Looks quite OK to me. Except for one thing: everything looks too busy, chaotic and thus somewhat confusing and tiring. Normally, only the actual content (that is, text in posts) should have a high contract color. Now, everything does. Icons, post count/join date/location, as well as the whole page surrounding the actual post has the same background as the posts themselves.

The quick reply box though looks good. It has a good separation from the rest of the page. The posts themselves should have a similar visual separation instead of everything kinda blending together.

I had to switch to old school and large fonts because I found the new design hard on my eyes.

Just noticed Search displays a glitch with hyphens.

"P4R800-VM" gets rewritten to "P4R800 -VM", which of course has no results. "P4R800" works fine.

So far no problems for me. I welcomed the update for my phone. But I have to agree on some aspects of the design like what @realnc said above. Contrast is the key when you want a fluid design without lines to separate stuff.

Theres a forum (I’ve mentioned it before in another topic) which replicates the design of Windows 9x in desktop mode. It’s awesome and works for everyone. I’m not saying we should copy that, the new design here is fine, just needs a few tweaks. If anything, the colors used here in Vogons reminds me of DOSShell *lol*.

@Imi, don't forget that this site is about old games on new systems.

Dominus wrote on 2019-12-28, 16:46:

@Imi, don't forget that this site is about old games on new systems.

Which answers question why background colors are made from dot patterns instead of one shade... how exactly ?
I'm pretty sure "dithering" that was mentioned, is related to this.

Dominus wrote on 2019-12-28, 16:46:

@Imi, don't forget that this site is about old games on new systems.

and that's the reason why it should only ever be accessed by phones now?

idgi :p

and like I said, the dithering causes issues on my phone especially, reading text is at least possible there (as it was before) but navigating the site is more cumbersome and the main way I used it was on desktop.

the old design was simple, compact and functional, of course there is always room for improvement, the new design has a mix of unnecessary visual gimmicks and animations in addition to the things I already mentioned.

! really have no problem with the new layout on my laptop. Reminds me of some old '90s sites.

It's a reply to

funnily enough the only device that the dithering causes flickering on is on my phone, which apparently now are the only devices this site is optimized for (a site that used to be about retro computing apparently?)

and the misconception that retro computing is what the forum is about and it should only run on old systems. Nope, it needs to run on modern systems 😉
I have not mentioned the dithering and nothing I wrote was about the dithering.

And it runs awesome on my phone and the dithering is fine on it, too

I can't login to the site with Firefox 38.8. It says "The submitted form was invalid. Try submitting again" even though the login/password is correct (had no such problem with the old site). I even allowed vogons.org to execute in NoScript but to no avail.

Posting from my Samsung Note 9 - all good with Old Skool theme.

Forum updates aren't easy, so well done to all involved!

I found these settings to be more iPad friendly.

I’ve made changes to the dithering on the oldskool theme; people who were having trouble reading text there please let me know how it is now.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2019-12-28, 09:42:

I am also not a fan of anything that moves for no reason such as the logo and when you click into boxes etc.

Your OS reduce motion setting should be respected and will remove animation effects when it’s detected. If you have this turned on and are using a supported browser and still see this, please let me know so I can double check that the animations are correctly gated.

xjas wrote on 2019-12-28, 08:22:

Actually one more minor complaint: while I was writing the above post in the 'quick reply' box, someone else posted at the same time. When I went to swtich over to the full editor, the forum warned me about it & brought up a dialog screen, but the two options it presented (something like "do you want to update your post, or keep it as-is") didn't make any sense in the context of what had happened. I had no idea which one was the 'right' option to select.

I picked the "wrong" option (keep as-is IIRC) and it acted like a 'cancel' button. Fortunately I'd copied my entire text into the clipboard out of paranoia or I would have lost the whole thing.

IMHO those options need to be changed to something obvious like "Keep posting" or "discard your post."

Thanks for noticing this! phpBB uses the same page when there’s an edit conflict and doesn’t set any new flag (it just hacks in overrides for the original language dictionary entries), so it was showing the “post edit conflict” resolution options instead of the “reply conflict” resolution options. This should be fixed now.

cde wrote on 2019-12-28, 15:01:

I too would like an "Active topics" link that doesn't require to be logged in. It was present in the old layout and handy when you want to peruse what topics are active without logging in.

OK, I added this link for logged out users. It’s always named “new posts” to try to reduce confusion (i.e. “why is this suddenly gone?” when logged in), following the logic that they’re both new posts lists and it just happens to be more tailored when you are logged in because the system has better information on what’s actually new to you.

Can we talk about the auto scrolling behavior now?

After sharing my thoughts then reading through the thread. Basically even the minority of people here who either don't care or say they like it have problems with it. Everyone else hates it.

Vynix wrote on 2019-12-28, 10:17:

Wowza... So far so good, I'm going to really miss the old theme...

I still miss the older old theme, circa 2011.

Just found the color setting option. Not bad either. I prefer white on dark background, instead of black on light background. But I will stick to old skool option for a while to see if I can get used to it. The default option is good enough for me, though.

The color is just horrifying.

I like it all. No complaints here. Works as expected on all my devices (mobile and not so mobile).