Forums

I've changed the forum templates to make them look a little bit more like the main site. The biggest change you may notice is that the page is fixed-width. The competitions widget at the top will of course only be there for a few more weeks.

I'd make it a tad larger perhaps. Can we allow for small width and cap larger width to a maximum?

I changed the width to max-width. The width should match the main site, do you think it is too narrow?

looks good to me, reading posts is definitely more nicer now. Much less left-right scanning needed :)

Seems like exposure gets donations =)

Is it just me, or did the font become gigantic yesterday or so?

In before someone says that I have to change the zoom level of my browser thinking that I'm stupid and that I didn't check it out already.

So it is not Opera's Zoom setting gone bad ^^

The font got an extra 1pt to match the main site, and be a bit closer to modern website design :) phpBB seems obsessed with having stuff in small fonts all the time. Expect more changes in future...

I'll be honest, I don't like the bigger font.

Well, I may change it. Do you find the fonts large on the rest of the site?

Oh no, don't misread me, the rest of the website is fine and I like it, it's just that the bigger font looks out of place on the forum, in my opinion, maybe because I'm not used to it and I always think something went wrong with my zoom settings or with a css or something...
Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it, but as of now, my reaction is "wtf happened" and not "hey this looks good".

I totally agree with Tom.

I'm using Firefox. In Opera looks a bit better, as the underline thickness isn't that fat.

I think big fonts must have a (design?) reason, like search input captions or titles.

What is very common today is to use new google fonts. That is really pleasing and you have lots of fonts to choose: www.google.com/webfonts

Web fonts are generally not good for body text due to poor hinting and we have chosen not to use them for headings. But that's a digression.

Overall, I'd like to move the forums to look more like the rest of the site - consider the news on the front page which is a custom representation of the news forum, and definitely readable.

Right now I think the primary problem is that there's too much bold text, especially on forum index pages, which causes the fat underlines and poor readability; it's apparently just on the Windows font renderer threshold to make everything suddenly much fatter.

TmEE wrote

So it is not Opera's Zoom setting gone bad ^^

Hah. My first thought was that I'd messed up Opera's zooming, too, so I pressed the asterisk key a few times. When it didn't change, I realised it was an update to the forum.

I'm not a fan of the larger font, but that's something I can fix (and have now fixed) on my end. :)

I have to admit, it really is a matter of getting used to it.
After a few days I'm starting to like the new design.

I haven't commented so far because I myself wanted to see it over a few weeks. Its a bit early still to be able to draw the line clearly between actual usability changes and old anchored habits reacting to any change.

The said I think the topic name "Forums match the main site a bit better" is misleading in the sense that I don't think it matter much that the forums matches the main site considering how important the forum usability needs to be. So I'm only evaluating the changes as to wether they are making the forum a better place or not.

Didn't the Preview/Submit buttons lose their original blue style in the transition?

It is an ongoing process, eventually hoping to use common css for both the forums and main site, also aiming to look good on a smartphone. I did recently change buttons to use native style, as on the main site - buttons that look like buttons should be a usability improvement.

Not a fan, it gives me a horizontal scroll bar.

Do we have pictures of the old style? There's lots of many things that disturb me that I can't put my finger on.

The crumbtrail font size seems enormous to me, and the line of button at the top ("Log out", "search") maybe shouldn't show up in bold?

I understand the change on Preview/Submit buttons if it makes it easier to use on say, iPad. Maybe the buttons could be coloured blue somehow.

Can you provide screenshots and tell me which browser you're using if there's a problem?

Fonts should mostly all be the same size. The 1pt increase makes bold text look a lot darker on Windows - I'm mostly removing the bold tags.

Scaling down by one step in Chrome gets you back to the old font size. Almost everything should be the same as it always was at that size.

IE8 1280x1024.

1280_1024.jpg (204.75 KB)

Opera, 1680 x 1050

SMSpowerInOpera.png (163.17 KB)

Opera shot

Opera seems correct.

IE is screwing up, I'll see if I can fix it.

Maxim wrote

IE is screwing up.

Tell me something I don't know :P
I don't get why people still use IE...

Firefox 1.0.7 @ 1152×864:

Chrome 13.0.782.220 @ 1152×864:

Looks good. I can provide 1920×1080 pics from my laptop later.

lol Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 @ 1152×864:

17503060.png (76.18 KB)

Firefox 1.0.7 @ 1152×864

63368513.png (77.3 KB)

Chrome 13.0.782.220 @ 1152×864

48393145.png (56.8 KB)

lol Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 @ 1152×864

I never understand what people have against IE. Sure 5 and and 6 weren't that great. But it has improved a lot over the last couple of years. Also, Firefox still has memory leaks and I'm not a fan of Google's policies. I have no real problems with IE8.

S.F wrote

I never understand what people have against IE. Sure 5 and and 6 weren't that great. But it has improved a lot over the last couple of years.

Up to and including IE7, it was abysmal for following standards - to get things to work in IE, you'd have to include nasty hacks. IE users were the bane of my existence for many years because they kept finding problems with sites I'd made - problems that didn't occur in any Real Browsers™.

I don't do much web work these days, so I don't know how IE8 is - although IE9 has caused some problems on a recent project, oddly... It is certainly improving -- as you say -- but it has taken Microsoft so long to do it... IE has been left behind.

I think IE should be better now - I've only got IE8 on this XP box, but it seems happier (padding seems missing, most other things seem correct).

IE is fine now, thx.

Currently, on the forums we use these icons:

- forums

- topics

- post anchors (like at the top of this post)

- "go to post" links

- map markers, representing users.

However, on the main site, we have:

- topic link

- post link

- user link

I'd like to standardise this, but it'd make more sense if the snail wasn't used for both users and posts. I like the egg for topics (cool stuff inside it, broken open version for read topics), and the snail for users (the guy who lives in the SMS...) - but what would make sense for posts? I'd prefer to avoid the items in eggs in Psycho Fox that we aren't already using (medicine bottle = attachment; others seem inappropriate). It has to be a maximum of 16x16px, from an iconic SMS game and ideally somehow matching the concept. Maybe this, for example:

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:31 pm

...except it's not very recognisable...

Should the text under our user names be so squished? I personally think the forum could be a little wider.... Although that is just personal preference.

Jacko wrote

Should the text under our user names be so squished?

I'm wondering about this as well. To clarify, I've attached an image of Jacko's post as seen in Firefox 10.0.3 (ESR).

JackosPost.png (56.77 KB)

That's not supposed to happen.

Firefox 1.0.7, btw.

47193693.png (3.63 KB)

The text under the user names appears "squished" in Opera as well.

The problem seems to be that, in the HTML, the column containing the names has width="150" and the one containing the posts themselves has width="100%". Given these conflicting requests some browsers honour the former, but Firefox and Opera seem to try to satisfy the latter at the former's expense.

I've removed one of the 100%s that seemed like it was causing the trouble.

That seems to have fixed it. Thanks!

The "location" field now looks weird (in a bad way) if it's longer than one line, though. Unless it's just me.

That was on purpose... it's supposed to make it clearer that it's a wrap, not someone with confusing location text.

I see. Well, I hope it can be added to the list of "things I will need some time to get used to", but... it just looks too weird :|

Not if I turn it off again. For future reference, here's what it looked like:

before.png (3.35 KB)

after.png (3.35 KB)

I actually quite liked the indent, even though its presence does not prevent "hacking": consider someone writing something like "Site Admin" in place of "Evil: yes".

Maxim, you didn't need to turn it off because it looks weird to me, my opinions might differ from other people's. Changes per se always scare me, but in the end I get used to new things with the same ease.

Also wow, I noticed just now that I've been on smspower for more than 10 years, woo :)

Take your guesses on what's what:

72875682.png (557 B)

83810321.png (568 B)

94456064.png (557 B)

It looks OK in Chrome and IE8 for me. IE6 is not expected to work.

if i were you i wouldn't even bother w/ie6 for this site at this point. xp users can go all the way to ie8, vista & 7 can do ie9, and every non-ie desktop browser is already capable of handling it "correctly."

Nice blue buttons :)

Hey, I have 98 and ie5 :(

Author	Message
Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Forums match the main site a bit better Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 6:55 pm
	I've changed the forum templates to make them look a little bit more like the main site. The biggest change you may notice is that the page is fixed-width. The competitions widget at the top will of course only be there for a few more weeks.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8702 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 6:59 pm
	I'd make it a tad larger perhaps. Can we allow for small width and cap larger width to a maximum?

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 7:08 pm
	I changed the width to max-width. The width should match the main site, do you think it is too narrow?

TmEE Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 853 Location: Estonia, Rapla city	Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2012 9:20 pm
	looks good to me, reading posts is definitely more nicer now. Much less left-right scanning needed :)

Niloct Joined: 25 Dec 2005 Posts: 618 Location: São Paulo - Brazil	Posted: Sat Mar 03, 2012 3:53 pm
	Seems like exposure gets donations =)

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:54 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Is it just me, or did the font become gigantic yesterday or so? In before someone says that I have to change the zoom level of my browser thinking that I'm stupid and that I didn't check it out already.

TmEE Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 853 Location: Estonia, Rapla city	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 8:03 am
	So it is not Opera's Zoom setting gone bad ^^

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 9:21 am
	The font got an extra 1pt to match the main site, and be a bit closer to modern website design :) phpBB seems obsessed with having stuff in small fonts all the time. Expect more changes in future...

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 1:58 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	I'll be honest, I don't like the bigger font.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 2:10 pm
	Well, I may change it. Do you find the fonts large on the rest of the site?

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 2:31 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Oh no, don't misread me, the rest of the website is fine and I like it, it's just that the bigger font looks out of place on the forum, in my opinion, maybe because I'm not used to it and I always think something went wrong with my zoom settings or with a css or something... Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it, but as of now, my reaction is "wtf happened" and not "hey this looks good".

gallos_11 Joined: 07 Jun 2010 Posts: 199	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 3:03 pm
gallos_11 Joined: 07 Jun 2010 Posts: 199	I totally agree with Tom. I'm using Firefox. In Opera looks a bit better, as the underline thickness isn't that fat.

Niloct Joined: 25 Dec 2005 Posts: 618 Location: São Paulo - Brazil	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 3:05 pm
	I think big fonts must have a (design?) reason, like search input captions or titles. What is very common today is to use new google fonts. That is really pleasing and you have lots of fonts to choose: www.google.com/webfonts

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 3:52 pm
	Web fonts are generally not good for body text due to poor hinting and we have chosen not to use them for headings. But that's a digression. Overall, I'd like to move the forums to look more like the rest of the site - consider the news on the front page which is a custom representation of the news forum, and definitely readable. Right now I think the primary problem is that there's too much bold text, especially on forum index pages, which causes the fat underlines and poor readability; it's apparently just on the Windows font renderer threshold to make everything suddenly much fatter.

aypok Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 91 Location: Merry Olde England	Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2012 4:04 pm
	TmEE wrote So it is not Opera's Zoom setting gone bad ^^ Hah. My first thought was that I'd messed up Opera's zooming, too, so I pressed the asterisk key a few times. When it didn't change, I realised it was an update to the forum. I'm not a fan of the larger font, but that's something I can fix (and have now fixed) on my end. :)

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 2:28 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	I have to admit, it really is a matter of getting used to it. After a few days I'm starting to like the new design.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8702 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 2:33 pm
	I haven't commented so far because I myself wanted to see it over a few weeks. Its a bit early still to be able to draw the line clearly between actual usability changes and old anchored habits reacting to any change. The said I think the topic name "Forums match the main site a bit better" is misleading in the sense that I don't think it matter much that the forums matches the main site considering how important the forum usability needs to be. So I'm only evaluating the changes as to wether they are making the forum a better place or not.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8702 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 3:14 pm
	Didn't the Preview/Submit buttons lose their original blue style in the transition?

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 4:03 pm
	It is an ongoing process, eventually hoping to use common css for both the forums and main site, also aiming to look good on a smartphone. I did recently change buttons to use native style, as on the main site - buttons that look like buttons should be a usability improvement.

S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012 12:07 pm
S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	Not a fan, it gives me a horizontal scroll bar.

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8702 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012 12:19 pm
	Do we have pictures of the old style? There's lots of many things that disturb me that I can't put my finger on. The crumbtrail font size seems enormous to me, and the line of button at the top ("Log out", "search") maybe shouldn't show up in bold? I understand the change on Preview/Submit buttons if it makes it easier to use on say, iPad. Maybe the buttons could be coloured blue somehow.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 7:24 am
	Can you provide screenshots and tell me which browser you're using if there's a problem? Fonts should mostly all be the same size. The 1pt increase makes bold text look a lot darker on Windows - I'm mostly removing the bold tags. Scaling down by one step in Chrome gets you back to the old font size. Almost everything should be the same as it always was at that size.

S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 2:44 pm
S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	IE8 1280x1024. 1280_1024.jpg (204.75 KB)

TmEE Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 853 Location: Estonia, Rapla city	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 4:04 pm
	Opera, 1680 x 1050 SMSpowerInOpera.png (163.17 KB) Opera shot

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 5:20 pm
	Opera seems correct. IE is screwing up, I'll see if I can fix it.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 6:01 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Maxim wrote IE is screwing up. Tell me something I don't know :P I don't get why people still use IE... Firefox 1.0.7 @ 1152×864: Chrome 13.0.782.220 @ 1152×864: Looks good. I can provide 1920×1080 pics from my laptop later. lol Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 @ 1152×864: 17503060.png (76.18 KB) Firefox 1.0.7 @ 1152×864 63368513.png (77.3 KB) Chrome 13.0.782.220 @ 1152×864 48393145.png (56.8 KB) lol Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 @ 1152×864

S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 7:29 pm
S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	I never understand what people have against IE. Sure 5 and and 6 weren't that great. But it has improved a lot over the last couple of years. Also, Firefox still has memory leaks and I'm not a fan of Google's policies. I have no real problems with IE8.

aypok Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 91 Location: Merry Olde England	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:00 pm Last edited by aypok on Tue Apr 24, 2012 3:52 pm; edited 1 time in total
	S.F wrote I never understand what people have against IE. Sure 5 and and 6 weren't that great. But it has improved a lot over the last couple of years. Up to and including IE7, it was abysmal for following standards - to get things to work in IE, you'd have to include nasty hacks. IE users were the bane of my existence for many years because they kept finding problems with sites I'd made - problems that didn't occur in any Real Browsers™. I don't do much web work these days, so I don't know how IE8 is - although IE9 has caused some problems on a recent project, oddly... It is certainly improving -- as you say -- but it has taken Microsoft so long to do it... IE has been left behind.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:55 pm
	I think IE should be better now - I've only got IE8 on this XP box, but it seems happier (padding seems missing, most other things seem correct).

S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:57 pm
S.F Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Netherlands	IE is fine now, thx.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Post icons Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 8:31 pm
	Currently, on the forums we use these icons: - forums - topics - post anchors (like at the top of this post) - "go to post" links - map markers, representing users. However, on the main site, we have: - topic link - post link - user link I'd like to standardise this, but it'd make more sense if the snail wasn't used for both users and posts. I like the egg for topics (cool stuff inside it, broken open version for read topics), and the snail for users (the guy who lives in the SMS...) - but what would make sense for posts? I'd prefer to avoid the items in eggs in Psycho Fox that we aren't already using (medicine bottle = attachment; others seem inappropriate). It has to be a maximum of 16x16px, from an iconic SMS game and ideally somehow matching the concept. Maybe this, for example: Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:31 pm ...except it's not very recognisable...

Jacko Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 1464 Location: Sunny ol Tamworth, New England NSW AU	Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 7:34 am
	Should the text under our user names be so squished? I personally think the forum could be a little wider.... Although that is just personal preference.

RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 9:36 am
	Jacko wrote Should the text under our user names be so squished? I'm wondering about this as well. To clarify, I've attached an image of Jacko's post as seen in Firefox 10.0.3 (ESR). JackosPost.png (56.77 KB)

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 3:56 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	That's not supposed to happen. Firefox 1.0.7, btw. 47193693.png (3.63 KB)

RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 10:34 am
	The text under the user names appears "squished" in Opera as well. The problem seems to be that, in the HTML, the column containing the names has width="150" and the one containing the posts themselves has width="100%". Given these conflicting requests some browsers honour the former, but Firefox and Opera seem to try to satisfy the latter at the former's expense.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 7:26 pm
	I've removed one of the 100%s that seemed like it was causing the trouble.

RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 7:03 am
	That seems to have fixed it. Thanks!

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Sat May 26, 2012 11:12 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	The "location" field now looks weird (in a bad way) if it's longer than one line, though. Unless it's just me.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 12:28 am
	That was on purpose... it's supposed to make it clearer that it's a wrap, not someone with confusing location text.

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 1:38 am
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	I see. Well, I hope it can be added to the list of "things I will need some time to get used to", but... it just looks too weird :\|

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 9:12 am
	Not if I turn it off again. For future reference, here's what it looked like: before.png (3.35 KB) after.png (3.35 KB)

RetroSpark Joined: 08 Dec 2005 Posts: 488 Location: Melbourne, Australia	Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 10:03 am
	I actually quite liked the indent, even though its presence does not prevent "hacking": consider someone writing something like "Site Admin" in place of "Evil: yes".

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 6:00 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Maxim, you didn't need to turn it off because it looks weird to me, my opinions might differ from other people's. Changes per se always scare me, but in the end I get used to new things with the same ease. Also wow, I noticed just now that I've been on smspower for more than 10 years, woo :)

Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2012 7:11 pm
Tom Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 1378 Location: italy	Take your guesses on what's what: 72875682.png (557 B) 83810321.png (568 B) 94456064.png (557 B)

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14939 Location: London	Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:39 am
	It looks OK in Chrome and IE8 for me. IE6 is not expected to work.

neologix Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 93 Location: New York, NY, USA	Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:05 pm
	if i were you i wouldn't even bother w/ie6 for this site at this point. xp users can go all the way to ie8, vista & 7 can do ie9, and every non-ie desktop browser is already capable of handling it "correctly."

Bock Site Admin Joined: 08 Jul 2001 Posts: 8702 Location: Paris, France	Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2012 9:54 pm
	Nice blue buttons :)

Kaunisto Joined: 19 Apr 2012 Posts: 51 Location: Finland	Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 9:19 pm
Kaunisto Joined: 19 Apr 2012 Posts: 51 Location: Finland	Hey, I have 98 and ie5 :(

Forums

View topic - Forums match the main site a bit better