New Forum feedback

[donnk]

sorry guys but its awful. I use several and this is by far the worst layout I've ever seen. 

 

Please can you rollback to the old one which was nice and easy to navigate.

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

 

 

[Gary Prentice]

Well, it's a new layout which is taking a bit of getting used to, but there's some features (I'm sure there's more I haven't found or needed yet) that have brought a lot of improvements. 

 

I liked to old one, I was used to it, but some parts were a pain and hard work. I know nothing about running a site like this (thankfully) so if Steve says it had to change, it had to change. I'm just grateful that someone else takes the time and effort to do it

[Steve Bullman]

whats wrong with the layout exactly?

 

and ermm, no i cant undo 12 months work and several thousand pounds to rollback to the old software that didn't even work anymore, sorry! 

[WesD]

Steve any chance the general chat, +, page, search icon bar can be fixed so when you have read the comments in the thread you can press the page icon to go back instead of scrolling back up through the comments to go back. Hope that makes sense. 

[Steve Bullman]

That would be better, I will look into it

 

[WesD]

Cheers Steve! Great job so far 

[THtreeservices]

Step in the right direction, site is confusing but nothing that cant be figured out. Merging with social media is a must, so this is good. 

 

It will take time to iron out the niggles that may annoy users, but with all new sites, this will take more time. 

 

The site needed a breath of fresh air and this is the right thing to do, over the coming months try to make it less cluttered and i think if will be fine. 

 

Im suprised you never went with zen foro, i know VB is not great any more, what ever software you use, there are comprimises. 

 

 

[DuncanH]

I've browsed without feeling the need to make an account for several years now but I've just signed up so I can offer a few suggestions.

 

Please provide a way to hide avatars when reading the forum. An example of why it's needed: go to this thread where there are a lot of posts with very little text. On the monitor I have at work I can only just see 2 posts without scrolling.

 

It would be nice to choose how many posts I see per page so I don't have to click to the next page as frequently.

 

At the start of a forum with several pinned posts how about minimising them in some way unless there's a post to them. The General Chat forum has 6 pinned posts, most of which haven't changed in several years yet I still have to scroll past them every time I go in there.

 

I was going to post last week about the space taken up by graphics at the top level but found the option to display forums in a traditional table view rather than a grid. Is anyone ever going to use the grid view as the graphics seem kind of pointless.

 

Thanks for the good work

 

 

[Steve Bullman]

4 hours ago, THtreeservices said:

Step in the right direction, site is confusing but nothing that cant be figured out. Merging with social media is a must, so this is good. 

 

It will take time to iron out the niggles that may annoy users, but with all new sites, this will take more time. 

 

The site needed a breath of fresh air and this is the right thing to do, over the coming months try to make it less cluttered and i think if will be fine. 

 

Im suprised you never went with zen foro, i know VB is not great any more, what ever software you use, there are comprimises. 

 

 

Thanks for the feedback.

 

which areas do you think look cluttered?

 

i did look at xenforo extensively, even purchased a license and had it installed on my server running the arbtalk database for a time.  I just decided that it was great at being a forum software but that was all,

so many plug ins were required for it to be anything else.  ips is a better think for a more commercial forum, everything Integrates so much better 

[Steve Bullman]

3 hours ago, DuncanH said:

I've browsed without feeling the need to make an account for several years now but I've just signed up so I can offer a few suggestions.

 

Please provide a way to hide avatars when reading the forum. An example of why it's needed: go to this thread where there are a lot of posts with very little text. On the monitor I have at work I can only just see 2 posts without scrolling.

 

It would be nice to choose how many posts I see per page so I don't have to click to the next page as frequently.

 

At the start of a forum with several pinned posts how about minimising them in some way unless there's a post to them. The General Chat forum has 6 pinned posts, most of which haven't changed in several years yet I still have to scroll past them every time I go in there.

 

I was going to post last week about the space taken up by graphics at the top level but found the option to display forums in a traditional table view rather than a grid. Is anyone ever going to use the grid view as the graphics seem kind of pointless.

 

Thanks for the good work

 

 

Thanks for taking the one to register and leave feedback.

 

i will look at the software later and see if turning off avatars at a user level is possible.

 

youre right about the pinned posts, I neglected them and will sort them out later 

 

the grid does seem to be putting people off, perhaps I will rethink it.  I really thought most people just used the today's post button to browse