Forum new look?

[Almond Magnum]

Did the forum change its looks recently or is it some kind of bug? Now I see it all with angles everywhere (instead of round corners) and sharp contrasts. Some tags aren't very readable.

[SomeOldGuy]

It's a bug that was intentional. Apparently, they've decided to make things "easier" by hiding buttons, and even removing the unread topic highlighting.

[dragon3010]

If this was intentional please return it back or atleast give us the option of a look we like cuz this new one sucks :/

[SomeOldGuy]

Now that I think about it, I think this is a continuation of the "everyone uses their phone to access, so we can screw up everything not phone related" attitude that a lot of new developers have. Problem is, they can't seem to agree on which phone to develop for, so things just fall apart.

Things like the page change at the bottom, which used to tell you where you were in the NUMBER of messages posted, but now tells you which PAGE you're on, which takes up less space on a phone than the previous numbers.

The "home" page got the treatment months ago; now it's the forum pages.

[kuali]

Speaking of designing for phones, these two screenshots are from the outer and inner screens of my phone (a Samsung Z Fold):

vs

Now, I can see how you might want to save space on the smaller screen, but making the labels visible on the small screen and going icons-only on the big one seems off!

[Almond Magnum]

@kuali
Speaking of bugs, I had to quote your post to see the inside of the spoiler tags...

[kuali]

@Almond-Magnum Yeah, I couldn't get the spoiler to work either, so now people just have to scroll past the screenshots!

[grobinson2k1]

Not liking it, I could not post on my iPad. The banner at the top was hiding the submit button.

[Lily Garden]

Form pages are no longer doing that changing color thing once I’ve read them which is annoying.

The forum is now poorly optimized

[TheGrimLich]

Is this a software change, is my question. Because a lot of the baffling design decisions are explicable if it's a software change. But yeah... this was, sadly, not a lateral move in terms of forum design or software. It feels, honestly, like a downgrade.

[AliceCheshire]

Definitely has the standard mobile "upgrade" bullshit such as managing to make everything somehow less readable. I already used a custom stylesheet extension to make the forums more readable, but I didn't have to change things heavily for that. This change seems to be a comprehensive change. Definitely not encouraging me to continue using the forums, that's for damn sure. Any site that panders to mobile at the expense of desktop users is a site that tends to very quickly make itself obsolete for me. Really get tired of this crap.

[dragon3010]

@AliceCheshire its not even good on mobile, its actively way worse for me on mobile. Everything is so big and ugly looking, notifications dont seem to work anymore? Not a big fan of this if its for mobile the previous look was wayy better.

[holatuwol]

@SomeOldGuy said in Forum new look?:

Things like the page change at the bottom, which used to tell you where you were in the NUMBER of messages posted, but now tells you which PAGE you're on, which takes up less space on a phone than the previous numbers.

I disliked this too, but it's not related to taking up less space, since you still see where you are in terms of the number of messages if you go to Settings and switch to infinite scrolling (so disable pagination).

On a related note, the paginated view has an annoying new convenience feature that displays a toast message that offers to take me to the latest posts any time I end up on the first page of a thread, even when I specifically use the "go to first page" button to get there.

[cureClover]

removing the unread topic highlighting: Please bring this back. It's now hard to see which threads I've checked and which ones I haven't. It was also easier to see the new threads that way.

[wanderer_1204]

@cureClover this! I also aposted about this in the other thread which is also about forum update.

[Lily Garden]

@dragon3010 notifications aren’t working for me either, I go to the tab and nothing shows up.
I’m on mobile as well and it’s basically unusable at its current state

[dragon3010]

@Lily-Garden im really hoping jnovel actually comments here and we can convince them to change it back, idk why they redesigned the fourms when literally no1 asked for this.

[kuali]

@dragon3010 AFAIK, they use pre-made forum software (NodeBB, I think), so the redesign may not be entirely under their control...

[SomeOldGuy]

@kuali Based on a quick look at the NodeBB support forum, it would seem that there was a change in how THIS copy was configured when the new software was copied in; topics on their support forum seem to look like they did here a few days ago.

So, things like topic dates and highlighting "what's new" does work, if it's turned on.