Welcome to the new Forum look – give us your feedback

Martico

MikeJXE said:

I have just read all of the 16 pages and notice it's mostly negative comments

Also noticed none of them are from usual latest post board users or for that fact the usual posters on any of the  the top boards 

I wonder why that is ?

That seems more provocative than constructive. As I said before, these are difficult projects to oversee, and I think that people understand this. But this post looks a little deaf. Are you taking the comments on board?

VoucherMan

Still no wide screen version?

I

guess

you

only

care

about

mobile

users.

May

as

well

write

like

this

then!

KajiKita

I’m going against a lot of what is being said here but I quite like the white, open clarity of the new layout. 

I like that I can more easily navigate to my threads. 

Struggling a bit with the other navigation - the font is very small and it is difficult to see which of my bookmarked threads have new posts on - I’d appreciate a tweak to that if at all possible. 

Thank you for making the emojis usable, at least on the NSD thread 😊

KK

cymruchris

Ok, so I didn't jump straight in and say how awful it was, and decided to give it an hour or so of browsing to see what I got on with, and what narked me.

I've had a read through the thread of feedback so far, and the overwhelming trend seems to show that the update is awful in quite a few respects.

Following my navigation around the new layout my initial thoughts are that I agree, it's awful.

When you arrive at the forum front page, it no longer even looks like a forum. Pretty pictures everywhere that look more like adverts for something or other:

A forum should LOOK like a forum. The world knows what a forum looks like. This doesn't look like a forum.

Having to click this, that or the other to eventually get there really isn't user friendly. Having to scroll left or right to see forum categories is just pretty for pretty's sake, and ends up just being pretty awful.

I'm accessing via a PC desktop on a fair sized screen, and the font size has gone from standard to 'large'. This may be a move to help those that are visually challenged - but if this is a shiny, new forum software, shouldn't it be optional or customisable?

Notifications seems to be broken - when I mark all as 'read' and then come back later it's still telling me that there are 2246 new comments on a certain discussion, even though I've been there and read them already. If I refresh the screen it doesn't update. If I hit 'mark as read' it doesn't.

There's too much blank space all over the place, combined with the larger text means we have to scroll more. Not very user friendly.

I understand you have to optimise the layout for more than one device - but on this PC with a nice big screen - I get to see three - that's right THREE latest threads on a full screen before having to scroll. There's so much space and guff.

So my first impressions are that bits of it are broken, bits of it are awful, bits of it make it not even look or feel like a forum anymore - but on the plus side (And yes there is a plus!!!!)

The 'Quote' system still works!

HillStreetBlues

On a 28" monitor I can see one (yes 1) post on my screen. containing 6 lines of text.

babyblade41

What can I say, my eyesight isn't great and this is so hard , every update this site makes it's even worse than before, 

BossBob

Nope, don’t like it. Probably won’t be back unless I need to complain about something rather than to read interesting posts or to post advice or comment. 

Bye!

robatwork

MikeJXE said:

I have just read all of the 16 pages and notice it's mostly negative comments

Also noticed none of them are from usual latest post board users or for that fact the usual posters on any of the  the top boards 

I wonder why that is ?

The implication of your post is that you're a "usual poster" on a top board. Strangely I recognise many posters on this thread who have considerably more years under their MSE belt than your 11 months.

My personal comments are from the viewpoint of someone who started on "forums" in dial-up bulletin board days, through Usenet (I think we peaked there) and on to the www. I also run several forums. 

I'm certainly not negative for its own sake - and I realise we are all paying £0 for the privilege of using this forum so ultimately it's put up or shut up.  What's disappointing is that MSE will be expecting a barrage of criticism and on a thread like this especially, but you'd think maybe a 30/70 split. This negative reception is very damaging. 

quirkydeptless

Utterly horrible upgrade, so visually unusable I think I'll be visiting here considerably less often

DullGreyGuy

Not read all that have gone before so some may be a repeat, some may go to the opposite of what others have said.

I fully accept no one likes change so inevitably there will be morenegativity than it probably deserves.

Personally... there is too much bold text when looking at the list of posts in a forum and as they are no longer in a tablular format they are dotted all over. As a consequence seeing bold subjects (ie something that's unread) -v- not bold (already read) is difficult as the bold Started By and Most Recent By which can be anywhere depending on lengths of names etc make it easy to miss.

Secondly, having Report, Reply and Thanks next to each other with the first in red, for me is leading to me clicking the Report rather than Reply (think I've a thing about hitting red text as I have the same issue with Microsofts Authenticator). Not the end of the world as it just triggers a sub menu to appear but personally would rather that Report was off on the other side or such rather than the first (and so most likely) response