Forum UI Changes

[Dman979]

35 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Is it possible to return those buttons to where they belong, or is that just part of the forum software update?

It's on the list of Things We'd Like Done^TM

[kerbiloid]

I'd say, well-done.

Spoiler

 

[Entropian]

Thanks IT for the less whitespace change!

[Stone Blue]

13 hours ago, steve_v said:

It might be wise to hold off on using or creating stylesheet overrides until they've finished buggering about with it, things are bound to break randomly until it settles down.

Yeah... I dont know about Hebarusan, or others, but I'll be holding off on updating/tweaking my dark forum theme till after the dust settles and ManeIT finishes up.

And yeah, if anyone was already using my dark theme, yes... it broke with this latest forum update

15 hours ago, steve_v said:

Ed, here's what the frontpage looks like for me, with uBlock applied to the most useless elements (banner, sidebar, link to modhost nobody uses, etc, etc.):

See how much cleaner that is with just a few clicks? See how only forum related things remain?

Minimal sidebar whitespace?...
Like this?


and below is the front page before the recent forum changes. With all but the basic stuff *I* would ever be using:

https://imgur.com/a/eLpXv

Edited October 22, 2020 by Stone Blue

[Stone Blue]

7 hours ago, HebaruSan said:

Yes, my Stylish override removes the sidebar because I don't find anything in there useful (it's even worse on the All Activity screen, where it's just a Newsletter announcement that I'll never sign up for in exchange for making every post 40% narrower). If you want it back, this is the line to remove:

#ipsLayout_sidebar,

Yup... My Stylish theme does away with it also, for the same reasons

[HebaruSan]

24 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

Yeah... I dont know about Hebarusan, or others, but I'll be holding off on updating/tweaking my dark forum theme till after the dust settles and ManeIT finishes up.

I expect the near-term changes to be aesthetic rather than structural (compared to the recent upgrade itself), but if something does break, it probably won't be that hard to fix it.

Anybody else notice there's a Preview button now?

[Dman979]

12 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

Anybody else notice there's a Preview button now?

alwayshasbeen.meme

For real, though, the preview was added shortly after (or concurrently) with the transition to Invision. IIRC, there were reports that WYSINWYG, so that option was enabled.

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, Stone Blue said:

Like this?

Exactly like that

Personally I'm not looking for a "night mode" theme (light is fine, just not actinic), so I'll probably tweak the colours a little.
Aside, is there an alternative to userstyles.org that works with stylus and isn't unusably slow? I know you put your stuff on github like a sensible person, but others do not... poke poke@HebaruSan

[Stone Blue]

40 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Personally I'm not looking for a "night mode" theme (light is fine, just not actinic), so I'll probably tweak the colours a little.

Please! Feel free to completely use mine as a base to tweak to your liking. I totally ripped this off from nbz's lighter blue theme. THEY did all the code... All I did (with permission), was to tweak the colors mainly, and did some minor moving around and hiding of stuff *I* didnt need. Loo at nbz's... theirs might be a better starting point for the colors you want... vOv

I'm all for a lot moar peeps to offer up alternatives to just the 3 or 4 styles that have been on Userstyles for years... (not counting the one Hebarusan just added )... the moar choices, the merrier.

Matter of fact, heres my Github repo. I have some older versions where I added moar tweaks:

https://github.com/StoneBlue/KSP-Forum-Dark-Theme

Pretty open license, as stated at the bottom of the README

 

Edited October 23, 2020 by Stone Blue

[RandomKerbal]

Perhaps the tittle wordings can be larger... "[Minimum KSP version - 1.8] KAS v1.7"

[steve_v]

3 hours ago, Stone Blue said:

Loo at nbz's... theirs might be a better starting point

Yeah, I do prefer nbz's colour choice, but I gave up after about 20 minutes of constant 504s and infinite spinners on userstyles.org.
I can't tweak what I can't obtain, which is why I went with yours, as it's served in a sensible manner as a flat file on github. Userstyles is a hellhole these days even on the rare occasions when it does work, stylish has gone proprietary and shoves an android app in your face at every turn, etc. etc.

If you do happen to have a copy of nbz's theme, do you recon you could mirror it somewhere so I can have a play with it? Of course I can't see the licence on the thing I can't obtain either...

40 minutes ago, RandomKerbal said:

Perhaps the tittle wordings can be larger...

That is sarcasm, right? It's huge already.

[kerbiloid]

It's a counter-procrastination layout. To do the work instead of chatting.

 

[RandomKerbal]

6 hours ago, steve_v said:

That is sarcasm, right? It's huge already.

But not as enormous as the old one.

[steve_v]

2 hours ago, RandomKerbal said:

But not as enormous as the old one.

Perhaps. Frankly I find this current trend for enormous buttons, enormous fonts, enormous blank areas, completely unnecessary boxes/borders/padding, social-media links/likes/rep/ratings, and information-free icons, animations, and  other random graphical elements properly perplexing.
The purpose of a forum is primarily discussion, and secondarily a repository of information. As such, the more discussion and information one can get on a page and still be navigable the better. Bonus points for minimising bandwidth hogging graphics and CPU/memory hogging javascript, particularly if you intend people to use the site on mobile devices. Not everyone has this years super-phone and/or a high bandwidth downlink you know.

Huge titles do nothing for signal/noise ratio or information density. All they achieve is making me scroll down further to get to the content. If they're remote fonts, they slow down page loading as well.
What would be nice WRT the topic titles is eliminating some of that padding above them. Even with the huge font, there's still more screen devoted to blank space, buttons, ratings and follower counters than to content.

---


And somewhere down here, pushed off the bottom of the image by all the silly bling, there be dragons content.

Edited October 23, 2020 by steve_v

[Guest]

Signature size restrictions are off btw

[Kerminator K-100]

4 minutes ago, Aperture Science said:

Signature size restrictions are off btw

Yeah but you don't have to make us suffer with your huge font size just to make a point

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, Kerminator1000 said:

Yeah but you don't have to make us suffer with your huge font size just to make a point

What?

Edited October 23, 2020 by Guest

[Kerminator K-100]

Is that just your signature?

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, Kerminator1000 said:

Is that just your signature?

Yes, just the usual. Why?

Edited October 23, 2020 by Guest

[steve_v]

26 minutes ago, Aperture Science said:

Signature size restrictions are off btw

That broke rendering in the most hilarious of ways for a minute there. Top notch job.

Careful with this stuff though, you're starting to give me ideas...

[Kerminator K-100]

2 minutes ago, steve_v said:

Careful with this stuff though, you're starting to give me ideas...

Oh no

[steve_v]

Yup, a 50k by 50k jpeg bomb in your sig also breaks rendering. This is fun, what else can we break?

I wonder what this does...

[snip]

Awww, someone put a limit on inline image dimensions. Boring.

Edited October 23, 2020 by Vanamonde

[computercat04]

The UI is looking strange again.

[Dman979]

Let's not break the forums in this thread, ok? There's already a test thread for it, and it's pretty good.

[EchoLima]

One thing I do like is that the title is a separate element from the thread, and is visible on the top of every page. Helps if I'm ever deep in a thread and forget what the topic is...

Edited October 23, 2020 by EchoLima