Problems with the new design

But in a good way, I wont visit as often.

  1. The whitespace is blinding,
  2. the round circles of randomness of pics and letters make no sense so it triggers my OCD,
  3. You click on “About”… to see the categories for the forum… and then you have to remind yourself where that topic was or which category should I post this in.
    and as I am typing this… I cant find the submit button… or is it this create topic button?
    Was this a free wordpress template?
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I had the same exact thoughts in my first few visits and I can say that discourse is 100x better than the old phpBB format.

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the phpBB is very popular format used worldwide.
I dont see any benefit from this new design, other than a notification that I received an “reward” or a “trophy” for being here over a year. I dunno, I will plow through when I really need an answer to something important… but as far as posting for fun / observations/ etc… forget it. It’s not worth the time.

PhpBB sucks and not much can be done to improve it because of the way it’s written. It’s a good idea to move away from it.

Discourse as a forum engine is much better. It’s a big step in the right direction. Here it’s just the default layout that sucks but this could be easily improved by a good designer. A frugal way instead of a total overhaul would be just to remove all the clutter from the layout, which is what has actually been done by some people before:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/23288

I too find parts of the new forum annoying but I also know that it wouldn’t take a lot of changes to fix it so hopefully it will be addressed with time.

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I didn’t like it at first but now i’m used to it and it’s nice. Only thing I would like to change is a bigger avatar and I miss the titles we get like buxiban lao ban or high school triad member.

Oh yeah those titles are hilarious. It’d be nice to keep them lol.

Personally I like this new design because I get to see the new posts up front. The old format was probably easier to use (at first sight) but it was also extremely boring. All other fora out there are like that, it’s nice to have something cutting edge. :laughing:

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The white background is a bit too white. Just checked it and it’s 100% white.

I still have mixed feelings. Reading a single thread on the new forum is ok, but browsing through different sub-forums wastes a lot of time.

I am a creature of habit . So as such I don’t like the new forum.
But the old one crashing all the time was a huge nuisance.

This is the better of the two evils.

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i just wanna know what happened to the weather thread!

It feels like moving from Win7 to Win8, the headache. Yet, I tried it on mobile screen and feels not bad.

I’ve noticed a few posts with “(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 876000 hours unless flagged)”, but that must be a mistake. If you really want a round number, it should obviously be 876576 hours to equal 100 years exactly. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Don’t change this now, I have already marked my calendar …

Anyway the admins can do something about this whiteness? It does hurt my eyes!

I agree that a different color scheme would be preferable. There’s got to be an easy fix for that.

phpBB is a dinosaur, I remember setting it up for a job I did in 2003 or thereabouts. Discourse at least feels like it’s from this decade.

Hopefully the “default word document black helvetica on white” look can be adjusted in future, I find it a bit painful to read.

I off-whitened the whiteness of our white background–you can see the difference in the top header. Please let us know what you think

Thanks for all the feedback all, and we hope to see more

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The white didn’t bother me too much since I usually visit the forums under fluorescent lights in the office.

I too agree the “ranking” system should make its return! These badges mean nothing!

We’re looking at the badges and will definitely be making some changes, including ways to implement the old title system.

any changes to make the avatar bigger? It was a cool way to tell who’s who in the community before