I really don't get what you're trying to say, sorry.

using pixel accurate fonts does not make the site suddenly not usable on higher DPI monitors... so I really don't see how optimizing for those is an advantage, it is a major disadvantage for the majority of users though that have to make do with blurry fonts, and yeah I know most people are sensitized to that look nowadays unfortunately anyways since most websites only optimize for phones anymore, but I am always happy if there are exceptions, vogons isn't one of those anymore :c

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-03, 06:42:

At least on Linux, web browsers don’t respect the system font antialiasing settings, in my experience.

In Debian 10, this is what I do to get back a familiar experience of pixel-aligned fonts in all applications, including browsers:

- add FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35 to /etc/environment
- remove this symlink: /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
- create a symlink in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ pointing to /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf
- adjust the antialising settings of your WM. For xfce4, it's Settings->Appearance->Fonts->Hinting = Full

With all of the above, you will get non-blurry fonts.

The only way to come up with realistic numbers is to have a long-lasting poll, something like
-I use theme 1 and I'm happy
-I use theme 2 and I'm happy
-I tweaked a theme and I'm happy
-I tweaked a theme (size/spacing) and I'm still not happy
-I tweaked a theme (size/spacing) and I'm still not happy, but mobile experience compensates

Not that it matters, it's clear that the team wants the forum like this and it's not realistic to expect from anyone to repeat all this hard work, especially since it's ok for them.
This would help though to answer if people complaining are a minority of naggers, or the team defends bad choices. Again, nothing more to be expected out of this poll except concrete numbers. Because although I understand perfectly well why some cannot stand the new look (I kid you not, the 1st time I visited the new forum I honestly thought this was some joke like the web 2.0 photo made for fun in the old thread), I suspect actual numbers from all active users will be a lot different.

konc wrote on 2020-01-03, 15:59:

The only way to come up with realistic numbers is to have a long-lasting poll, something like -I use theme 1 and I'm happy -I us […]
Show full quote

The only way to come up with realistic numbers is to have a long-lasting poll, something like
-I use theme 1 and I'm happy
-I use theme 2 and I'm happy
-I tweaked a theme and I'm happy
-I tweaked a theme (size/spacing) and I'm still not happy
-I tweaked a theme (size/spacing) and I'm still not happy, but mobile experience compensates

Not that it matters, it's clear that the team wants the forum like this and it's not realistic to expect from anyone to repeat all this hard work, especially since it's ok for them.
This would help though to answer if people complaining are a minority of naggers, or the team defends bad choices. Again, nothing more to be expected out of this poll except concrete numbers. Because although I understand perfectly well why some cannot stand the new look (I kid you not, the 1st time I visited the new forum I honestly thought this was some joke like the web 2.0 photo made for fun in the old thread), I suspect actual numbers from all active users will be a lot different.

yes, you are right, such a poll would be good in a while, once the knee jerk reaction to something new and different has been done

Dominus wrote on 2020-01-03, 16:04:

yes, you are right, such a poll would be good in a while, once the knee jerk reaction to something new and different has been done

Thank you for carefully reading my post and really understanding what I meant, it was a dangerous one. And you're also right about the timing

And I think the numbers would matter, btw.
I'm pretty sure that Qbix and Snover do not hope to make the majority's experience hell 😀

(some more poll questions or clarifications would need to be whether one is generally happy but there are some issues, I think)

Dominus wrote on 2020-01-03, 16:20:

And I think the numbers would matter, btw.
I'm pretty sure that Qbix and Snover do not hope to make the majority's experience hell 😀

(some more poll questions or clarifications would need to be whether one is generally happy but there are some issues, I think)

Speak for yourself! Every time Muz shows up asking his weird questions, I wonder if Vogons might be some secret CIA or Facebook experiment and we're just rats in a cage. Then I put my tin hat on and the mind control beam stops working.

Old skool theme hate the way background colour for titles is white

Yes, agree, that should be a point in the styles problems thread.

A bit late to the party... gotta give a thumbs up for the new/added functionality. 😀 It would've been nicer if more of the old functionality could've stayed - e.g. next/previous page buttons, more pagination links in the forum view, more text next to icons, and (most especially!) the ability to edit & preview a message on the same page.
OTOH, I know how much compromising this sort of thing entails; having done this kind of work in the past I know exactly what Snover is talking about.

As for the design/color scheme, no huge complaints there. I've always preferred light-on-dark themes to the reverse, and when I minimize the font size + line spacing from the control panel, the screen economy is just fine.

If I could put my finger on a couple of things that could be improved, they'd be:

• Contrast: Most of the text is very brightly white; too much contrast can be just as bad as too little, and in this case it could be toned down a bit. Links and buttons can be white, but I'd make the normal text slightly darker, more in the direction of the light purple border or so.
   
• Font: No problem with the typeface itself, and the anti-aliasing is fine too. I think it's the hinting that isn't very good, so on low-DPI screens the text doesn't look very sharp. At least this seems to be the case in Windows, which prioritizes sharpness for small font sizes... as long as the hinting is appropriate.

Both of these things I could 'fix' on my end using custom stylesheets, so no biggie, but they'd probably improve the experience.

you can click on next and previous page numbers so what do you need separate next and previous buttons without page numbers 😉

James-F wrote on 2020-01-03, 13:47:

Nobody is using high DPI screens to browse Vogons... this is a retro PC and DosBOX forum... no teenager comes here with their smartphone and retina displays.

Uhm...I rarely access this website with my retro PC's. Because they are slow and it doesn't make sense to browse the web with them for longer periods of time.
Choppy scrolling gives me a headache.

Also, 4K screens are becoming pretty much the norm now and current smartphones are high DPI by design, even the cheapest ones.
This site is very well optimized for them.

I am also a webdesigner and while I don't think the font used here is the prettiest one on the market (that would be Uni Neue for me), it's doing its job.
Maybe we should switch over to Comic Sans MS for a week and see how long people can stand it. 😜

I understand that the font doesn't work for you because of personal reasons, but maybe you can just zoom in? That makes it much more readable.

@imi, James-F, etc.:

For the most part, I'm not using high-DPI screens to browse Vogons either. The main displays I use this forum on consist of: a 2013 Macbook's 1280x800 screen, a 2011-ish Ideapad's 1600x900 screen, a 1280x1024 Dell monitor from 2008, and a 21" Samsung PVA 1600x1200 monitor on my KVM. So, from my low-ish DPI perspective, the new site looks and works fucking fine.

The font sizes are comfortable and the "information density" is more than good enough. And yes, I'm talking about the desktop site here (although the mobile one is perfectly good to me too.) I have excellent eyesight and I sit a reasonable distance from my monitor instead of having my face smooshed right up against it, so whatever.

Here's an idea: you can hit control-minus (or command-minus) on like every browser ever to zoom out one notch instead of endlessly moaning about it. Problem solved. Incidentally, the new forum scales with browser zoom far better than the old one ever did.

If you don't like the colors, there's an oldschool theme, like, right there, that approximates the old board pretty well. You could just ... use that? I mean, it's there! Or is that just too easy of a solution?

Honestly, I can't understand how some of you function in daily life if you get this upset by background colors or font kerning or text anti-aliasing. Is everything else in your life so perfect that that's all you have left to complain about?

Its good for people to complain, they have every right. I can't stand the people who disagree who tell them to shut up or try and shut them up, that's not how a civilized society works.

I'm not telling anyone to shut up, but ignoring blatantly obvious solutions to their problems (the oldschool theme, browser zoom, etc.) so they can just keep moaning isn't helpful to anyone. Snover has gone out of his way to fix every single actual bug, useability issue (flicker caused by the dithering, the animated jump scrolling, etc.), and honor some really excellent feature requests ("Active Topics") that have been posted here & in the other thread, but they're getting lost in the noise from the crowd who were primed & ready to complain no matter what.

From my perspective, this new forum is a huge improvement in nearly every way over the old one, so I really want to emphasize the opinions of the people claiming it's "unusable", etc. are not universal. Can you imagine what the tone of this thread would be like if we'd switched from this forum back to the old one?

It's not "good" for people to complain if it's way over the top about something trivial or minute like a forum redesign, and the complainer has no intention of accepting a solution. Seriously, re-direct that irateness towards something that matters. Otherwise at some point the onus goes on YOU to bend slightly or adapt rather than standing your ground with fire and brimstone, especially if it's over something as trivial as a FONT. Don't like it? I'm sure someone here could whip you up a 15-line browser CSS extension that would change it, you just need to ask.

well, I don't know about you, but I can't read this without getting sore eyes after a few seconds, zooming in or out doesn't change that as the problem is the total inconsistency of the font, different line-widths and odd curves that makes it hard to read... of course, if I would turn on smoothed fonts (I will not do that as it would completely ruin any chance of getting crisp fonts elsewhere) and make it even larger it would look fine and be easy enough to read, but that goes completely counter to the information density that is already worse as things stand with the current design even with the custom font off and would make it equally unenjoyable to use.

compare that to how easy to read and how crisp the default font is

^^ what the crap? That's not even slightly what it looks like for me. Here's what I see (at -2 zoom level, which is how I've been using it on my 1280x800 MBP):

Granted, this is on OS/X, but on my Linux & Windows PCs it looks similar. Why are you so against having anti-aliasing on?

Incidentally, ALL the UI elements look pretty good on my setup when zoomed out:

Again, my Windows & Linux experiences are similar (I use a mix of Firefox, Vivaldi, and Opera for browsing but can't speak for anything else.) What you're having strikes me as a specific problem with your setup rather than a universal issue on "low-DPI screens."

Snover wrote on 2020-01-02, 06:18:

dionb wrote on 2019-12-31, 15:15:

The problem seems to be that the line spacing option affects lines within a text block, but not between them, which is where the problem is.

This was an oversight and should be fixed now. Please let me know how it is.

Afraid no different. Here's two screenshots, there's absolutely no difference in empty space between normal vs small line spacing, so much that even on my 1440p screen the index takes up over two full screens (where it previously comfortably fit on one):

This was on Firefox 71.0, but it looks identical on Chrome 79.0.3945.88.

Wow, both of you guys look bad compared to mine...This is at 4k with 150% zoom in the browser.

^^ Keep in mind, I'm zooming OUT on a low-DPI screen. I won't say it's perfect, but it looks a hell of a lot better than whatever imi has his browser set up to do. (And it looks better than how the old forum zoomed at any level, for that matter.)

When I zoom IN, it scales up smoothly, like yours does.