Board Game Arena

I assume there was some change to the interface that began truncating chat messages beyond 300 characters. This is super frustrating!

I frequently teach games using the site chat and also discuss strategy with my opponents. Multiple times in the past couple of days I've had a good chunk of a message I type chopped off and lost.

I don't understand where the problem was here. Sure I could chop up my chats into multiple messages but sometimes it's nice to type out one thought all together. And it's easy to forget and have it just happen. It's not like I'm counting characters as I type. If people were abusing the system, why not base this limitation on reputation or length of active account.

Een and Sourisdudesert, IF you are unwilling to stop chopping off messages please at least provide a character count inline so we know when we're approaching our limit or have an alert when we try to send a chat longer than that.

In an age of twitter, not everything needs to be limited to a handful of characters. Sometimes it's nice to be able to just take your time and explain things.

Some players were abusing the chat tools, sending giant messages to disturb their opponents.

I don't know if the solution provided is good, but at least it fixed this issue

UPDATE: we will add a limit on browser side to avoid losing text.

Great. Thanks for the quick followup!

sourisdudesert wrote:UPDATE: we will add a limit on browser side to avoid losing text.

On the member's page (for example, https://fr.boardgamearena.com/#!player?id=84499839 ), a button called 'message' open a chat, instead of starting a private message : it is the main issue.

The solution is nevertheless simple : when you click on "message", you start a message, when you click on "chat", you open a chat.

I, too, would appreciate a counter so I don't go over the chat window limit accidentally.

squarerootofthree wrote: In an age of twitter, not everything needs to be limited to a handful of characters. Sometimes it's nice to be able to just take your time and explain things.

Amen.

diamant wrote:

sourisdudesert wrote:UPDATE: we will add a limit on browser side to avoid losing text.

On the member's page (for example, https://fr.boardgamearena.com/#!player?id=84499839 ), a button called 'message' open a chat, instead of starting a private message : it is the main issue.

The solution is nevertheless simple : when you click on "message", you start a message, when you click on "chat", you open a chat.

That's because they purposely changed this a while back. While the messaging system still exists, if you can manage to get to it, they aren't intending for it to be used. So "message" and "chat" basically got integrated and everything is now a chat.

I don't know that I'd call this "the main issue," because what OP is doing probably does work better in the chat, right on the game. But I do agree it's a problem not having a way to send actual messages. Sometimes there is more you have to say, that would work better if you had the space to write things out and make paragraphs, etc., that don't work well in a chat. I never used the messaging system that much, but it definitely came in handy for certain things and I wish we had it back.

This is not the main subject, but no, we're not going to have the old messaging system back.

Having 2 messaging system for one service, like we had before, was useless and was adding complexity.

There are certainly things to improve to the BGA messaging system, so please advise. But to be honest "it works" at now, so another set of improvement would be quite far in our priority list.