the new forum sucks.

[infurno]

It bothers me so much that I have to post something. I loved the old forum. It was simple, clean, efficient, clear, and easy to look at. All of this is gone now.

Forum text is light blue and faded grey on a light blue background.
The borders are so saturated it makes it hard to read the contents of the body.
Posts are oriented backwards. Post body is on the wrong side of the screen.
Search now sucks. Posts are oriented in reverse and it's the important details like which sub-forum of a result is harder to see.
Excerpts on threads make it hard to get context.
The animated icons are driving me nuts.
Code snippets are now harder to read.

This blue theme is hideous.

Why! It makes no sense! I think it's great to see an upgrade with new shiny features but this is a step in the wrong direction. bb3 is the way to go but someone please fix this...

[rooly]

The first 2 points are opinions*. Every body has 'em. (*opinion, meaning that these are failings)

Point 3: Post body being more important than some silly avatar is a bonus to me. I'd rather read text, not look at stupid gifs.
Point 4: Search always sucked. You can barely find poop on these built-in searches.
Point 5: Huh?
Point 6: And yet you didn't mind avatars taking up a good 20% of the viewing space?
Point 7: I haven't looked into this one, so I can't really comment. In fact,

Code: Select all

int main()
{
    cout << "Hello, code snippet!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

Point 8: Themes can be set by the user, can't they? If not, ask the mods to change the theme to something a little easier on the eyes.

Why? Because the future happens and somebody finally had the time to get around to it. Change is scary (trollbaiting).

[Sylence]

Posts are oriented backwards. [...]
Search now sucks. Posts are oriented in reverse

User Control Panel -> Board preferencens -> Edit display options
There you have "Display topic order direction:" and "Display post order direction:"

[infurno]

Point 3: Post body being more important than some silly avatar is a bonus to me. I'd rather read text, not look at stupid gifs.

Figuring out who said what after it's been said is disorienting. It's like following a conversation, you want to know who has what to say as they say it. Forums have a more or less standardised format. The user details are on the left and body on the right. This common format makes it easy to navigate bulletin boards. Besides all that, when researching often the author of the post is equally or even more important than the body.

Point 4: Search always sucked. You can barely find poop on these built-in searches.

Search was great how it was. The point is that now it's worse.

Point 7: I haven't looked into this one, so I can't really comment. In fact,

Code: Select all

int main()
{
    cout << "Hello, code snippet!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

This is how code appears:
(from a random post)


I'd prefer for it not to be back the way it was. Not in boxes with such a light font.

Point 8: Themes can be set by the user, can't they? If not, ask the mods to change the theme to something a little easier on the eyes.

I did ask days ago. Nothing came of that but maybe they will get to it.

Everybody will have an opinion and I know I'll take some heat for voicing mine. I understand this is the default theme but I wanted to point out what bothers me.

Posts are oriented backwards. [...]
Search now sucks. Posts are oriented in reverse

User Control Panel -> Board preferencens -> Edit display options
There you have "Display topic order direction:" and "Display post order direction:"

Thanks!

[hybrid]

Talking about who says what: Having just two posts on your sheet, I just can say 'Who are you?'
Anyway, I just can agree with rooly. Search sucks, some things are just a matter of taste. Having an updated forum is definitely some effort to get warm with it for everyone, but that's life. So get into it. As you can see, the code does come out quite nice, it's just that the update mechanism didn't apply the code tags properly. So old code is not that nice anymore. Authors should be able to edit their major code fragments, though, and get the proper highlighting. New code will always come up nicely. And yeah, the main point for me is: Who are you?

[CuteAlien]

*sigh* ok - so now we have 2 threads about the new forum (the other one was just beside this one man!). I think also that it is harder to read with the current color-scheme, so I would be ok with improving that. I don't agree with search being worse - actually I think it's by far better than the old search! You no longer have to type AND and OR in your searches, but + and - which I think are far easier to use for most people. One difference which might irritate you is that the search no longer works for word-fragments, but you have to use * instead (check results for : "absolute*" "*solute*" and "*solute" for example to see how it works). But that also allows to do more exact searches, so I see this as another improvement. And having search now always in top-right corners also is nice. Haven't found yet anything that makes the new search worse (you can still see thread-topic and sub-forum directly beside the search-result ... the discussion of putting this left or right is already going on in the main-thread about the new forum).

[Yoran]

Infurno: go to http://www.phpbb3styles.net/ and do a suggestion for a theme.
We cant suit everyone's wishes. The old forum was broken and slow, this one works and is way faster, that is what counts most.

Theming is a matter of taste. So start a vote for 3 themes, whichever one gets the most votes, I will implement.
And no I will not be enabling per user themes. As most plugins alter the theme as well. Which then has to be done for each theme individually. Thats a no go.

[ent1ty]

I think this is a good one

Edit: I have noticed that url links don't open in a new window anymore. Could this be fixed?

[XXChester]

I have to agree with this post, I did not see a problem with the old forum, it looked great, clean and very easy to read. This new forum feels completely unnatural and I am almost at the point to stop reading it.

[MPKaboose]

I think this is a good one

Edit: I have noticed that url links don't open in a new window anymore. Could this be fixed?

press the middle mouse button (scroll)

On topic: I agree with, "The old forum was broken and slow"

[serengeor]

I think this is a good one

Too dark for me.

What themes I liked:
http://demo.phpbb3styles.net/Hestia
http://demo.phpbb3styles.net/subsilver2 (Old looking one!)

[mongoose7]

Well, this style is what *I'm* used to. The old forum was really bad because it was difficult to find new posts (without finding *all* new posts and having your pointer updated, whether you read them or not). The "First unread post" link is really much better.

[Grumpy]

my 5 cents worth (inflation ya know)...
Search in the old forum is slow... new one is better that you can have absolute searches.
For a matter of tast, the light blue is fine with me.
Avitars look better on the right side... I always read the post then see who its from afterwords.
Code snippits definatly look better now, not taking up most of the page.
Easy to spot red/blinking unread posts... easy as 3.141596........

[Yoran]

So back to the old style, let me know if you guys can live with this.
Cant resemble the old board much more than this

[ent1ty]

Why was there no poll or something?