Official feedback thread for new forum design (beta version)!

[Kevin OQuinn]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

First glance:

I have a 28" 4K display at work, my laptop is a 15.6" 4K display. At home my desktop monitor is 3440x1440. I have high resolution displays all over the place, but the forums are still only wide enough to fill maybe half of them, and far less than that at home.

AC Forums are not the first or only site to poorly scale to my displays, but being a brand new design I expected this to be taken into consideration.

Also, the "POST QUICK REPLY" and "GO ADVANCED" buttons are grayed out, which makes it seems like they don't work until you actually hover over them. That seems to go against what users have been used to.

 

[TheBlkGuyFrmWrk]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

maybe I overlooked it but maybe a legend that says what these icons mean the pencil and the question mark don't know if there are more:

even mousing over with some text would be helpful imo

 

[David Lundblad]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Unfortunately, days of such web-design seem to be numbered.

Hey and thanks for that feedback! We are attempting to remain compelling to our hardcore forum users while also making the forums more compelling to a very wide audience. Over 85% of our forum traffic is just straight out of a google search. This is why you see a lot of sites changing We want our fly-by visitors to be enticed to stick around and engage or at least read the great content our members produce in the forums. Right now the bounce rate is very high so we want to fix that any way we can.

Hopefully you will like some of the changes and perhaps we'll release a 'hardcore' view too

 

[pazces84]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I like the new design. It seems easier find a specific kind of forum. I like the simplicity look too.

 

[BB-JAM215]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I don't like the way the "Originally Posted by" comments look like they belong to the person replying.

I just added a screen shot to show what I mean. When you first look at this post, the "originally posted by" comments look like they were made by Toni, not Aquila, and the grey out font used for the "originally posted by" text doesn't help.

And I don't see my "Reason for Editing" comment is this updated post.

 

[Nechasin]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

On the light theme, the background of the quoted text is too light and hard to distinguish.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I opened an external link to the forums and it did not open correctly.

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I opened an external link to the forums and it did not open correctly.

View attachment 250353

This actually keeps happening. I'll do a bit more investigating. I'm on a VPN right now, but I don't think that will make a difference i how the page renders considering it renders corrently when I open it from the actual page instead of an external link.

 

[Matty]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Man, crushing it with the feedback - thank you so much

You you are very welcome. Love helping out where i can especially with 'Beta' testing. Such a fun 'Job'. Ive still got lots more to mention but didn't want to make the post too long to read. Additionally some of the feedback i wanted to include had already been mention by other members so didn't want to duplicate them.

Its also a work in progress so not going to nit pick on things and looking more at a usability perspective. Glad my feedback is of use.

 

[EgoAnt]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Woot! Okay, I got my account / login issue here on AC figured out. I thought I had AC attached already but I didn't.

New forum design first impressions:

• Overall the design is nice and feels more modern.
• The layout feels like it has more space / padding, which makes it easier to read.
• I see a bunch of possible accessibility issues with contrast on the default theme. The thread "last update" time and user post count below their picture are almost invisible. The quote, reply and like buttons are a bit better, but still not fantastic.
• There is a bit of an issue with the profile images bumping up against the chat boxes for me. I'm using Chrome in Windows here at work. (image below)
• Some of the icons load a little slowly for me occasionally and I end up with the button description showing beside the icon (see image below)
• I switched to dark mode and it's pretty great, still a couple contrast issues. In dark mode the red has to go. Look at the image samples below.

User images bumping:


Icons loading slowly:


Dark mode current with red:

I find the red pretty hard on the eyes.

Same thing with green / blue:

 

[Todd Bernhard]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

1) Would like to be able to view more posts at a time. Perhaps offer an option (25 | 50 | 100)

2) I agree with others who said there's too much white space between posts. Don't want to go to the other extreme, like Reddit, but something in between.

3) Nitpick but my avatar in the top left corner is cut off at the top and bottom. Looks to be a wide rectangle, not a square as it should be.

4) Post Reply buttons are hard to find... needs contrasting color.

That said... I like it!

---todd

 

[EgoAnt]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Dark mode on the VR forums reveals that some of your icons aren't transparent:

 

[anon(394005)]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I made the mistake of clicking on the link to take a look at the new forums. Not liking the new design and it won't let me revert back to the old one.

Just had that happen too. Normally just toggling yes or no for the "Help us test our new forum design?" option under General settings did the trick (would take effect upon refreshing a forum page). But today I had to clear browser cookies and log back in (since your login session is stored in a cookie) to get things back to the existing design.

 

[laytoncy]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I like what I've seen so far. Is there a way to tell which threads are unread besides off to the left where in red it shows how many posts are unread? I think the old forum for me show that information and the thread title was bold. I don't think I noticed it in bold in this new version.

 

[anon(679606)]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

This is our official feedback thread for our new forum design. If you haven't heard of this yet, and would like to help us out by testing the design, please go here for all the details.

For those that are here with the new design activated, we ask that you kindly provide your feedback below.

Thank you in advance for your help, we can't do this without you!!

Hello I'm a long-time use of these forms and I recognize that you are making an attempt to refresh the forms and address certain problems. My initial observation immediately upon find the new format for less than 5 minutes is that I observe much less content per viewing screen on my BlackBerry. Replaced by lots of empty white space requiring lots of scrolling to access content. You're too for the contact was much more Compact and compressed requiring less finger workout to get to what you want. Just saying and give it a thought.

 

[xandros9]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

One more thing of note is that I no longer have quick access to who liked or quoted me as of now from the main page. The previous menu was somewhat awkward but just having the inbox button isn't too much better although it is a lot better aesthetically.

 

[darius_robin]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Great design

 

[anon(394005)]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

Hey and thanks for that feedback! We are attempting to remain compelling to our hardcore forum users while also making the forums more compelling to a very wide audience. Over 85% of our forum traffic is just straight out of a google search. This is why you see a lot of sites changing We want our fly-by visitors to be enticed to stick around and engage or at least read the great content our members produce in the forums. Right now the bounce rate is very high so we want to fix that any way we can.

Hopefully you will like some of the changes and perhaps we'll release a 'hardcore' view too

Please please please provide a "hardcore" view or at least an option to revert/stay on the existing design. I've tried the new design many times in the past couple of weeks and it just doesn't work for me at all (can't get back to the existing design fast enough!). Otherwise in all honesty if the new design is the only option I'll feel much less inclined to visit much anymore.

 

[Sergiu Iordache]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

It's nice, but I can quite difficult because there are beginner!

 

[jeff275]

Re: Official feedback thread for new forum design!

I understand what you're doing and I like the simplicity, but on a desktop there is A LOT of wasted space. It's easily 50% of my screen. I don't want clutter but everything is too big with too much empty space on the sides.