MrRowl said:
I'm sorry - I feel bad being negative, but this is not a positive change. I'm not a regular poster nowadays (I used to be...) but it seems to be more of the kinds of changes that pushed me away. Comments here relate to the forums:
- Huge waste of "white space" (depending on light/dark theme!). I don't get this - I come here for information and to be able to scan without scrolling etc. For example, just above this edit box there are four "one line/sentence" posts - and that is all that fits on the screen! Similarly for the topic list in a forum. And this from someone whose eyes are failing and can't even generally cope with small text these days!
- It's slower to load pages/topics (hard to compare - but I don't remember it being as sluggish as this).
- No read/unread indication. Seems unbelievable this was pushed out without that support.
- No "page" support for threads/topics. That makes it harder to manage/navigate long threads.
- No search-in-topic.
- This editor is buggy (not a significant comment, because bug fixes are easy). Seems weird I could hit a bug (using "*" for bullet points) within 10 seconds of typing, not doing anything weird.
There seems to be a reinvention of the wheel here, and I don't really get it. It distracts from the content - and I think has pulled people like me away from gamedev to other forums which might not look pretty but are much easier to use (e.g. Bullet forums for physics).
Sorry - this is rather negative - but I'm just trying to give you another data point!
Just a comment on the white space issue - in some areas it does feel a lot more empty but in practice the amount of text is pretty much the same.
Here's a before and after on one specific thread:
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As you can see, it's more about moving whitespace - we used to waste a lot down the left-hand side, but now we don't. In exchange we now have a little more space between posts (which in some cases seems to be down to forum signatures). The amount of text onscreen is roughly the same. I'm hopeful we'll find a way to reduce any wasted space further, but for now, be reassured that you're broadly getting the same amount of knowledge per pixel as before. :)
As for 'reinventing the wheel', there were a lot of problems with the old software which were impractical to fix, and some things we wanted to extend that were also impractical. Returning to our own system gives us flexibility to do a lot more with the site in future. Another big benefit of this new platform is that we should be a lot less susceptible to the masses of scripted spamming that we get every day when using an off-the-shelf package. Much of my moderation duties are just going through and removing tons of spammers and spam posts every morning that the automated checks can't catch.
