Let me preface this by saying that none of these complaints are new. Ever since I joined the forums in 2014, myself and others have been pointing out the issues with how certain things, particularly the search feature is handled, and since then the complaints have only gotten worse and more numerous, all of them seemingly falling on deaf ears. First it was the growing amount of search engine restrictions, then it was the equally obnoxious and unnecessary post purge, and I shouldn't even get started on how forum moderation is handled. Now I have no idea what purpose any of these changes serve but one thing that is clear to me is this: everyone is complaining, and no one likes these changes. And yet nothing is being done. To elaborate further on what I'm referring to:
-from the very beginning, the search feature on the forums was halfway decent at best, what with its odd list of keywords that were "too common" to be indexed, and whole forum sections being omitted. But wait, even if the forum's own search feature is broken, you can just use google to search the forums far more effectively instead, right? Wrong! Not only was the search engine here useless half the time, but it appears that the admins have gone to some length to ensure that not even google (or other mainstream search engines, eg bing) could index any of the forums beyond the home page, essentially making it borderline impossible to find topics quickly and effectively. Unless the forums are secretly used by TurdPile and co as a secret drug smuggling operation or illegal pornography ring, there is no reason for the topics themselves to not be searchable via google.
-But wait, it gets even worse! Not only are whole sections of the forums manually omitted from the search engine but someone also had the bright idea to remove forum mafia from the list of indexed forums. Now, by this forums' standards I'm considered a shitter or casual mafia player, yet even I found myself wanting to tear my hair out at being unable to search a mafia thread the normal way, instead being forced to ctrl+f my way page by page. Short of some ugly combination of profound autism and down's syndrome there is no reason why this kind of restriction should be forced on the mafia community. Players are already finding it hard to keep up with mafia threads, and to force them to spend half the free time they have to play a mafia game just searching for a single post that they could've found in 2 seconds with a working search engine just makes me want to bash my head against the nearest brick wall.
(EDIT: apparently im retarded or something and didnt realize this was fixed, but that still leaves the other search issues many of which date back to 2014 EDIT 2: nvm it still isnt working for shit)
-finally, I was looking for an old lounge thread from in june earlier this morning when I discovered that every single thread prior to july 2015 has been deleted for some inane reason. Now, while we all know the lounge as our forums' shitpost center, there is absolutely no excuse to simply purge this amount of threads. Even with the amount of useless posts in the lounge, I can remember some gems prior to july 2015, and to get rid of them without a second thought is simply lazy and incompetent. There are no other ways to describe this attitude.
Now while I'm aware that there are other issues with the forums, especially as far as moderation is concerned, I won't go into those in more detail, especially when I wasn't forced to deal with that as much as certain other members. However, the problems I've listed above are alone ridiculous, and the fact that nothing is being done about them only further screams of laziness and incompetence. This isn't how forums are normally run, and I know I speak for more than one person when I say that we've all been fed up with these changes.