New look.

[Abraxas]

I want to second Plane Sailing's dislike of the Bold unread messages in forums. I already have to diable the boards default font, and the font I find easiest to read is not easy to read in bold yellow on black.

 

[nHammer]

Looking good.

 

[Psionicist]

Some of your suggestions are very good, Psionicist, and I'll certainly look at them.

Others, I'm not sure sure about. A few of them suggest that users just check elsewhere for the info; I'm of the opinion that every time you require someone to actively do something to find the info, you reduce the chance that they'll be able to do it. For example, my grandmother would never think to check someone's profile (or even know that it's possible), but she might like seeing someone's location next to their name - "Oooh! That nice chap lives in Newport! I went there for my holidays last year!".

I realise that using a grandmother is a bit of an extreme example, but from the "Help!" emails I regularly get, having as many of the options/info clearly displayed on the screen is a good thing.

I especially think that having the style dropdown on the main page is important. A lot of people want different styles, and many of them don't know where to find it.

If only half of my suggestions come true I will be one happy gamer.

On the other hand we have the current "feature overload", the forum is overwhelming, it feels like Tokyo with everything everywhere.
If grandmother wants to search the web, I think she will find www.google.com easier to use than www.msn.com, Google is just a small box and a button, whereas MSN is a huge portal with loads of features, text, colors etc. Most people like features, but in the end too many of them will result in annoyance and confusion.
That said, I do belive you're correct about the information (location etc), I am mostly concerned about links, buttons and everything that does something when you press it.

The best way to solve this problem is probably to create lots of different themes with different levels of features, such as "minimalistic" (read thread, post reply, and that's it), "standard", and "advanced" (lots of features everywhere). I am one of those radical beings who won't touch a computer program if it has too many features, but I can imagine some people here love features.

I have created a few sample pages without lots of colors and features. Notice pretty much everything is gone. I like it though.

Index: http://psionicist.online.fr/enwtemp/enw_index.html
A forum index: http://psionicist.online.fr/enwtemp/enw_forum.html
A thread: http://psionicist.online.fr/enwtemp/enw_thread.html


(the stylesheet, if anyone is interested: http://psionicist.online.fr/enwtemp/enw.css PLEASE NOTE! This is not a complete, fully working style sheet. Some things not shown on the pages above aren't fixed, there are still traces of the standard theme in there )

 

[Lela]

Hmmmm, I'd recomend moving the Post Icons back above the text field. It's no longer possible to quickly press Tab and Enter to be done. As it is, you need to reach over to the mouse, scroll down, and click. It's Utility mostly but it would help me (at least) a lot.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Hmmmm, I'd recomend moving the Post Icons back above the text field. It's no longer possible to quickly press Tab and Enter to be done. As it is, you need to reach over to the mouse, scroll down, and click. It's Utility mostly but it would help me (at least) a lot.

It still actually works with me (pressing tab and the enter) - the fact that focus is no longer on the text entry field seems to do the trick.

Personally I'm glad to see the wall of (to me, useless) post icons below the text area, so I don't have to scroll down to actually reach the input area!

If there was an option to hide the post icons I'd do it like a shot.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The things I like about the new look are still in the lead, but if I might be so bold as to mention one other thing that I'm coming to dislike about the new appearance:

thread starters underneath the thread title.

Firstly it extends the list and increases the amount of space to an unwanted degree, making it harder for me to read. Secondly it is much harder to scan down a list of threads for ones started by people whose opinion I'm particularly interested in.

Cheers

 

[Piratecat]

I dislike that, too; it makes it more difficult to quickly scan threads.

 

[Davelozzi]

These smilies stink; we'll swap them out soon enough.

Good. I've been looking around for a holy symbol for the past few days so I could turn 'em.

 

[Lela]

It still actually works with me (pressing tab and the enter) - the fact that focus is no longer on the text entry field seems to do the trick.

Personally I'm glad to see the wall of (to me, useless) post icons below the text area, so I don't have to scroll down to actually reach the input area!

If there was an option to hide the post icons I'd do it like a shot.

I would too.

It might be a Mozilla/Netscape thing (anyone else notice this?). I'm on an IE computer right now and I just need to click Tab twice. I'll double check and see if it's still a problem at home later.

Assuming they weren't hidden, perhaps they could just be moved down below the "Submit Reply" are along with the rest of the options.