I know every time I hit this limit, I’ll usually just go to another game’s forum where I feel free to talk as much as I want. Not that great for player retention…
At least make it an hourly limit, if you really wish to restrict player communication (why you want to do that is beyond me, though), but a daily is just not right.
3. Allow us to embed videos.
That’s commonplace these days. It's comfortable to just click a "play" button. It helps to keep the user on this website, too, because once a user is on YouTube or another popular video website, he’s bombarded with other stuff (suggestions on the right, comments, subscribed channels) and might thus stay on YouTube rather than staying engaged in FF XIV.
4. Change the design to something modern, efficient and coherent.
It looks outdated, it feels a bit like 2005-2010 more than 2013+. It's important to engage potential new players who come to check these forums. Some ideas, based on current web design trends:- To make it look modern, choose a very dark grey or very light white background, and make the design generally flatter, less flourished (no 3D, no glossy effects, no redundant separation lines), and better aligned altogether. Choose colours that go well together! Lodestone and SE website/blog are much better in this regard (Mogstation isn't, and its navigation unintuitive).
- Add a "My Posts" link in the Quick Links menu.
- Add a "Refresh" button to the top and bottom (next to "Post New Thread" or "Reply to Thread"), so that users don’t have to reload the webpage; alternatively simply make the forum’s (or thread's) name as a link in the top breadcrumbs, so that users can click it to reload the current page.
- Buttons/nav could be sticky on one side of the screen (visible regardless of scroll position).
- Icing on the cake would be auto-updating through AJAX requests, if that doesn’t put too much strain on the server.
- From a pure web design standpoint, its CSS should be coherent with Lodestone, and the layout should keep the Lodestone’s top menu ideally. You should really think more about integrating all relevant websites together, from Lodestone to Mogstation passing by these forums.
- Also the URL should have been "finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/forums/#" ideally, for SEO purposes and human intuitiveness.