Our updated Halo Waypoint experiences are slated to be released alongside the launch of Halo 4. That means they will all be here within the next 24 hours or so. Since many of you call our forums home (thanks for that!), I wanted to give you a sneak peek at what’s coming soon for our little corner of the 'net.
We gave the forums a bit of a facelift, and we also did some backend and services work. As you can’t see the latter two, I thought we’d at least cover the basics of the former. As you’ll see with the following images, our primary goal with the forum update was to simplify. We wanted to make it easier for you to find your way around and reduce some of the visual noise, while still making the extraneous information available to those who want it.
First up is the landing page for our forums. You can see the “before” on the left, and the “after” on the right. The right is still a work in progress, as I’m currently working on tightening up the section titles and descriptions to fit neatly on a single line. That way you’ll have an attractive landing page that is clean, organized, and easy to navigate.
There are two different choices for information you can show on the landing page. One is “Show post descriptions”, which is the default (as shown in the previous picture), and the other is “Show last posts”. If you select “Show Last Posts” (available on the bottom left, next to “Mark all forums as read”), the thread title, author, and date of the most recent post is revealed.
The individual sections of the forum have also been updated. We focused heavily on making the most valuable information the most noticeable. The left column now has the thread title only, and the right column has the author along with how many pages that particular thread has. The clear page numbers are intended to provide a strong visual clue as to where the current hot topic is going down, should you want to throw in your .03 cents (I know you all have more than .02 cents to offer!).
Just like the main landing page, each individual section of the forums offers additional details to those who want them. Along with the thread title and relevant number of pages, the following information is revealed by clicking on the “Show topic details” option on the bottom right of the page. Hovering over the following fields yields the below information:
Clicking on the author name takes you to their profile.
Hovering over the replies field shows the number of replies along with the number of views.
Hovering over the last post field shows the date and time the most recent post was made.
Oh for goodness’ sake, get rid of the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary forum and merge it with the Halo: Combat Evolved forum. It’s nice to know that the forum update will be here soon! The new forums look great!
PS. That’s a nice avatar you have there, bs angel.
The only suggestion I would make would be to merge the CE and Anniversary forums. You guys made wonderful additions to the game but it is still the same game =)
Are there any new profile options like a bio or custom avatars?
Edit:
Oh, and when will the Halo 4 terminals be available? I assume on Nov 6th at 12:01?
Individual posts look similar, however all of the options are not readily visible. That is to stay with our theme of keeping things clean. If you hover over the bottom right space of each post, a magic menu will suddenly appear. The options that pop up when you take that action are Thank, Quote, Reply, Private Message, and Report.
> I love the look!
>
> Is there going to be any bug fixes? I occasionally get errors and get timed out when trying to view the forums.
We push out bug fixes every two weeks. This update has some in it, and the regular work will continue as well. As many of you have noticed, our servers have been buckling under the increased load lately, and we’re continuing to tackle that through a variety of different solutions.
> Are there any new profile options like a bio or custom avatars?
> Edit:
> Oh, and when will the Halo 4 terminals be available? I assume on Nov 6th at 12:01?
To my knowledge, there are no new profile features in this update. We have been uploading new avatars on a weekly basis lately, though, and that schedule will continue.
