What do you think of the new forums?

[Dfthu]

I think the forum looks pretty bad, what do you think?

[John FX]

I do not, there is a flatness to it that looks amateur or unfinished and the contrast difference between a posts background and the main forum background is not clear enough.

 

That said, I like a lot of the new features. My complaint is purely the reduced function resulting from palette choice.

[HoloYolo]

I wish not to have a kerbal Facebook thank you very much.

[EdFred]

Looks like there is a large need to fix things.

Looks like all the image tags are broken, quote tags are broken, etc...

Really?  The enter gives me double spaced text? Come on guys.

[Superfluous J]

I would like to know exactly what is making random beeping noises and how to make it never happen again.

[Murph]

In one word: dreadful!

This terrible software could be a perfect case study in gross inefficiency and failure to learn from decades of past experience.  The index pages fit about half as many forums/threads per screen page, and with far less information than is typical of good forum software.  There is an elegant simplicity, highly developed efficiency of layout, and a maximising of visible information with phpBB, vBulletin, etc; and that is entirely missing in this dumbed down nonsense.

Overall, it just puts me off wanting to read the forums and contribute to them.  It is a huge step backwards.

[RocketPilot573]

1 minute ago, 5thHorseman said:

I would like to know exactly what is making random beeping noises and how to make it never happen again.

Looks like.. or rather sounds like, whenever you get a notification it beeps. There's probably a setting for that somewhere around here.

[Superfluous J]

1 minute ago, RocketPilot573 said:

Looks like.. or rather sounds like, whenever you get a notification it beeps. There's probably a setting for that somewhere around here.

Yeah I just found it and turned it off.

I'm a bit worried with all the notifications and stuff. I may have to watch my bandwidth usage when I'm tethered to my cell phone. That is, if I can find where to turn off displaying images. If I can't find that, I'll just have to stop checking the forum during those times.

[Van Disaster]

Too much wasted space, posts are too busy ( the post above this one is mostly made up of anything but content ) and the theme hurts my eyes after a little while. All fixable with different themes and user settings, but until then I think I'll just stay away.

Also it appears to follow youtube hyperlinks in signatures ... just, no.

Edited November 29, 2015 by Van Disaster

[Frybert]

Well I don't like the fact I can't seem to get my avatar right again...but that might be on my end rather than the forums (though I I used the same picture for every other forum before without hassle).

[Alshain]

I said it in the announcement post, IPS is a downgrade from vBulletin.  vBulletin is the best forum software on the market.  I say this not as a forum poster, but someone who has worked with both behind the scenes.  The software is limited.

[Gaarst]

I enjoyed vB better because I knew how it worked, at least basic BBCode which allowed me to do what I wanted to.

I guess we'll get used to IPS some time, but for now, though I hate to complain for this kind of thing, the change indeed feels like a downgrade.

[Snark]

I hate, hate, hate the new forum, but I'm holding off on ranting too much about it until it's had a chance to settle in.

For one thing, clearly they're having serious operational problems (the rampant 502 errors), which makes the forums practically unusable at the moment-- it's hard to judge what the real experience will be like until it's stable enough that I can browse around without getting 502 thrown in my face all the time.

Also, I know that when I'm used to one thing for a long time, I'm likely to react negatively to any change, at least for a while until I get used to it.  My gut tells me that I'm gonna keep on hating the new forum, but we'll see how I feel in a week or two.

One thing (one of the many things) that's got me scratching my head about the new forums:  Why the weird inconsistency of forum presentation?  For example, consider this forum, which is ugly but functional (shows number of replies, number of views, when and by whom it was last responded), and then compare to this forum, which is ugly and completely useless (no way of seeing how many views, or when it was last updated, and the total disconnect in visual appearance from the other forums makes it very hard to train my eyes to read it).  Is there any way to control the way a forum is presented?

[Van Disaster]

9 hours ago, Snark said:

 Is there any way to control the way a forum is presented?

I went looking at the stylesheets with a view of reformatting the place so I could read it without getting eyestrain ( if you want to mess with the look and feel an easy way is to use the Web dev tools FF provides ) but there's at least 5 of them and I think some of the style info is generated also - so no really easy way. You can use a text replacer plugin for a browser to do it all on the client end, but that only really works if it's easy to extract the right text and that's not easy to do with the one I have, at least. Maybe there's a client side css rewriter plugin somewhere. I at least wanted to turn avatars off in the hope there'd be less pointless waste of space at the left - I think I may try classifying avatars as adverts in uBlock.

We shouldn't have to do that to make a usable forum though. In the time it took to write this post my eyes have started itching & it's taking some effort to keep focussed on the text, so using this forum is causing me literal pain, not just any metaphorical pain from the atrocity that's the presentation format of the forum itself.

Edit: adding avatars to uBlock worked perfectly, made a big difference.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Van Disaster

[steve_v]

18 hours ago, HoloYolo said:

I wish not to have a kerbal Facebook thank you very much.

Ya, this. I'd rep you, but like I will most certainly not.

In other news, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with all the complaints on this page.

My personal top two gripes are the eye-burning lack of contrast and the faceborg-like "like" thing.

Edited November 30, 2015 by steve_v

[steve_v]

14 hours ago, Snark said:

Why the weird inconsistency of forum presentation?

After hitting those links, agreed. The "Q&A" style forum sections are horrible, adding nothing but hiding a lot of useful information.

[steve_v]

Ooh lookie, it doesn't merge posts anymore, how irritating.

[Harry Rhodan]

Waste of space, terrible contrast and missing borders. The Q&A and support forums look like a desperate rehash of Reddit. Meh!

[BigNose]

The old forum had a much more 'homey' feeling, right now it feels sterile like a hospital.

Edited November 30, 2015 by BigNose

[Nibb31]

The reply and quoting seems to be broken for me. If I reply twice to a thread, it keeps on putting the first quote that I replied to.

I suspect the problems that people are having with readability and UTF-8 characters are due to a poor font choice. It seems to be some sort of non-standard Helvetica Bold or something, and that is causing problems.

[RainDreamer]

Need more kerbal green.

[T-Bouw]

I'm almost getting scrolling-burns on my index finger...

[KrazyKrl]

14 minutes ago, T-Bouw said:

I'm almost getting scrolling-burns on my index finger...

Yea, even with disabled signatures, the username area of the page still causes each post, even if one line, to several inches in height.

And for the bright white, on bright white, color scheme; I ended up downloading a firefox addon (Color that Site) as a work around.

[eirexe]

Amazing new upgrade, the forums look waay better and will probably be easy to extend in the future.

 

I'd rather have problems now than be stuck with vbulletin.

Edited November 30, 2015 by eirexe

[Starwhip]

I don't know what I think about it yet. It certainly feels more sterile than the old one. IMO the old one was the most friendly-looking forum I'd ever seen. This one... is weird. Bigger, I guess, is the word. Everything is bigger. Main menu, topics page, posts. And this "like" button, I do not like. :/

Also, this annoying WYSIWYG editor. .-.
Shift+Enter is gonna be my friend.

Spoiler

Hey, spoilers. Ugly spoilers, but still.
You can't change the title? Blasphemy! D: