Forum shows all game boards now, not just the games I know

[Vivavi]

Until recently, the BGA forum homepage showed boards for the games that I know, with a notice to that effect. Now it shows all games. What happened? I tried hunting for a setting to change it back, with no success. Any tips?

[robinzig]

It's the same for me. Been this way for I guess around 2-3 weeks now. I haven't been bothered to search if anyone's raised this yet, but seeing this post I thought I should chime in!

It's really quite annoying, it has to be said. I don't want to see a forum with hundreds of games I've never played and in many cases have never even heard of!

[FrankJones]

This is indeed quite annoying, and somewhat puzzling it has not yet been fixed.

[GTSchemer]

It is the same for me.

I thought it might be for performance reasons. Querying all those game tables and filtering by games the player knows takes time. But, wouldn't it save even more time to not load those subforums unless someone scrolls down or clicks a button to load them?

So, we don't know the motivation or whether it is intentional.

[Vivavi]

Yeah, I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but I didn't see any notice. In any case, I see I'm not the only one who preferred the old setup, and it's always nice to be in good company

[Jellby]

I don't think it's intentional, because the URL passed to the iframe still contains a "gamefilter" argument. They probably did some other change that had unwanted consequences (https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49867).

[Aero88]

Same issue. Thought it would be fixed by now.

[Meeplelowda]

I don't think it's intentional, because the URL passed to the iframe still contains a "gamefilter" argument. They probably did some other change that had unwanted consequences (https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49867).

Maybe it is intentional. The gamefilter argument was causing issues (it's too long for people who've played a LOT of games), so broadly speaking there are two ways to handle that until you find a real fix. 1) Ignore the gamefilter argument on the backend, or 2) don't send the gamefilter argument at all, such as by rewriting the code the builds the query string and have it not create the gamefilter argument. I don't know which is less of a headache on the development side, but only doing 1) is plausible--it might be as simple as commenting out whatever code parses that argument--which means the gamefilter argument would still be created.

[robinzig]

It's worth pointing out that the filtering was never done purely on the backend. No, I don't have a clue what's in any of the forum code, but it used to be the case not infrequently that when loading the forum (or just refreshing the page), you'd briefly see all games, before the filters "kicked in" and most games got hidden. This clearly looks like some Javascript being run (and taking longer to run that one would ideally want!) to simply hide the relevant games (whether with CSS or actually removing from the DOM, I don't know - it doesn't ultimately matter, and I obviously can't check now as the feature no longer exists).

I never even noticed there was a query string with all the games you've played in it - that's certainly going to get very unwieldy (and yes, run into browser limits as to the length of a URL) if you've played tonnes of games.

It's weird that BGA needs the information transmitted that way, as other pages clearly know which games you've played and which you haven't, and don't seem to have issues like this. You wouldn't think that it should be a particularly complex or badly-performing database query to find all games that a player has played (given that you'd only ever be making this query for a *single* player at a time).

But I have no knowledge of the inner working of the site. I think I've heard it stated before that the forum is essentially third-party software bolted on to BGA (it does look like a generic forum with some limited customisation), which probably limits what precisely can be done with it.

[FrankJones]

I would think the easiest method would be to allow users to simply click a button (maybe one next to the "heart" button used to mark a game as favorite) with some sort of icon indicating "show forum". It would need to be done manually by the player.

Before the recent change, I only had 15-20 games show up in my forum, but most of them are games I rarely or never play.

With manual selection I would likely only have 6-8 of them selected, and I would think that would speed up the process. Instead of querying my profile for all games I have played, it would just query a short list or database entry for the games I have selected to show forum for.

I'm guessing that people who have played hundreds of games didn't want or need all of them to appear. Especially since there was no method (as far as I know) to remove them once they appeared.