Thread

I’m excited to see a lot of the “new foundation” changes cropping up now, especially after a lot of complaining about spam and such on the CI forums. The new forum seems nice so far; it will take some adjustment, but I’m sure myself and the rest of us can acclimate. I do have a few items of feedback I think are worth mentioning, though.

1) The design is nice overall, I like the general color scheme and layout. The boxy nature of this layout can make things difficult, though. Too many horizontal lines separating content, such as when there are quotes in a post. For quotes, I think different background color and text styling would make compartmentalizing different posts aspects would work better, just like the way code styles do it. And in general, a little less grid borders and more white space would improve flow a lot (that’s what I’d try first, at least).

2) Relating to code styles, the syntax highlighting leaves much to be desired. It has far too much contrast between a dark background and bright blues and white text. It’s also has very few differentiating colors, making it more difficult to discern the constructs of a language. I think a Github-style color scheme would be easier to read, and many developers would already be familiar with it. There are also some width issues (here’s an example).

3) A user’s title (“Lab Technician”) having a more prominent text style than the actual user name; I’ve had users respond to me using this title rather than my username on numerous occasions previously. Actually, the titles seem irrelevant in most occasions, anyway - I think they’re better suited for specific higher post counts, and not shown for the average user. I’d personally like to see the post count returned, too, since I think it says a lot about different people by itself.

4) The remaining characters when making a post being shown as a field. Just takes up room unnecessarily.

5) The read/unread post icons are pretty similar in color. Should be much more obvious.

6) No avatars? :(

I say everything here as an opinion and related feedback and suggestions, not as “do it this way or you’re an idiot” (because someone will inevitably think that…). I hope they can help improve the experience on the forums. I’m happy to elaborate on anything if need. If I come across anything else, I’ll be sure to add it here. And I encourage others to leave feedback, also (don’t be negative and unhelpful, though).

I’m agree with all the points explained by Lab Technician (I know, Aken).

Many things should be reviewed, first the code box style, that white on blue and most of all the light blue on blue, or the green on blue, they are totally unreadable.
Maybe a neutral color like a very light grey would be better, of course changing the white to dark gray or black for the code text.

According to me there would be another thing to be changed.
Now that I’m replying to this thread, I ‘d like to have the other posts shown below on the page, so I could read and reply to what other people wrote just scrolling the page, instead I must open a new tab with the thread and switch from this tab to the other to read and back to this to write.
In this case I could quote the message, but what about a long thread where it would be useful to read the question and the several answers already given?

Please use black type for the forum text. Books, magazines and 99% of all Web sites use black text and not gray because gray is too hard to read.

Too many horizontal lines separating content, such as when there are quotes in a post.

Agreed, although this didn’t bother me in the thread view, but it does seem a bit over-the-top in the Post Reply pages.

2) Relating to code styles, the syntax highlighting leaves much to be desired. It has far too much contrast between a dark background and bright blues and white text. It’s also has very few differentiating colors, making it more difficult to discern the constructs of a language. I think a Github-style color scheme would be easier to read, and many developers would already be familiar with it. There are also some width issues (here’s an example).

Here’s an even more extreme example: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/228443/

The forum width thrown out of whack by any long lines in [code] blocks. Have you considered integrating any of the pre-built code formatting scripts floating around the web? I don’t mean integrate it into EE - I mean just layer it on top of the EllisLab site’s forums. 😊 (EDIT: Why is the smiley referring to the broken link of “http://parfaitkrakow.com/asset/images/smileys/smile.gif” ???)

If that’s not an option, at least apply this:

.codeblock {
    max-width: 790px;
}

3) A user’s title (“Lab Technician”) having a more prominent text style than the actual user name; I’ve had users respond to me using this title rather than my username on numerous occasions previously. Actually, the titles seem irrelevant in most occasions, anyway - I think they’re better suited for specific higher post counts, and not shown for the average user. I’d personally like to see the post count returned, too, since I think it says a lot about different people by itself.

6) No avatars? :(

These two are very important points, and both are currently adversely affecting the readability of the forums, believe it or not. The username should always be the most visually-prominent bit of metadata for each post, whereas the title is nearly meaningless and can even be eliminated without much problem. I also prefer having the postcount displayed, not in an “e-peen” sense, but to make it easier to gauge how experienced any given poster may be.

As for the avatars, they serve the same purpose as the simple stick-figure symbols on restrooms; both allow identification at a glance. As clean as the avatar-less look is, I think the benefits of restoring them far outweigh the slight increase in visual clutter.

4) The remaining characters when making a post being shown as a field. Just takes up room unnecessarily.

Agreed, but not a major issue. Perhaps relocate the “Check Spelling” link, remaining characters (why is it labeled “Characters” and yet it counts down as I type?), and the options checkboxes to the left of the Message textarea, where the “Smileys” link already is?

The new look is ok and I agree with the above comments. One other thing I noticed is when I’m viewing a forum post in EE2 tech forum I don’t see the “Fast Reply” and “Post Reply” buttons at the bottom. Even if I click to subscribe to the post I don’t get the buttons. Does anyone know why? Did something change that I’m not a ware of?

Cheers,

Mike

The new look is ok and I agree with the above comments. One other thing I noticed is when I’m viewing a forum post in EE2 tech forum I don’t see the “Fast Reply” and “Post Reply” buttons at the bottom. Even if I click to subscribe to the post I don’t get the buttons. Does anyone know why? Did something change that I’m not a ware of?

Cheers,

Mike

That forum was archived and made read-only… *facepalm*

Wow, that totally sucks. What is going to happen to all of the posts from users looking to get help? I hope they move them to the community help forum unless EllisLab is going to answer them on their own.

Mike

Some of these request is already mentioned above, but I want to highlight again,
1. Please put back the JOB Board (Very very important!)
2. Please put back the number of user post (This is the reason I keep helping and answering people questions, very important!)
3. Please put back the Avatar (For easy for people to recognize each member)
4. Please put back the Signature text and image.

Thank you very much in advanced.

I’ll just make it really short:

1) “Mark as read” feature
2) Filter “New Topics/Posts” by Forum (I’m not much interested in new posts in “Expression Engine” or “MojoMotor” subforums 😉
3) Avatars
4) Number of a member’s post (next to their username in the post view)
5) [In the Control Panel] I guess the counts of “Total Forum Topics” and “Total Forum Replies” got screwed/lost while migrating? My count is 712 and 0 respectively which feels kinda weird 😉
6) Code highlighting is really a pain in the eye. Please use Pygments or make it similar to GitHub2 Syntax highlighting
7) Is it possible to reduce the page’s header? For me (and I’m on a 15” screen) it’s almost half the page “wasted” before the forums/forum replies are visible. Makes me scroll a lot. And I guess on a 13” it’s even worse 😉

[EDIT]

8) Notification mails get sent by <[email protected]>. Not that I mind but I’d rather have them sent by something like <[email protected]> 😉

Here’s my $0.02. I think it’s too “white” if that makes sense. I think some background color is in order—maybe not inside the posts, but maybe on the outside. Between the lighter color text (gray?) and the entirely white background, it makes viewing difficult.

Lots going on today, first day after launch, so I apologize in advance for brevity.

Our new forums have vastly improved over our old ones, mostly in structure and features. You may not have noticed that development and community support forums have new tools to make helping each other and finding real solutions a much better experience. We also merged many forums, simplified their organization, and even brought back posts from third party devs, providing a space for them to talk about their add-ons and developing for ExpressionEngine. Those features were our primary focus for launch. We are aware of many of the stylistic issues, but appreciate the attention and manner you’ve raised them.

One quick note, when you post a reply, you can review the contents of the thread you are posting to by clicking the “Thread Review” button below the reply form.

Thanks everyone for the feedback to help us continually improve.

I agree with the majority of what has been posted.  I too am coming from the CI site/side of things and think it would be extremely helpful if we could subscribe to individual forums so that when we search the results are limited to those forums only.  While I’m sure EE and MM are excellent products, they are not the reason why I am here.

I am mainly interested in helping with the CI community, so wading through all of the “new post” results with all of these unrelated forums is not pleasant to find the actual posts I am interested in.  This was very easy when CI had it’s own site/forum as all searches only related to that topic.

I know you can partially do this in the advanced search (selecting individual forums), but there isn’t a way (that I can see) to “get all new posts” from there as you have to supply search criteria and that isn’t too convenient to have to do that each time anyway.  Maybe a simple setting in our profile would be adequate (limit all searches, including predefined search links like “new posts” to the checked forums).

One thing I did notice on the advanced search is that any mention of “codeigniter” is missing in the forum names.  Expression Engine is mentioned along with Mojo Motor along with child forums (and the CI forums show up there, but they don’t indicate that they are CI forums so it looks like they are part of Mojo Motor since they are listed in that group).

One thing I did notice on the advanced search is that any mention of “codeigniter” is missing in the forum names.  Expression Engine is mentioned along with Mojo Motor along with child forums (and the CI forums show up there, but they don’t indicate that they are CI forums so it looks like they are part of Mojo Motor since they are listed in that group).

Hm, are you not seeing this?

No, I see this (hard refreshed too)
Edit: Tried in Chrome/Firefox - both current versions - and they both look like what I posted.

Adding my two coins to the above:

The site is a lot slower than it used to be. Waiting 30+ seconds for a page to appear isn’t very funny.

And can we filter all the stuff we’re not interested in? I usually scan headers of all unread email to see if there are CI posts that interest me. Now the unread mail list is swamped by stuff related to other products I couldn’t give a rats backside about…

p.s. please put the “mark all read” option back. Besides having a list with unread messages I don’t want to see, I now also can’t get them out of that list. :-(