Couldn't agree more... With Tom.
This forum layout just honestly works better for the sort of community this is.
Neblim wrote:
I show outside friends these forum trees and they immediately turn away and run. Just saying, it's been like this since year 2000, no? Really? Over a forum? Personally I believe BYOND's forum structure is probably one of the best things the site has going for it. | |
Chord wrote:
This forum layout just honestly works better for the sort of community this is. The less than brilliant 12 year old community that wouldn't know an easy to use, well designed anything if it earned them a million dollars? The community that would rather skim through an infinite number of pointless spam copies of the same exact thing? Probably, but if anything, that's just another reason to change it. SuperAntx wrote: Really? Over a forum? If not the forums, I'm sure the hub would. Especially once they realize those billion games are really all the same one, and that none of them are any good. Personally I believe BYOND's forum structure is probably one of the best things the site has going for it. You think this horrible wall of text is a good thing? or even worse, this one? That's just a redundant, uninformative, and unorganized wall of text fail IMO. At least Topic View provides a semi-competent layout for anyone who has ever used any other forums anywhere. What forums should look like, for the most part. And single message view expects you to read one post at a time? I could maybe see having these modes as options, but having them as the default is ridiculous. Even with the best options selected, I still have a few complaints, but at least the forums become usable. | |
I like it too.
There are always people who are going to prefer one style over the other. Personally, I run 4 different phpBB forums for various games and organizations that I volunteer for, and if this took on the aame appearance as one of those, I'd be dissapointed. I like the default view format for this forum better. | |
Zagreus wrote:
There are always people who are going to prefer one style over the other. That may be true, but one of those sides is usually wrong. Can you name a single advantage to having a pointlessly long list of the same exact topic names? I could see if it actually displayed the posts like that, like some websites do with their comments, but that isn't the case here. Somebody else posted this point as well, but they seem to have deleted their post. | |
No, those phpbb-type boards look like crap. I post on many forums and BYOND's is by far the best for its threading and the fact it has a regular old text box. I absolutely hate when web designers try to pump in as much crap as possible in order to have a few extra features and buttons nobody ever uses.
As for that wall of text you referenced, that's definitely a valid criticism. Perhaps sometime in the future we'll be able to expand and contract threads on the fly. I'm almost positive I've seen this requested before, but honestly it's one of the lest important changes which need to be made. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
No, those phpbb-type boards look like crap. Organized, informative, standardized, easy to use, straight to the point, and offering more features without increasing the complexity? Yes, what horrible horrible crap they are, visually or otherwise. I post on many forums and BYOND's is by far the best for its threading and the fact it has a regular old text box. Text boxes, as opposed to the magical mind inscribing plates other forums use? Whats the alternative you're referring to? Every forum I've ever seen uses a simple text box for posting, most with more advanced features and some even dynamically appearing on the same page, so I don't have to reload the forums 30 times to post 1 thing. | |
Falacy wrote:
Text boxes as opposed to the magical mind inscribing plates other forums use? You should take a look at the Giant Bomb forum. The community is great, I just think their posting interface is atrocious. | |
I think what would really fuel this discussion beyond mere speculation is if Tom could include a just a screenshot of the new website design in question...
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Flame Sage wrote:
I think what would really fuel this discussion beyond mere speculation is if Tom could include a just a screenshot of the new website design in question... Or just make it available to the rest of us so we can weigh in our opinions. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
Flame Sage wrote: We are working on some optimizations so we can't open up the test site just yet, but we will most likely do a public test prior to switching over. Games page While we went with a more conventional color palette and layout, the main changes are internal as to how games & resources are organized. We hope the search system is more useful in this iteration. Developers page The idea here is, instead of forcing users to submit content to a guild (something that never caught fire), volunteers simply highlight useful community posts & resources as we see them. There is a lot of good material already, but it has never been well organized. | |
I do like the idea of this layout a lot better.
Though, do members still get the ads hidden? The grey does throw it a little off, but I assume little stuff like that is still being worked out. Perhaps beside the games we should have "friends online" that have little icons similar to the game hub icons, but have their member icons there? And have it open up a small facebook like paging system? | |
Flame Sage wrote:
I do like the idea of this layout a lot better. Yes, members can still hide ads. I don't think we'll ever come up with a color scheme that everyone would like, and themes are a bit of an overkill since only 0.1% will every use them. The neutral scheme is boring but should have the least resistence. Perhaps beside the games we should have "friends online" that have little icons similar to the game hub icons, but have their member icons there? And have it open up a small facebook like paging system? We have a web pager project in the works that basically replaces the standalone pager (which will be necessary for users on other platforms using the Flash client anyway). This will cover the above functionality and much more. The big concern we have now is machine overhead (something we've spent the last three days working on). | |
I use the top bar for 99% of my navigation on BYOND, so it looks like it'll be a very minor change to me. Which is good.
As for the design, yay for widescreen filler. I run at 1920x1080, and while it is nice for previewing <dm> blocks, at other times it makes the forum posts and stuff way too stretched. One paragraph frequently looks like one line. Such at this one. I like. | |
The layout looks much, much better. It's kinda funny to say it, but now that I'm used to the blue/orange color scheme I think it's better than the new one you have there. I'd suggest swapping out the off-white/grayish look for the current blue color scheme. The little bit of orange up in the top is fine and still acts as a good contrasting color for blue, only this time it's much less intrusive.
I'd do something about those stars though. They remind me of "buy one get one free" infomercials. It would probably just be a good idea to remove them entirely. I see we can now sort based on date. If that's the case we should be able to alter the display date on the hub. Decadence for example was released about a month ago, but the hub entry was made last year for the sake of beta testing. I'd rather the hub date reflect the day of release rather than hub creation. Authors could also potentially change the date to reflect any recent updates. | |
Zagreus wrote:
I use the top bar for 99% of my navigation on BYOND, so it looks like it'll be a very minor change to me. Which is good. Yeah, we'll keep the same bar, although we might spruce up the look a bit. As for the design, yay for widescreen filler. I run at 1920x1080, and while it is nice for previewing <dm> blocks, at other times it makes the forum posts and stuff way too stretched. One paragraph frequently looks like one line. Such at this one. Yeah, I was resistant to that because the engineer in me likes using all the space available, but Forum_account convinced me otherwise and showed a very nice mockup that this site is largely based upon. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
The layout looks much, much better. It's kinda funny to say it, but now that I'm used to the blue/orange color scheme I think it's better than the new one you have there. I'd suggest swapping out the off-white/grayish look for the current blue color scheme. The little bit of orange up in the top is fine and still acts as a good contrasting color for blue, only this time it's much less intrusive. While I personally like the blue too, I think new users are generally more accepting to white, because it's what most sites use. Again, it's just not possible to make everyone happy. I'd do something about those stars though. They remind me of "buy one get two free" infomercials. It would probably just be a good idea to remove them entirely. They make a little more sense in the other viewing modes, where featured (starred) items can be mixed with others (which have no star and a white background). Although color acts as a highlight, the star is sort of a universal way of saying "this is good", which is what we want. I see we can now sort based on date. If that's the case we should be able to alter the display date on the hub. Decadence for example was released about a month ago, but the hub entry was made last year for the sake of beta testing. I'd rather the hub date reflect the day of release rather than hub creation. Authors could also potentially change the date to reflect any recent updates. The only problem there is that we don't want to encourage "bumping" just to keep a game on the top page. We probably need a submission/approval system for that. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
I'd do something about those stars though.Agreed I'd rather the hub date reflect the day of release rather than hub creation. Authors could also potentially change the date to reflect any recent updates.Date sorting should be based on the last time the game was publicly hosted, not any of that criteria. Especially not values manually updated by the hub owner, they would just update their hub to today's date to get listed first Tom wrote: While I personally like the blue too, I think new users are generally more accepting to white, because it's what most sites use.Then go with white and blue, instead of gray and white? I think its mainly the orange around here that's a bit ridiculous, and animetastic. They make a little more sense in the other viewing modes, where featured (starred) items can be mixed with others (which have no star and a white background). Although color acts as a highlight, the star is sort of a universal way of saying "this is good", which is what we want.I think they're too big, should stay yellow, and shouldn't be half sticking off the corner. Not saying you should get rid of them entirely. The only problem there is that we don't want to encourage "bumping" just to keep a game on the top page. We probably need a submission/approval system for that.Date sort by last public hosting... | |
Tom wrote:
Zagreus wrote: I was thinking more about this, and specifically <dm> blocks on forum posts, and what sort of effect the widescreen filler might have on the forum layout. We would really have to wait till it is done to see if the new forum width is appropriate or not, but is there any way to have something similar to the image viewer, which can create a sort of "popup" (although not really, I'm not sure what you call those) that will present a code box that utilizes the full width of the browser window when viewing a <dm> block? Or would that look bad? | |
Methinks the lady doth... not take constructive criticism well =P