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Reply 60 of 743, by Snover

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leileilol wrote on 2019-12-28, 01:43:

at least it's not vanilla with half of the images offloaded to a google-owned server with megabytes of fonts cached per page load 😉

You have no idea how hard this was. Some… person… at phpBB thought that it was a totally cool great perfect idea that, whenever someone typed an emoji into a message, phpBB should just go ahead and unconditionally replace that with an image pointing to a CDN. I basically ended up having to write an entirely separate extension just to fix this.

leileilol wrote on 2019-12-28, 01:43:

EDIT: what's with the creative commons link on all the posts AND attachments? That could be making quotes from other pages/ sources and/or attaching screenshots/software be 'relicensed' illegally or so. It'd also probably void any GPL-licensed patches for dosbox too 😖 This is probably my biggest issue with the update since it implies there is no such thing as fair use.

Adding the improved licensing system was important to me, since when I started VOGONS, I was a silly kid who knew that open access to information was important, but my solution was just like “hey everything you post is automatically CC-BY-NC licensed!”. Which, as you point out, isn’t correct. So, better late than never, going forward, every post and attachment can be marked with a correct license to avoid confusion.

The license list is configurable, so there should be more to choose from this weekend. I am sure Qbix was just not able to go in and add them yet, since it was quite early at his place by the time the upgrade was done, and I don’t want to go around making decisions about daily operations like that since I am not actually a mod/admin here.

Yes, it’s my fault.

Reply 62 of 743, by Snover

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kolderman wrote on 2019-12-28, 04:26:

On mobile phone, I can't see the "my posts" and "new posts" links. I can on tablet and pc. It is annoying as I use them most of all.

Since these are technically search shortcuts, they collapse into the search panel on small screen. So just tap the search button and there they are! 😀

Yes, it’s my fault.

Reply 64 of 743, by feipoa

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I am using the oldskool skin and the dithered background really strains my eyes. Something solid would be greatly appreciated. That's my number one disappointment. If you change only one thing, change that. Next would be to have smaller fonts and line spacing, perhaps "extra small", even with 'small' everything seems so bloated.

Thanks and appreciation to the admin for maintaining the site and keeping it updated.

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Reply 69 of 743, by dr_st

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kolderman wrote on 2019-12-28, 06:38:

Can we disable that slow scroll down to the bottom of a thread? Gets annoying after a while.

YES.

The scrolling when jumping to a different section of the page (whether by link or when searching for words in the browser) MUST be removed. It's completely ridiculous and currently is the only thing in the new theme that I absolutely cannot live with (nor should any sane person live with).

Please find a way to make jumps instantaneous as they were in the old software.

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Reply 70 of 743, by yourepicfailure

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Looks like this site followed suit of many others moving to the "modern web."

Resolution-based responsive design

I hate it. Sometimes I do indeed want to use desktop view on mobile devices so I can see large amounts of content for easy comparison and analysis. Or not having to poke around at times to find menu items collapsed into another menu I didn't know about. Responsive design blatantly disregards preferences, so requesting desktop version on mobile browsers is completely ignored. Yes, my eyes are in fact capable of reading and discerning small content. Not trying to sound negative or anything.

This is my primary, actually only complaint about the new site. Everything else I can get used to.

Reply 71 of 743, by xjas

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Looks good to me. Just wanted to put that right out front, since it seems like some of the usual band who complain about everything, relentlessly have gotten in here to have their way with this thread before the rest of us did. Sure, a lot of legitimate complaints and feedback have been posted in here, but some people will never be happy with anything, and having new users with eight posts tromping in here to moan about how much they hate it & how it's ruined is completely ridiculous, IMHO.

From my perspective, I saw the "work in progress" (nice SC2000 reference 😉 ) screen before I went out this morning, and came home to a fully functioning forum with a pretty striking design change that I think is mostly really decent. That's impressive. I love the white text, I like the colors (yay for purple), the dithered backgrounds don't bother me (although I can understand how the flickery scroll they cause could get to some people - I'm not gonna complain if these go solid color either), I like the overall design (including the "line art"), it works on my phone & all my (modern) browsers, everything's a good size on my main 1600x1200 monitor (and HAY GUYS, BROWSERS HAVE ZOOM), direct links to threads still work, attached images still work (including ones I uploaded just a few hours before the site went down for the update), all my PMs are still there, my ignore list is still there, and my browser remembered my login credentials and auto-filled my password. In other words, 98% of the technical issues that could have gone wrong, haven't.

I could take or leave the smooth scrolling. I thought it looked neat the first time I saw it, but I could see how it might overstay its welcome after a while. It could definitely get annoying or cause problems for people browsing on slow machines.

So do I have any complaints? Of course! (But they're mostly suitable for the UI feedback thread, so I will post them over there.) Mainly about the thread list view: I wish there were still a way to see how many pages long a thread is from the threads list, or jump to a specific page directly. I can live without those, but it does sometimes help in the case of long runners. And also it's a bit of a monoblock of text right now - it'd be nice if threads I've already read were de-bolded like they were in the old software, rather than just turned a slightly darker shade of grey, and maybe add some color rather than flat white to the icons to the left of the thread titles to help distinguish them from each other.

(Also, count me in the camp that uses "your posts" and "new posts" a lot, and "unread posts" much less so. It's a bit hard to explain, but I'd rather see the threads I haven't read in the context of those I already have.)

Anyway, from my perspective, good job guys. I'm sure there will be teething issues and things to sort out as we go along, but nobody sane would expect a major revamp like this to be perfect, instantly.

Also @Snover, nice to see you still involved around here. Thanks for all the hard work (& I'm including Qbix and the rest of the team in that statement as well.)

Last edited by xjas on 2019-12-28, 08:50. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 72 of 743, by xjas

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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."

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Reply 73 of 743, by Zup

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I find the new style less readable. I don't know if it's font related of background-color related (I didn't noticed that checkered background until I read a post about it), but I tried it on Chrome and Firefox.

In Edge (that thing I never use) is more readable, but still not as readable as old style forum.

I find new buttons strange, but it's not a problem. But I miss the "go to first unread message" button (although in old forum was VERY small). In some other forums (i.e.: World of Spectrum), when you open a thread it takes you to the first new message on that thread... could you put that button or put an option to enable it?

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Reply 74 of 743, by Deksor

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

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."

Ah you made the same mistake as I 🤣

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Reply 75 of 743, by Zup

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Zup wrote on 2019-12-28, 08:52:

I find the new style less readable. I don't know if it's font related of background-color related (I didn't noticed that checkered background until I read a post about it), but I tried it on Chrome and Firefox.

In Edge (that thing I never use) is more readable, but still not as readable as old style forum.

Found a solution: it seems that fonts are ugly unless you have Cleartype active (I usually have it disabled).

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Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 76 of 743, by Joseph_Joestar

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Another vote for getting rid of the dithered backgrounds. They flicker even on my iPad, not to mention my desktop monitor.

Otherwise, looks ok.

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Reply 77 of 743, by mwdmeyer

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The forum software is fast and seems good but the theme needs serious work. The Old School theme is better but the font needs to change and the gradient on replies needs to be fixed.

I also don't like the power button for login, makes no sense. Actually all the buttons & shadowing are odd.

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

Last edited by mwdmeyer on 2019-12-28, 09:56. Edited 3 times in total.

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Reply 78 of 743, by Anonymous Coward

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"Old Skool" colour scheme should have been the default. I can't stand reading the white text.
Also, not a huge fan of the dithering. Other than that it's more or less okay. At least the site doesn't seem bloated or anything.
Also not a big fan of the new logo.

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Reply 79 of 743, by Vynix

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Wowza... So far so good, I'm going to really miss the old theme but this one feels like it could have a option for those few stragglers who still use a low-DPI display (me included, well until I get my LCD monitor fixed. The CRT is usually my secondary display, that is.), right now I don't have anything to complain about it, we'll see how that goes.

Though there is something I may have a pretty big gripe with the new forum: I hope it won't look like a total mess on my ol' CRT (long story short, my CRT can do 1280x1024 but setting it so locks the refresh rate at 60Hz, so I'm running it at 1024x768).

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