New forum

Wowza, I’m all discombobulated. Hello new forum.

Ohoh, i know the phrase that good things take their time but whilst we now have vBulletin, after all those years of waiting, this is really the design you wanna come up with, wasting so much space?

Yeah, this new forum is going to be odd at first. But we’ve wanted to upgrade for a long time and I hope everyone likes the changes as soon as we all get used to it

It’s less odd, it’s more badly designed in terms like overview and readability.

Mark up a screen grab with Photoshop, suggest improvements! Changes can be made; it’s not like everything is set in stone…

The two issues I see are that there appears to be less text on screen so I’m scrolling more, and because all the colors are such similar shades, there isn’t as big a distinction between content and fluff like with the old forums. It makes it a little hard for my brain to parse at the moment.

For instance, this post has tons of whitespace under this text.

Agree with Taumel

There are two major issues for me:

1. It seems that signatures got even larger unless correctly configured (mine is a 1:1 transfer of a signature that was opted for using the few available letters usefull in links), but Taumels and Antenna Tree show how large they can also bee an beezir has some massive nothing block which potentially comes from no signature at all.
   I though welcome that the annoying signature tags were disabled (like image etc)

2. PLEASE design the board for its purpose CSS wise. This is a board for programmers, programmers have screens with realistic widths to read code.
   We don’t have 1024 widths, a board that has a content window in the middle with this as fixed size and the rest white (which on my 1920x1200 means 50%+ white) is not acceptable nor even remotely focused on its target.
   All it gives me is anger due to the vertical scrolling it causes

3. You forgot ranks. Already before UT staff was hard to detect immediately, now its basically impossible. That was a straight shoot in your own legs guys

I would have prefered if this board would first have put online for testing purposes a week or two to find such issues before a working, not needfully fast system was replaced with a not working, not usable system took over which first has to proof that it is fast under non-empty conditions (my initial search took way longer than in the old board and the old board had hundreds of thousands of posts, not 20)

EDIT: realized that it are more than 20 but the whole old content which is great but it also shows that the search filter with “new posts since last” visits seems to be broken, cause the “new posts” link on the top shows a much larger selection of postings.
Fishy it is.

Wow, this forum looks really cool now!

1. New signatures cannot use IMG tags, SIZE tags, or COLOR tags. Imported signatures still have these.

2. You actually browse with a maximized browser? :shock:

3. Ranks will return for all UT staff.

I’ve run some pretty large forums and it’s a really common thing to get nothing but complaints from users when you try to do something better than it was done before. Forum users aren’t generally comfortable with change, unless it REALLY outshines the original.

So, I truly hate to join in with the negatives, but…

My first impressions are that this forum is much harder to read due to the colors and added vertical spacing between thread titles, which, ok, I’ll do my best to get used to, but mainly it seems to be a lot slower to me than the old forum. That could totally be my imagination but it seems the added graphics and all that just sort of slowed things down. If anything, the old forum was too slow as it was, so this seems like a backward step.

Why not just use something tried and true like V-Bulletin? I guess I don’t get the whole “custom forum” script idea when there are already solutions out there that people are used to and that run fast and smoothly. Just curious is all.

Anyway, with that said, I’m sure I’ll get used to this forum. It’s hard on my tired programmery eyes but maybe there’s a setting somewhere to change that, or at least maybe some sort of Greasemonkey thing or something.

I’ll see what can do when i have some time. I never understood why you didn’t hire me for setting up a good forum. All could have been done since a long time. :O)

The new forum is vBulletin.

This forum is a massive improvement in terms of graphics. It now looks like the main Unity website which is good.

Only thing graphically I would change is reducing the amount of whitespace, and basically tightening up the content to make it have less wasted space.

Well this will take a while to get use to

I personally like the experience better, but there is way too much white space imho.

Ahhh, so it is… well then maybe you guys could put in the ability for users to choose their own theme? I think that would pretty much solve any issues about colors, text, etc.

Yeah, user-selectable themes could solve some issues for power users (wide display, or dark themes, etc).

Totally. And yeah I just now found all the general settings, etc. where sigs and all that can be turned off. Not so bad after all, haha. A few themes added in would rock.

@Matthew:

Part of that quote comes from the original posting, realized that img was cut which is very welcome. But doesn’t resolve the other problems as far as I see.
Its obvious that my initial posting was driven from quite a bit of anger due to the steps back without even testing it in the wild before scrapping the working installation.

2. Yes I do, because my setup is development oriented here, not design oriented or “home hacker” so its not a single screen but 2x 1920x1200 screens, with an additional 15.4" macbook pro (1440x900) next to it which is used for communication to have the development system independent of that (in case of maintenance runs, restarts, …). I use the browser pretty regularily for more than just happy clicking as I use google docs and other webservices for most of my work thats not related to an install software (unity, shiva, torque, VS, Adobe WebPremium and games basically), as those services don’t require me to sync stuff forward, backward and in circles, and when working with such services I don’t see any gain from working in tiny windows. As mentioned, we are no longer on 1024 screens and I don’t see a need to restrict myself to such unrealistic small measures just to get 10 times as much scrolling. Thats neither fun nor productive.

3. I hope so

<3 the new forums, but maybe give some more space to the post content and less to the avatars, like maybe a horizontal split for the content so it fills the entire board width, with poster info above, and signature/tools info below.