my only problem with the new forum is the lack of the go to top of page button.
if you could add that I would be totally happy with the new forum.

tannerstevo wrote on 2019-12-31, 00:46:

my only problem with the new forum is the lack of the go to top of page button.
if you could add that I would be totally happy with the new forum.

Likewise I would love to have the " Your posts | New posts | Active topics" navbar at the end of the thread too, so I don't need to scroll back to the top or use "Back" then refresh to see the new indicated topics.

Shagittarius wrote on 2019-12-31, 01:39:

tannerstevo wrote on 2019-12-31, 00:46:

my only problem with the new forum is the lack of the go to top of page button.
if you could add that I would be totally happy with the new forum.

Likewise I would love to have the " Your posts | New posts | Active topics" navbar at the end of the thread too, so I don't need to scroll back to the top or use "Back" then refresh to see the new indicated topics.

I think that with a little bit of CSS he can make it sticky while scrolling, so it shouldn't need to have one at the end. But that's modern CSS, and I'd rather add other at the end of the thread because 1) it's easier and 2) retrocompatible.

I’ve made changes to the topic view design to address earlier feedback about problems with dithering and feeling like the content was not visible.

I did try to keep some accent patterns just so it is not all flat. My hope is that by using patterns more sparingly and by fixing them to the viewport that there will be little/no flicker on panels that were prone to flicker before.

Viewport fixing is usually bad for scrolling performance since it requires more painting, but since it is such a small amount of the screen, this will hopefully not cause any trouble. Please do let me know if you now have significantly worse page scrolling performance, though.

Those who had troubles before with the dithering, please let me know if there are still troubles now.

Yeah, the dither is much better on my screen now (I was the one with the image of the bad crosstalk). It's still there with the title portion of each post but is incredibly faint that I don't even think my camera would pick it up, so this doesn't bother me anymore.

My phone also had some flickering before, but that seems to be gone now too. There's a little in the left column next to quotes but that's about it.

Dithering is still a problem, wish we just had a flat option. It seems like the flickering only occurs over the dithered portions now rather than on the whole page though. It help to use a less contrast oriented color scheme like old school too. I can just stick to Old school scheme its not as bad there.

Lost: a very useful feature: last signon. I used this to determine how far to go back. Now, I will have to make a note of this somewhere.

Gene Wirchenko wrote on 2019-12-31, 03:56:

Lost: a very useful feature: last signon. I used this to determine how far to go back. Now, I will have to make a note of this somewhere.

Last login date is in the profile menu at the top right of every page.

Snover wrote on 2019-12-31, 04:00:

Gene Wirchenko wrote on 2019-12-31, 03:56:

Lost: a very useful feature: last signon. I used this to determine how far to go back. Now, I will have to make a note of this somewhere.

Last login date is in the profile menu at the top right of every page.

So it is. Thank you. (It used to be displayed without any need to hunt for it.)

Another problem is that now, a lot of buttons do not display on my system. I get hex so there is no way to tell what they are short of checking each.

So everyone likes the "oldschool " style,,, this ugly deep purple going to stay?
Also, something is very wrong with the font, each letter changes line thickness.
Moreover, old vogons background colors are "153,153,204" and "165,165,216", soyou got the lighter background color wrong in the oldschool style.

Notice the font in that image of three different forum boards, it is even and very readable, no surprise most forum boards use that font.
Can't we use this kind of font?

I am sorry, but the new Vogons doesn't look like a forum board, but like a phone app, disappointing really.
Huge buttons and boxes,, no proportion whatsoever.

Why not phpBB?... or something that actually looks like a forum board..

I agree on the font, but something tells me it would require fundamental reversals of the changes made to the forums to use that font again, as it was designed for the low-DPI screens that were common in the early 2000s.

The whole internet still uses phpBB forum boards,, I'm sorry but our boards is just ugly and barely readable.
Anyway, I will use what is given, but In my view the change was not for the better.

Oh, come on... while I agree that the font is not the "mainstream" font used by many forums or boards, there's nothing that stop them from using a different font. I don't dislike the current font, but I have no problem with that. So far it's good for me. There are browser add-ons to change that for your personal tastes.

But like keenmaster486 just said, a change to a new font would require fundamental changes to the forum design.

The previous font and the font used in the examples above were designed for a different situation. This is 2019. We have big screens, phones with retina screens, higher resolutions. Currently, it requires a different type of font, so VOGONS is not wrong to try a different font in a new design.

Can't we all just go back to Usenet?

Hi, I’ve reviewed all the comments to make sure I did not miss anything, so here comes another massive update reply post.

roytam1 wrote on 2019-12-28, 01:24:

any chance making theme compatible with old/retro browsers? retrozilla loads site unstyled right now.

The unstyled theme is the “compatible” theme. 😀 Browsers need to support at least CSS media queries and flexbox in order for the normal design to work.

ATauenis wrote on 2019-12-28, 12:09:

Snover wrote on 2019-12-28, 03:59:

Hey, sorry to hear that it feels like everything is too big. Unfortunately, it is difficult to make it perfect for everybody, so the default targets the most common devices: mobiles and 1080p+ monitors with a higher dpi. If you size down the whole site to 80% using your browser’s full page zoom (control-plus and control-minus) that should probably make it “correct” for you, since I’m guessing that monitor is probably closer to 72dpi and so the pixels are pretty large compared to new screens.

Yeah, my current monitors are not Retina: ViewSonic VA712 (1280 x 1024 96dpi 17") and LG E2341 (1920 x 1080 96dpi 23"). Most of my friends and known people also using similar monitors, so it is not clear where the myth came from, that everyone is using monitors with high dpi. Mobile devices, really, are hi-dpi now, but desktop (huh, tower and mini-itx 😀 ) PCs are still mostly equipped with older monitors. Especially in offices. But in homes too. Low-end laptops too had got such displays only since 2015, or even later.

So when I was talking about “higher dpi” there, I meant higher relative to 72dpi. So your 96dpi screens, and everything above that, were meant to be included in my statement.

While this is quite off-topic, the myth-vs-reality of high DPI screen penetration is an interesting topic:

1. Smartphones are basically all high-DPI these days (even budget phones like Nokia 3 are ~300dpi). Globally, 52% of web traffic comes from smartphones. So, it’s not an unreasonable claim that the majority of screens used to view web pages are now high DPI. (For VOGONS, 29% of visits were coming from iOS or Android before the update.)
2. Laptops are usually in the 120–160dpi range due to their smaller form factors (usually 768p, 1080p, or 1200p at 13–16"). Globally, laptops and tablets are outselling desktop computers 3 to 1 (and it has been this way for a while). So, it’s also not unreasonable to suggest that the majority of computer screens are now, while not true retina displays, higher DPI than a traditional desktop monitor.

OK, back to the regular programming.

agent_x007 wrote on 2019-12-28, 12:36:

I HATE the secondary color for posts ("lighter purple" ?).
It's unwatchable on on S10 since it's only shows dots - like WTF ?
[…]

This isn’t how the site is programmed to look. There’s something wrong with your device or browser.

digger wrote on 2019-12-28, 13:49:

As for the colors, I like the homage to the C64. However, I've noticed the background color being clearly different when viewing the site on my mobile phone than it is when viewing it on my laptop. On my laptop it's C64 blue. On my phone it's lilac. Is that on purpose? Not that I mind.

Not intentional, though a fun coincidence since you’ll often see the same thing with C64 screenshots 😀. Colour accuracy is 100% garbage, everywhere, all the time, forever. Different web browsers on the same computer render colour differently by not applying or misapplying colour profiles. TN panels can only actually display 6bpp colour and fake the rest using dithering. Screens capable of rendering >100% of sRGB colour space will remap sRGB colours into the wider colour space by default (“wow, it’s so vibrant!”). I could go on and on.

Orkay wrote on 2019-12-28, 13:59:

For the hell of it, I hastily loaded up this website on Internet Explorer 5.5, and even without the ability to handle modern HTML5 gimmicks, it still looks very true to form.

It even “works” in Netscape 4.

cde wrote on 2019-12-28, 18:05:

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.

I don’t know why that would be happening. phpBB has a pretty… bad… anti-CSRF implementation, so I’ve seen that message quite a bit when the short lifetime tokens expire, but the second submission always works since the token is refreshed. Also, the login form is just a plain HTML form, so I’m afraid I don’t have any useful advice other than to upgrade your browser since FF38 sounds like an rootkit just waiting to happen (NoScript will not protect you from vulnerabilities in the image decoder) 😀

gdjacobs wrote on 2019-12-29, 03:27:

We definitely need to make web rings and cgi hit counters great again!

Yes please

bfcastello wrote on 2019-12-30, 00:31:

I noticed that some users forum signatures got a CSS filter over their images darkening them. For example, @oeuvre 's signature image got darker.

Yes, this was requested, since the signatures are secondary data.

j^aws wrote on 2019-12-30, 10:58:

Some more playing around and for reference: Screenshot_20191230-104822_Samsung Internet_compress6.jpg Forum settings: Logged off […]
Show full quote

Some more playing around and for reference:
Screenshot_20191230-104822_Samsung Internet_compress6.jpg
Forum settings: Logged off, default blue.
Browser settings: Mobile mode, 70% text zoom, Dark Mode on Samsung browser.

Kinda like the white on midnight blue look.

Heck yeah! At one point the background was a lot darker but I got feedback that it was very important to keep a distinctive purple, so it got brightened up. It’s probably better to be bright and cheery, but I do miss the authenticity of that midnight hacker vibe 😀

At some point maybe I can share some of the tons of design iterations and everyone can have a good laugh and/or sigh wistfully at what could have been.

ZellSF wrote on 2019-12-30, 11:27:

I don't particularly have anything against replacing the normal cursor. If it was only a dumb thing that didn't break functionality, but this also removes the "Text Select" cursor, so it's harder to make out where you can select text.

Plus a lot of people use a very similar cursor in the first place, so they don't see the effect (I didn't notice the regular cursor was a different one).

Yeah, sorry about that! I checked before I implemented the custom cursors, and there’s really no API in the web platform for specifying custom cursors which work like the default cursor: auto. I guess the good news is that I can just tell you right now: all the text is selectable so long as it’s not in a button, so just go ahead and do it 😀

I know it is a subtle effect, but it is one which I certainly notice when using a Mac or Windows 7+ since they have pretty different cursors.

schmatzler wrote on 2019-12-30, 11:45:

Edit: Can we make URL's "target=_blank" by default please? I don't like outgoing links to overwrite my current tab.

Nope, sorry! Forcing a target violates the principle of least surprise and also violates a user’s autonomy in where they want a link to go (and also is a security vulnerability by default). Just use the ctrl+click/middle-click/however your browser lets you open links in new tabs when you want a link to open in a new tab.

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 18:30:

- I know this is a "new web thing" but does every site have to use 24pt fonts and make my 1080p monitor feel like 640x480 again? I can't help but feel this is designed to overcome Windows' really crappy use of high-DPI screens there for a while, where in 4K, most graphical elements were invisible to the naked eye. If that's just the way it is now, I'll get over it.

I’m sure that there are some designers that just make arbitrary choices like that, but here the font sizing was actually based on a review of scientific studies on reading speed according to the visual arc of the x-height of text, and the leading was selected to balance information density with performance of eye return sweeps. It’s not some attempt to be trendy or to make the screen feel small—though when screens were 640x480, text in fonts like MS Sans Serif would probably have had the same visual arc size.

The selection of a larger font size is also supported by studies on the relationship between line width and reading performance, though there are some emerging data which suggest that this may be a less significant factor in reading speed than has been historically believed.

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 18:30:

- The thin white sans-serif on dark color background isn't a great choice. It takes noticeably more effort to read. Maybe a slightly wider font to give the glyphs some room to breathe? I would also take contrast down just a touch, maybe a bright gray, or even a touch of lavender? Or desaturate the background color some. It's just a little too much.

Could you explain what you mean when you say it takes more effort to read? More effort relative to what? Is this still an issue, given the other design updates that were made today?

SirNickity wrote on 2019-12-30, 18:30:

- Does every post and attachment really need an icon to establish its license..? It looks like GNU took over the place and will soon insist on calling the site "GNU/VOGONS" and we're all now LibreMembers.

Yes, sorry. I tried to make it as unobtrusive as possible. The UI may change, but the licensing is really important. The open content policy very generally describes why this exists. The world’s copyright systems are broken, there is a ton of super important original historical research here, so this is a simple but important safeguard to help make things easier for researchers from the future.

Gene Wirchenko wrote on 2019-12-31, 04:07:

Another problem is that now, a lot of buttons do not display on my system. I get hex so there is no way to tell what they are short of checking each.

It sounds like you probably have disabled web fonts and/or are running something like uMatrix which is configured to block fonts. You will need to allow the icon font in order for the icons to render.

Errius wrote on 2019-12-31, 06:23:

Can't we all just go back to Usenet?

http://pessoal.org/papercut/

This + some amount of masochism just might produce something usable. If one were persistent enough, it would certainly be an option to write a backend which maintains a logged-in forum session and presents that as an NNTP feed to the newsreader.

I have a feeling that me and Snover could’ve been great friends while talking about web design. 🤣. I work with web design for like almost two decades and I have never met someone with the same passion for this work. Researching to make sure he choses the right font size, is something I would do. Cool.

Seriously, I like how he sees it and works to make the forum better for everyone. The redesign was a good job! Congrats

Snover wrote on 2019-12-31, 07:03:

It sounds like you probably have disabled web fonts and/or are running something like uMatrix which is configured to block fonts. You will need to allow the icon font in order for the icons to render.

that's literally the only way for me to get a readable font right now though.

the dithering flicker is better now that it is gone in quotes.

another thing I just noticed is that the mouseover color change on buttons seems to be very laggy

@imi, mouseover change is pretty much instant. I think you need to disable all your customization tools to give any judgement on the forum behavior now.