Hello, everyone. I am brain dead tired. I worked on this migration for two days straight - my entire weekend. There were so many unforeseen complications that it isn't even funny. Getting everything moved over was a complete technical nightmare, and I'm not even 100% sure I got everything. So bear with me - if you see anything odd, PM me. Let me know so I can fix it. Yeah, some things have changed. Improvements here, tweaks there, changes here and there. Just something to spice things up a bit - like this new Halloween theme, which is entirely optional by the way. (Check the buttons in the bottom-left of the forums) I need to pass out now, as I have work tomorrow. I apologize in advance if something is completely and utterly broken, or not to your liking. I'll fix stuff as it's noticed or reported to me. If you don't like something, such as the new layout, try sucking it up for a while and see if it doesn't grow on you. You might be surprised. It was a pain to maintain multiple forum layouts. Take care everyone, have fun roleplaying, Kazyyk
This is what I see. I won't even go into the idea that information is buried within other information because of the direction English reads in. LET THE DISLIKES FLOW IN.
I'm actually in agreement for the exact same reasons. Edit: I'm noticing the new site is much faster.
Try using the Width Adjustment button. You can see it in the bottom-left corner of your screenshot, next to the style selector.
I don't know if it's something I'm missing, but I can't seem to find the player count... widget thing, which was incredibly helpful. It's a lot more convenient than looking it up on the server list, which is the alternative. Until it returns, I can keep doing that, and that's fine. But I just thought I'd say something. Also I don't seem to have permissions to respond to anything in Roleplay Planning, I'm not sure about the other sections. Otherwise, I think the layout looks nice on mobile, and I appreciate the Halloween theme!
Still not helpful. Still looks bad. The standardized forum is standardized for a reason. Its good design. Honestly, Antares was one of the only Starbound RP forums that didn't have this bad layout. And now it does have this bad layout. I'm not going to bail immediately because I don't like the change, but it is incredibly discouraging from using the forums..
Thank you, but I've been using a different server list for the player count. Antares Roleplaying Server | Starbound server
That reminds me, I need to re-add the tracker to the sidebar. It's space efficient...? Less vertical scrolling. EDIT: I made a tweak to make it more "consistent"
Node, your screen must be bigger than mine, but at my resolution and uh... layout, it's only two topics in each section, and it seems fairly clean.I don't quite see what the problem is, unless it's something with the theme. Maybe if I zoomed out, I'd see what you're seeing.
Readability > Spacial efficiency It's... better. I won't bother you with another diagram of why I don't like it though. Use the width toggle, and you'll see what I see. Kaz changed it since I posted my initial diagram, so its not as bad. Its still messy as heck, but slightly more tolerable.
But it's inherently clean I think this one is to be chalked up to personal preference. Mayhaps I'll add back the option to go to a more traditional layout sometime, but no promises.
>Inherently clean You won't let it go, will you? I'll start off why standardized forums are designed the way they are, with a vertical alignment. For each section or category, the names are written left to right, because we are dealing with English. Alright cool, that seems obvious. To create breaks for the eye, to indicate that there has been a shift in sections, the next section or category is below the last one. The language of design is consistent. Move down, up and down for different categories, and left and right for the information contained in each. Discovering information is a very binary process. This pairs nicely with a sidebar, because sidebars are extra information, often peppered with various other GUI functionality. The header bar also gets a pass because internet language dictates that navigation is traditionally found on the top of websites. You've removed the basic binary structure in favor of a more convoluted one. With or without width toggle, this problem remains with the addition of an axis for finding information. It isn't good design. Sure, people may like it because they either don't know/understand/care/are hugboxing, but they also wouldn't care if it had a more classic look either. So why would you bother alienating the people that do care. And I know I'm not the only one that cares. I just think that a lot of other people don't feel like they can directly oppose you since you are the admin. Kaz, it's cool that you put in time and effort and work. Its great that you still care about the community. But you shouldn't attempt to reinvent the wheel. The wheel worked fine.
I don't like it when people say this, as I think it's more of an assumption than a truth. I'm not saying it doesn't have some truth to it, but I do think that it's an easy assumption to make. These breaks are still present, just with the addition of new horizontal breaks separating content on the same vertical line to distinguish different content groups while providing an increase in concision which permits more information to be absorbed/processed in a single glance than what would be possible with the traditional layout, particularly on smaller screens. Now I'm all about choice, which is why we used to have the selection for those who preferred it. I'll likely end up re-adding the option at some point in the future so just give me some time to work out the rest of the kinks before I add new features or re-implement previous ones.
Fine. While I'm ripping on design though, I do have one issue that's unrelated to current forum layout. Putting rules before forums on the top bar is great for rookies. Not as helpful to everyone that's been on the site for a while. I keep ending up on the rules page because its where the forums button used to be. This is mostly just annoying. As for the admin thing, I can tell you I've spoken to enough people privately to indicate that this is at least somewhat true. And its true on other forums. And its true in life. Sometimes you have idiots like me though who will throw caution to the wind and tell their boss that they think that they've done something stupid. EDIT: Also, I noticed we don't have the bar showing how many peeps are in the server... that would be cool to have back.
I would disagree Edit: They shouldn't feel the need to not oppose them, because you don't get banned for that, unless you oppose them by not obeying their orders to stop doing something thats against the rules, but thats it.
