Am I the only one that liked the new forum?

It could have used a little less whitespace but I didn't think it was too bad. Couple kinks here and there but there's stuff about this version I don't like either.

 

Yes, it was just you, and the web designer ;-)

 

Fair enough.

 

I didn't hate everything about it. Once I got the dark theme setup it was easier on the eyes. The lack of ignore though pretty much killed it for me. Well... that and the multitude of broken features and annoying "workarounds".

I wasn't super-against the HTML code in posts though. That could have some pretty cool applications for the Works In Progress forum when people need fancy categorizing and flare to highlight the features of their game.

I still think it would have been great to have the cool features of that forum added to the already working current forum.

 

I didn't think it was that bad until one night I received ~1100 emails from just one thread subscription.

 

Yes, the new forums were garbage, especially for a developer forum.

 

The things that I preferred about the new forum vs the old forum were... ummm.. hmm..

 

Wasn't too bad [to me, in my opinion], at least on the desktop. Mobile was a different story entirely.

Edit: edited for "clarity".

 

It was "ok"... It was very slow and seemed to epitomize flash over substance. Reminded me of some sites I have seen created by high school students. It worked in general and they "did it" but it is not something you roll out professionally.

 

No, you're not the only one.

I will say one thing directly to the staff who apparently is listening... beta testing? Kinda makes sense not to put buggy software in front of a bunch of software developers.

I'll participate.

 

My favorite was being logged out like every two minutes. Heck, I couldn't even figure out how to make it not log me out every two minutes because it kept logging me out while I was looking for how to do it and got tired of logging back in.

 

It was absolutely awful on the desktop, although I guess it would sort of work for casual users reading a post here and there. Any serious degree of participation instantly exposed many flaws.

--Eric

 

I thought it had some merits, but at the same time some usability issues. There's always angst about changing people's habits, like I kept wanting to look in certain places for information that i'd become accustomed to. Learned conventions. Figuring out which posts had new comments or when it was last commented on was not as obvious (small text in weird spot). And the blue main text... didn't really care for that, just in terms of visual comfort and ease of reading. The old forum does have a certain amount of simplicity/clarity that's noticeable in the switch back. If the best of both, that'd be good.

 

I was surprised people disliked it so much. The design was not that bad, only different. I don't think it had any issues that couldn't be fixed.

I bet it wasn't easy to make an entirely new fully functional forum, so it's a bit sad it got rejected instead of fixing the issues.

But either design serves their purpose well enough.

 

The design was pretty horrible as there was way too much white space everywhere. Even if you did some browser side modding to make it look better then you noticed how broken everything was and how dozens of features were missing.

 

I'm definitely not trying to turn this into another thread where people are just ranting about it's issues. There are other threads out there for that. I was mostly just curious if those who liked it were just being quiet, but it really does sound like most people didn't favor it.

 

There were before the rollback, for sure. Pretty sure most of those were lost.

 

My first impression was "Ohhh shiny new forum"... but that was on desktop, and that was before staring at it long enough to start getting a headache from contrast.

I spent a little time tinkering with settings and adjusting my signature (that took some figuring, thanks @Ryiah for the thread explaining that) and then kind of fixed a few of my old threads that didn't look right in the new forum. I didn't like that my WIP thread got moved to a new forum section... but I could have lived with that if it still had users browsing it.

And then... I used my android phone...

Gahhhh... super broken. Frustrating experience. When I am on the go, I need to be able to use the forum from a mobile device often (if I feel like checking on threads and whatnot) so it kind of hampered that pretty bad.

I liked the spirit of new and exciting things happening at UT - I just think this one came out half baked. It needs more love. A good bit more love... and testing...

 

Except they didn't make an entirely new fully functional forum. They used Lithium, an existing forum software that powers a few other communities, notably pretty terribly.

 

Boom. See? People don't give you guys enough credit. Nothing to fear.

 

I'd prefer not being implicitly referred to as a 'casual user' unless your only metric for defining 'casual user' is 'frequency of posting messages'. In terms of my use of the forum, though, I was far from it.

And I think it wasn't too bad on the desktop. And that's my opinion. Leave it at that.

 

I wasn't actually talking about you specifically, just users in general. I'm aware of what your opinion is, since you stated it. I also stated my opinion, which is a thing that's allowed. So, we disagree. That means we must fight to the death!

--Eric

 

It wasn't that bad, it was just the current implementation was bad.

It was like Unity releasing a 5.x version all over again with zero beta testing. They just pushed it out without any proper testing or user acceptance testing.

Hopefully the Unity forum managers will learn from Unity's software releases that this is a bad idea, and that longer release and testing cycles on the forum are the way to go

I hereby officially declare that dodgy forum release, Unity Forum 5.0

 

Sorry, I just don't like being falsely labeled. In general. No desire to fight beyond pointing that out.

 

My eyes started hurting after an hour or so on the forums. I'm not particularly old either at 33. If it had feature parity with XenForo and a good theme (multiple themes would be lovely) I think it would have been an acceptable upgrade.

Unfortunately it was presented to us with 90s era functionality and a CGA theme. It was pretty bad.

 

CGA Theme, ha, I like that

 

I will say, despite saying the new one wasn't too bad, that I much prefer this forum compared to the new one. I'm more motivated to post things on this forum. The other one was a bit repelling.

 

it was functionally dis-functional.

 

There was so much white space that two one-sentence replies took up the entire height of my 1080p monitor. It was nuts.

 

on the Lithium forums, i finally tweaked the CSS enough to make it look nice.
At least my eyes didn't hurt as much anymore.

 

That looks good, but I feel like the "Re : Title" above every post looks redundant.
And in a developer forum, redundancies is our bane!

The theme and its layout is one thing that can be quickly fixed (Coloring choice & canvas composition problems), but honestly the main problem lies in the absence of lovely features we had in XenForo forums.

• Multi-quoting
  
• Selection quoting
  
• Quick reply (They had the button, but it didn't work)
  
• Page automatically reloads randomly again and again (It only stops when I turn off Javascript)
  
• Non mobile compatible (Honestly, try the site in mobile, most feature & the text editor didn't even work!)
  
• Non partial page loading (why must you load the whole page just to reply/edit/like a post? This seems like something from forum softwares made 20 years ago.)
• Private messaging (Seems like it will be implemented soon)
• Watched threads (Also going to be re-implemented)

 

The main problem for me with the new forum was that it was a pain to use on my phone.

Partially for the amounts of white space, but also because it was almost impossible to scroll, I had to drag my finger on the entire screen to find the small area where i could drag/scroll.

Another thing was that it felt slow, it felt like it loaded the page in two (semi slow) steps.

Other than that, I think it looked good, a little more modern. I guess alot of people were so used to the old forum that the new one felt like a new pair of Jeans (you have to wear them a bit for them to soften...)

 

Yep... i managed to hack the CSS to allow for clicking the area where the Phantom Mobile Menu would appear.



Since this also was an issue on the desktop browsers.

There's a very decent chance, if mobile allowed custom CSS, this would allow touches to work as intended.

 

of course everyone knows the Photo Dialog, and the Video Dialogs not working.

That actually took 2 minutes to fix in the CSS

ex:

 

Oura, I prefer this forum version, more clear to read.

 

some other missing features (if not listed already..)

- Cannot copy paste image from clipboard into the message
- Cannot click post date-time to get direct link into that message (and highlight seemed broken)
- Slower loading, also after few seconds, while still loading and you already scrolled down the page, it then jumped on top again (probably some page onload finished)
- No small arrow after quote from user, that can be clicked to go into that quote source message
- I think couldn't reply with quotes visible in the message editor (sometimes easier to reply each point separately, splitting the original quote into multiple lines and replying after it)

 

Yes, it was terrible. On Safari the pages wouldn't even load, it was like they were constantly refreshing.

 

I wanted to say :

But I guess somebody there is instead

 

@IzzySofty: Shameless self-advertisement for the win!

Why on the old forums though? xD

 

in 3 or so months, we might have to go back there!

well, maybe 6 or so, if Unity requests some features?

 

3 months?!
I thought they reverted just for a little while...

 

honestly, no clue! just my guess.

 

I still don't get why Lithium is even being considered. We rolled back to XenForo which is:

• very fast on mobile
• I can go straight to new posts, the information I am after is available quickly
• go back and forward from mobile to desktop seamlessly. It's a great experience
• engage in one on one and group messaging. Sharing youtube videos for feedback, have quite a few conversations on the go at once. Messaging works great.

What problem is Lithium trying to solve?

What new functionality is so critical it requires the entire software to be changed, and cannot be delivered by XenForo?

It's not broken, the functionality is great, so why change it?

 

I agree, Unity please don't go back to the other forum ever, stick with this one please. If there is some data you want to mine from the forum get one of your good software engineers to spend a week on writing you a data miner that parses this forum and relieves what you want.

 

I like SMF more than phpBB. (view my forums)

Functionality isn't bad... and themes are plentiful.. which the users can set for themselves.

ex: How I have the post styled

 

I'm not sure that we ever got an answer on this, and it's a very good question.

There was speculation that it was an issue of scalability. XenForo is great, but someone was saying that it only runs (sans hacks) on a single server, so once traffic exceeds that server's capability then there's little you can do (aside from those hacks). Lithium, on the other hand, is apparently very scalable over multiple servers.

That kind of makes sense, in the way that Lithium breaks every single action out onto a new page. I'm no web developer, but I'm assuming that means that individual actions can be handled by different servers easily.

The thing is though that XenForo is a smooth, low-friction experience. It's easy to navigate around to things of interest, making responses is speedy, the workflows for common actions are very slick. Those are all things that make it easy for users to stick around. The software doesn't get in the way of social interactions, which are what we're here for.

Lithium, on the other hand... well, the every-action-loads-a-new-page makes even the simplest interactions very clunky. It's a slower, higher-friction experience. And that's without even considering the bugs.

If scalability was the issue then I too question whether Lithium is the answer, just because I can't see the point in supporting higher levels of user interaction if, in doing so, you make those very interactions harder.

 

I liked the look of the new forum, but it was borked. It would constantly refresh the page or turn white. Couldn't stay on the page long enough to actually make a post or click anything, so I can't comment on how well it worked (or didn't work).

 

I liked some aspects of it, but the navigation was utter clusterhay. I had to be wearing glasses to see what i'm doing.

 

I like this forum)