Shiny new forum theme

[Arachas]

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!

[Taylor]

Very cool, man. Looks great!

[ElectricPaladin]

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

[IJW Wartrader]

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.

[Zac]

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?

[Arachas]

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.

[Zac]

@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.

[rooster4796]

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.

[Zac]

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?

[Mob of Blondes]

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.

[Splod]

Definitely much more work friendly than the previous one

[Zac]

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

[Mob of Blondes]

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.

[jwai]

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?

[Zac]

You can disable avatars in your profile

[Mob of Blondes]

Also try other themes.

[Arachas]

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!

[Coder]

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.

[Spears]

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

[Arachas]

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).

[Spears]

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

[chromedog]

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).

[Spears]

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?

[Arachas]

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.

[Maru]

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

[captainspud]

Sorry to say that I'm really not liking this theme. There are some legibility issues, and a MASSIVE amount of wasted space that reduces the size of the "useful" content areas of the forum.

1) The "Main Menu" and "User Menu" on the right side eat up 20% of the usable page width, dramatically limiting the potential width of embedded pictures. I've never seen a forum that didn't have those items on the top of the page in teensy-tiny print-- I would recommend sticking with the standard layout. Right-side menus are mostly used for blogs, and don't really have a place on a web forum.

2) The "Data Sphere" title at the top of the page eats up too much vertical space, especially considering that you already have your logo above it. Why not use the front page logo (which has both the icon and your fancier-font site name) in the top left corner and then do away with this space-eating white block entirely? Or move the side menus from item #1 where the white block is now?

3) The "posted by [whomever]" line just above each post is in the exact same font style and colour as the text of the posts with no dividing blocks to separate it from post text. Thus, it's annoying to try to find the start of a post on a very quick eye scan. I would recommend reducing the size of this element and (ideally) putting a horizontal line under it.

4) The "number of posts" indicator beside each forum on the main index page is kind of pointless and, again, eats up space for no reason-- both horizontally to compound the narrow page problem caused by the side menus, and vertically, making each forum row taller (and thus, making the index page as a whole much longer to scroll through if you want to go to the bottom). You already have an indicator for the thread count (a more relevant statistic, IMHO); you don't need that AND the post count, so the speech bubble post counter can probably just be nuked. If you want to keep it, I would strongly recommend reducing the size of this element by getting rid of the "speech bubble" graphic and reducing the font sizes of the text within.

5) This one is a fairly minor thing, but the icons you use for different thread types (normal post, announcement, "hot" post, etc) are all the same colour, which hurts quick scanning. Your forum colour scheme has at least one additional colour you can use without hurting cohesion (the medium blue colour), so swapping the Announcement and Hot icons to use this colour instead of all the same dark grey might make parsing easier.

6) And on a note that has nothing to do with the forums: I think you guys may be dedicating too much space in your main website layout to the article splash graphic. When you go to the main page right now, you get slammed in the face with a gigantic Ariadna logo and have to scroll to get to any sort of useful content. This is extremely off-putting and immediately made me close the page immediately upon arrival.

I get that you were going for something a bit different with the layout and I applaud the effort, but for the most part I don't think your innovations were ultimately successful. The forums are clean and pretty, but they really suffer on a layout and usability level.

[Maru]

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

[Arachas]

@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.

[Mob of Blondes]

this icon vs all the ones like .

[Coder]

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