Coming Soon: New Message Board Layout

I've tried to adjust, but I really just don't like it. It's different, but no better than it was. I can't quote others (iMac using google chrome) and there's just not much actual info on the screen at any given time. It also looks very bland. Lots of white with some blah black text. 

I brought up evacuation as it had only occurred to me at that moment, I'm a Northerner ya see and not akin to Florida happenings. Who really knows the deal there.

I ain't bustin' on nobody only adding thoughts like others. I understand.

The gang has their hands full with hurricane prep / evac. Let's continue to post ideas & concerns in this thread, but I don't expect there will be any further implementation for a few weeks. 

EastCoastMojo said:

The gang has their hands full with hurricane prep / evac. Let's continue to post ideas & concerns in this thread, but I don't expect there will be any further implementation for a few weeks. 

Thanks for clarifying that, that's what I thought.

My thoughts.  Screwing with the css for a second...

Current:

What it should look like:

Obviously the actual thread listing page needs similar vertical compression, but it suffers from massive font sizes as well.

Edit:  I noticed above that the image link carries all the way across my post (including the white space to the right of the image) instead of stopping at the right edge of the image.

There.  I fixed it.  15 threads viewable on 1 page. 

Best of luck with the hurricane, guys.

These emojis suck. Bring back E36 M3eating grin sunglasses face please.

This appears to be a premature release of a new product. I have experience since I was a Product Manager for new industrial products, including software. This is unacceptable. I found that unless you go in through the CM site you can't find anything here. I worked in industry for forty years. This type of product failure on intro would have been totally unacceptable. Heads would have rolled. But if an artificial deadline was imposed then that's a different story, and the result of that is what we have.

Yes. Font size, white space, page formatting, layout whatever you want to call it is a big negative. I haven't noticed any improvements yet because I can't see past the new page layout. Honestly it ruins the whole forum experience for me. I don't even bother browsing any of the threads it's so annoying. 

But the new prominent save button to post is nice.

Hi all. Just checking in here before bed but after calling it a night on hurricane prep. 

As far as the launch goes, that's Ed's baby, but he spent today evacuating. Things are bad here. Like every store is out of everything and people are fighting in parking lots bad. I spent the day adding extra hurricane strapping to my trusses. This storm is going to be bad, and we're signed up for a direct hit  

We'll be back next week, so keep posting feedback, but know it will take a little bit for us to get to it. 

Thanks. 

In reply to Tom Suddard :

Sure hope you guys don't get too much damage. Stay safe! 

In reply to Tom Suddard : get a good bottle of scotch before they are all gone, you know for medicinal purposes. Take care, we'll be here when you get back.

What? Not sure if that was directed at me, but I'm busy worrying about real things (like whether my house will still be here in a few days) to pick fights over the font sizes on our new forum. 

I thought about typing a long post about how web development is different from launching an industrial product, but neither of those are my area of expertise and at this point my mind keeps defaulting to "berkeley off, I'm going to hang more plywood then drive my family to safety." So there's my response for now—look for more follow-up next week. 

In reply to Gary:

Wtf?  It's a free to you forum. Pull your head out of your shiny happy person and realize there's more important things in the world to get worked up over. 

Admittedly I haven't read all 15 pages, but my only major gripe is that im having a hard time discerning which threads have new posts on mobile. I obsessively check the forum, so knowing before I click is nice. The rest of it I'll get used to. 

Best of luck to all of you that are in the path of this brewing disaster - my sister is in Tampa and I'm still trying to convince her to get out of there, regardless of the updated track. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

How did you get the 15 topics condensed like that?

DeadSkunk said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

How did you get the 15 topics condensed like that?

In chrome developer mode (right click, inspect) you can override the CSS.  I just reduced some margins/padding and made the font size for the topics reasonable.  Pretty minor changes can make a pretty big difference.

Those changes don't stick if you reload, but if you want to install a plugin you can have it permanently override the site stylesheet with your own custom stylesheet.

Edit.  I just did that^.  World of difference.  I can't share my style, because its blocked at work.  But if you want to download Stylebot, you can paste this into the edit CSS window:

div.forum-row {
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    padding-top: 0;
    padding-bottom: 0;
}

h6 {
    font-size: 1em;
    font-weight: 700;
    margin-bottom: 3px;
}

.forum-row .pages a, .forum-row .pages span {
    padding: 2px 4px;
}

a.topic_name {
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    padding-top: 0;
    padding-bottom: 0;
}

.postlist .post .head {
    padding: 0.125em 0;
}

.postlist .post:last-of-type {
    border-bottom: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0.25em;
}

.postlist .post {
    margin-bottom: 0.125em;
    margin-top: 0.125em;
    padding-bottom: 0.125em;
    padding-top: 0.125em;
}

.postlist .post .postcontrols {
    margin-bottom: .25em;
}

In reply to ProDarwin: 

Thanks for doing that and showing how it was done. I'm not sure you can redesign a forum by committee, but it's nice to show what the options are.  Much more constructive then just wailing about the world ending due to whitespace. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

I like what you've done on the topics page.  I'd say the thread one is almost a hair too condensed though.  Adding something visually separate different replies would let it work better without needing the extra whitespace.  

rslifkin said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

I like what you've done on the topics page.  I'd say the thread one is almost a hair too condensed though.  Adding something visually separate different replies would let it work better without needing the extra whitespace.  

I agree. I like the whitespace and line in between thread posts, as it keeps it all from looking like a compressed jumble. In fact, I'm not having any of the issues many of you seem to be having. I can see a lot of threads on the main page, and lots of posts inside the thread. Scrolling a bit is not onerous unless you're excessively lazy (ohh, moving a finger a little bit is soooo taxing) and it's normal on most of the forums I'm on. Try scrolling in a thread on VW Vortex, for example). This is better than the Car&Driver backfires forum, too.

I like a lot of the additional features it's acquired, especially the picture posting and automatic link creation. The quoting seems to work fine, too.

I feel bad. 

I was asked to help Beta test this, and was really stretched and was unable  to spend much time with it. I feel like I let down the staff, and the forum members.  So, I apologize for that  

However, I have to agree with some of the sentiments here. It's really not good at all. I can't offer much constructive, because I know very little about this. I'm just a forum user. 

I appreciate the efforts of the staff, and respect that you have much more important things to worry about right now. I'll be patient. 

rslifkin said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

I like what you've done on the topics page.  I'd say the thread one is almost a hair too condensed though.  Adding something visually separate different replies would let it work better without needing the extra whitespace.  

Yeah, I've already tweaked it a bit since then.  I don't think its the solution for everyone, and I certainly think someone could do a better job than I can (I'm not a web developer) in 2 minutes of screwing around with the guts.

I like the way I have it now (aside from the ginormous font in the editor), and I'll use & enjoy it this way until the staff has time to make updates.

One small gripe, reply and quote don't work on my craptop, but does on my phone.

I get used to it, but the light/white with light tones make it hard to see. Every other site I go to is "dark", which makes this one "blinding".