GUI Bloopers on the Forum

[sparky412]

Some suggestions on the forum would be to clean up the forum look and make it look nicer and cleaner and less cluttered and easier to navigate and understand.

1. The top is way too cluttered with links; it is a bit overwhelming at first and not really friendly to people not familiar with the forums. In all honesty, there needs to be less links. Some suggestions to fix the issue would be:

• Group links together to cut down the clutter in order to make it easier to navigate.
  
  • Youtube, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and IRC Chat could be grouped together under a media tab drop down list. Or they could be placed as an image link at the bottom or top of the forum.
    

2. Give a bit of explanation to what the tabs do, I have no idea what some of your links mean or where they will take me.

• While a lot of tech savy people are aware IRC Chat is, not everyone does. This could be renamed to "KSP Chatroom" for those who have no clue what IRC. Also, what is KSP-TV?
  
  • Having maybe a hover over feature (tooltip) explaining to the users what the links are about and where they will take the user. This would help the users out a lot and cut down on the users confusion.
    

3. Drop down list that only have one item in the drop down list.

• The notification tab drives me batty. Now, I'm aware that this may or may be able to be controlled since this may be hardcoded in the vBulletin software, but the notifications tab should have more than one selection under, else it shouldn't be a drop down menu like it is.
  

[vexx32]

The notifications tab is coded like that because it's perfectly possible for notifications to come from multiple places. Unless you spend a great idea of time directly interacting with other users, there's usually only one, though. For example, if you receive rep, it shows on that tab, as do private messages. Both can be shown at once.

The rest seem like good ideas, though.

[Raven.]

The notifications tab is coded like that because it's perfectly possible for notifications to come from multiple places. Unless you spend a great idea of time directly interacting with other users, there's usually only one, though. For example, if you receive rep, it shows on that tab, as do private messages. Both can be shown at once.

The rest seem like good ideas, though.

Well, I have to agree with Sparky. When I first registered on the forums here it took me all night to figure out where the private messages were. After a while I figured out that it was under the notifications entry.

Back when I was helping run a smaller forum back in the days of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, there was a dedicated "inbox" button. This was running SMF forum software on a Nearly Free Speech host. Great forum software for the user, as it had a rather simple bar with the inbox and the user control panel on the top left side. But, it was a pounding migraine of an admin panel, as it took a rocket scientist to figure out the admin panel.