Data Sphere

Hi everyone,

You must have noticed the dramatic new look we've given our forums. Hope you guys like it. We expect to update the blog in the same style soon, but that needs a little more work.

In the event that you prefer the old theme, fear not: you can set your own theme in your User Control Panel under Board Preferences.

Enjoy!

Very cool, man. Looks great!

It's shiny. It's new. It's a forum theme. I quite like it.

It's nice and shiny, but I find it much harder to see what's been read and which threads I've posted in.

There's also no colour difference between stickied threads and normal threads.

Looks nice.

Is it possible to update the Main Menu for the Search results page so it also has a "Mark Forums Read" link?

And while I'm asking for things, is it possible to get the RSS feed enabled for the forum?

Thanks for the feedback, guys: rest assured I'll look at everything you say. I'll see what I can do on short notice.

@IJW: the color difference is a good idea. Not sure with what you mean by harder to see what's been read: when it's not read, it's blue. When it's read, it's grey. But maybe I'm missing your point.

@Zac: and here I was thinking we don't need RSS! I'll take a look and see what the feed URL is.

Arachas wrote:@Zac: and here I was thinking we don't need RSS! I'll take a look and see what the feed URL is.

It will actually help take a load off the server if people use it. I suspect that phpBB and similar boards don't enable it by default as it cuts down on the page views a site generates and they primarily serve "professional" forum customers who make money from ad impressions.

The theme looks good on pc. only problem is I usually look at forums on mobile and the site looks squished and gets hard to read in that mode. any way to clean up the mobile experience? I'm using an iPhone if that gives any info.

rooster4796 wrote:The theme looks good on pc. only problem is I usually look at forums on mobile and the site looks squished and gets hard to read in that mode. any way to clean up the mobile experience? I'm using an iPhone if that gives any info.

Maybe Tapatalk?

Good that the old theme is still around, because the new one is not as space efficient as previous; I guess monitors should be used rotated if interface design keeps this trend. And also what IJW said, things were easier to differentiate too. So back to the "old" (months old?) Digital theme for me.

Definitely much more work friendly than the previous one

Three suggestions

1) The type, at least on my browser, is pretty large. Perhaps if it was even a point smaller?

2) The logotype for the forum is on two lines and it takes up a lot of space. Perhaps take "The Online Infinity Magazine & Community" and put it on the same line as Data Sphere and then maybe reduce the whitespace after to have it take up less space? That one element is about 20% of the screen and then when you add the white space after it and after the breadcrumbs you are looking at over a third of the page.

3) If you reduce the size of the type overall you might be able to save a little space with the right sidebar menus and then give more space to the comment text area.

Thanks

One thing... about Digital, does it become unsupported? Because there were one or two icons that were not made, and so I wonder if waste of time doing them or not (some days a bit flips and I launch a graphics app, like the maps for Section9) or reporting that the header is still full of compression ringing.

Is there a way to fix the avatars being all squashed up when viewing the forum from a phone or tablet?

Failing that, you could hide the avatars from mobile viewing to allow more space for text?

You can disable avatars in your profile

Also try other themes.

The tech guys are on it!

@Zac: funny, I actually think the font is on the small side. What screen resolution are you on?

@jwai: looking into that, it even squashes some avatars in the desktop theme.

We'll most likely keep tweaking stuff, based on your responses. I've opened up a feedback through in the appropriate forum section. If you could look into that and reply wit your ideas, it'll most certainly be looked at!

rooster4796 wrote:The theme looks good on pc. only problem is I usually look at forums on mobile and the site looks squished and gets hard to read in that mode. any way to clean up the mobile experience? I'm using an iPhone if that gives any info.

Confirmed. I will be looking into fixing that this week.

It's pretty swanky but I felt the animations made it feel a lot more sluggish than it actually is.

Spears wrote:It's pretty swanky but I felt the animations made it feel a lot more sluggish than it actually is.

Then you must have noticed I removed said animations. It looked ace, but it felt like the forum was slow (when it really wasn't).

I actually swapped straight to the old theme, I guess i'll give it another go.
Thanks

I'm using the old theme.

There's something about the new layout that I didn't like but the older layout is easier for me to use.

I do 95% of my browsing from my home desktop. I have a smartphone, but it's mainly used to make and receive calls. The browser is sluggish as hell and reliant on local cell nets (got ADSL2+ at home that's faster).

I've also swapped back to the old again. The newer has a lot of space between the posts, coupled with the narrower width caused by the widget on the right it results in a lot more scrolling to actually read a page. Maybe only showing the right hand box on the index page would help?

Spears wrote:I've also swapped back to the old again. The newer has a lot of space between the posts, coupled with the narrower width caused by the widget on the right it results in a lot more scrolling to actually read a page. Maybe only showing the right hand box on the index page would help?

Jup, I was thinking the same thing. I'll look into that.

my eyes burn.... but i prefere new fonts .. they look better on my LCD

and you can always turn it off in preferences ^-^

@captainspud: thanks for the big bunch of feedback! I agree with most issues and we'll most definitely have a go at improving some of the issues you've brought up.

this icon vs all the ones like .

Thanks guys, keep this feedback coming. We're going to be actively working on the theme to make it even better