New Website Design Feedback Thread

[moogly]

Yeah the first forum template was 'simple' with too many white background but now it's really better! Good job. I love it.

--> I saw the frame of the website (connection/lang) is missing when we are browsing the board.

[Ultima]

Other observations/suggestions:

GENERAL:

- Is this circled header really necessary? I can easily see the entire site design being perfectly usable and coherent without it (and the whitespace above it). It's essentially duplicating information already shown by the website header's tabs (mostly anyway, assuming this gets fixed), and is causing the odd disconnect that I mentioned here. The only problem with removing it would be that the forum header's "Index | User list | Rules | Search | Profile | Logout" links would go with it, but they can always be merged with the #brdwelcome div.

Edit 1: I suppose an issue with merging the forum links with #bdrwelcome would be that other forum skins might get messed up by the page structure change...

Edit 2: Okay, so the Documentation sub-pages would lack headers if it got removed... But that's just one section of the page, and I'm sure a slight redesign of those documentation pages would be sufficient in working around removal of this (IMO extraneous) page header. They can be put at the top of the "blurb" section I mention below, for example.

- [2009-03-21 @ 10:26] Along the same lines as what boo mentioned about the footer, why is a site map even needed at the bottom of every page, period? Wouldn't a Site Map page be sufficient? I'm pretty certain users won't be scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to get to quick links (at that point, it wouldn't be considered "quick" anymore). IMO, all it serves to do is add clutter to every page.

FORUM:

- The "Homepage" and "IRC" links can now be removed from the forum header, since they're already accessible from the website header.

- The lack of spacing (or other division of some sort) seen here surprised/confused me for a second. Perhaps some padding/margins need to be added?

- I don't know if it was intentional, but a bit more than the left half of the gray post header is an anchor. I'm not really sure why it needs to be half. Having only the timestamp clickable (or alternatively, the entire header clickable) would make more sense.

- Can the "Report | Edit" links (in the ".postfootright" divs) be moved over to the right side again? It feels awkward with it on the left-hand side (or, er, middle of the page). Messes with my muscle memory ;D

- Why are form buttons so ginormous? D:

- The post preview page is really messed up (just try it yourself to see ).

- The redirection page after a post is submitted/edited is somewhat... plain. It's mostly unimportant, but I guess the point is that it's just inconsistent with the rest of the forum.

- The unbolding of threads without new posts is definitely an improvement, but I guess the distinction still isn't quite that clear unless you look carefully. Under the other forum skins, there are images to the left of each thread indicating the read status of the thread, where threads with new posts are colored differently from threads without. Perhaps a page should be taken out of those skins and status images should be reintroduced for threads? I guess I overestimated the utility of the bolding, and underestimated the utility of the thread status images.

Edit 1: An alternative to using an image would be to use a different color that's distinguishable from regular links. Distinguishable, not jarringly different

Edit 2: So I guess after a while, it's become less of a problem (perhaps I've gotten used to it already). Oh well

DOCUMENTATION:

- The text on the Documentation page is somewhat... large. It looks inconsistent with the rest of the site, and almost out of place.

- There should be a short (one or two line) blurb at the top of each sub-page linked from the Documentation page (much like where "Check out guides, get ..." is on the main Documentation page). NOTE that the "µTorrent Connection Setup Guide" page already has such a blurb, but it isn't styled in the same way as on the main Documentation page.

- While the site is still actively being redesigned, I'm thinking... maybe the on-site guides should be styled more consistently with the "µTorrent Connection Setup Guide" page's style (images next to and a divider between each section, etc.)?

SKINS:

- The skins page's "Show" combobox redirects to "toolbar?order=[ORDER]&limit=[LIMIT]". Yes, you're seeing that correctly, it's redirecting to a URL with the & HTML entity, which is causing it to fail. When you remove the extra amp; from the URL, the skin count is (unsurprisingly) used correctly.

- The skin submissions page... I realize that because it's just a simple form, it shouldn't need to be that wide, but even still, the large whitespace on the right of the form is irksome...

[rafi]

boo:

Another thing, I don't like the fact that the font size is smaller :-(

Same here... it really hurts my eyes...

[moogly]

- The unbolding of threads without new posts is definitely an improvement, but I guess the distinction still isn't quite that clear unless you look carefully. Under the other forum skins, there are images to the left of each thread indicating the read status of the thread, where threads with new posts are colored differently from threads without. Perhaps a page should be taken out of those skins and status images should be reintroduced for threads? I guess I overestimated the utility of the bolding, and underestimated the utility of the thread status images.

I second that, it's really not obvious to distinguish new bold threads and non-replied threads, especially with green color. Maybe add a flag before title of new threads (like in phpBB or IPB templates) in addition to bold.

Same thing for subforums when a new posted has been posted within it, it's practice to go directly to the subforum when we see a new thread.

[Ultima]

Indeed, such a flag would pretty much be an image as I mentioned. An alternative to using an image would be to use a different color for threads with new posts.

Edit: Another curiosity... Along the same lines as what boo mentioned about the footer, why is a site map even needed at the bottom of every page, period? Wouldn't a Site Map page be sufficient? I'm pretty certain users won't be scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page to get to quick links (at that point, it wouldn't be considered "quick" anymore). IMO, all it serves to do is add clutter to every page.

[war59312]

It appears your forum password can not be logger than 8 chars. lame! No warning about it either when changing password.

Should at least allow a 20 char. password, that seems about the average max.

The official forms of fluxbb work just fine with a 20char pw...

And why change from punbb?

And wow is font size small now, 2 zooms in on Firefox makes it a lot better and this is at today's standard resolution of 1280x1024.

As is, it is very hard on the eyes.

[boo]

@war59312: the forum has been using FluxBB for quite some time,

so it has nothing to do with the changes.

FluxBB is a derivative of punBB.

btw, 2 zooms in firefox looks great for me as well,

I really hope they fix the font size

[teohhanhui]

The colours are too light/bright for me (the shiny look is distracting, and perhaps a little disturbing). Miss the old site...

[porphyry]

This link:

http://www.utorrent.com/faq/network#Modems_routers_that_are_known_to_have_problems_with_P2P

on this page:

http://www.utorrent.com/faq/network#faq6 (the part where it says "this list")

doesn't seem to work. I think it should be changed to:

http://www.utorrent.com/faq/incompatible-software#faq10

Otherwise the site is very easy to navigate, looks good, and is quite functional. Thanks!

_{Edit (Ultima): Fixed second link (originally pointed to #faq5, and didn't specify which link in that FAQ).}

[war59312]

@war59312: the forum has been using FluxBB for quite some time,

so it has nothing to do with the changes.

FluxBB is a derivative of punBB.

Guess I never noticed the change until now..

But yeah it's cool..

[MechR]

The new website has gone live, but there's still no way to sort skins by date

[osm0sis]

I felt the old font was too large on my sadly (more uncommon lately) 1024x768 screen resolution and was zooming out to make it easier to handle.. so maybe we can compromise and say it would be nice if the font size were dynamic to the display.

[Firon]

It appears your forum password can not be logger than 8 chars. lame! No warning about it either when changing password.

Should at least allow a 20 char. password, that seems about the average max.

The official forms of fluxbb work just fine with a 20char pw...

And why change from punbb?

Are you sure about that? The form is set for 16... I'll change it to 32 anyway.

[war59312]

Are you sure about that? The form is set for 16... I'll change it to 32 anyway.

Firon, odd! But yeah it was only remembering the first 8 chars. Tried many times. Oh well.

But yeah, thanks. Fine now.

Update: Oh and I thought it might be a special char, but the same PW worked fine on the official forums so figured it was not that.

My account does not show up twice by chance in the database? I've seen that happen before and caused problems. But that was like a year ago and with punbb.

But yeah who knows.. Thanks!

I felt the old font was too large on my sadly (more uncommon lately) 1024x768 screen resolution and was zooming out to make it easier to handle.. so maybe we can compromise and say it would be nice if the font size were dynamic to the display.

So perhaps easier would just be if smaller than 1280x1024 leave at current size otherwise make it 2 font sizes larger. Easy enough!

[scubanarc]

Hey guys,

I noticed today that when I did a port test (and failed) the link to the utorrent guides at portforward.com is malformed. Can you fix it, because I set up a lot of people and find that link to be very helpful.

The BAD link points to:

http://www.utorrent.com/%5C%22http://www.portforward.com/english/applications/port_forwarding/Utor/Utorindex.htm%5C%22

and I suspect it should point to:

http://www.portforward.com/english/applications/port_forwarding/Utor/Utorindex.htm

Thanks a ton!

[Panarchy]

Great work with the new site & forum theme!

Who designed it?

What are you planning on doing with the old site design?

Just asking!

Panarchy

[fatspirit]

About search results:

[simonbcn]

Hi,

The new website looks better, but the speed of page loading is extremely slow.

And in some links, after waiting some time, firefox opens the file download dialog to download the PHP page instead of displaying in the browser.

If I waited for a while and I repeat, sometimes I get to see the page properly.

Greetings.

Other error:

[Ultima]

I think .postsignature needs to be made slightly distinct from the forum post body (maybe a different background color?). Too many people confuse signatures with post bodies, and respond to the signature instead of the body (case in point).

[boo]

yay, the font size seems to be fixed

But shouldn't the 'Show new posts since last visit' and 'Mark all topics as read' links be more to the right?

[BigRedPK]

Hm, since the new site launched, the port checker seems to be totally broken. http://www.utorrent.com/testport.php?port=##### always reports 'An error has occured' despite the port being open.

I've used several other port checkers to determine that the port truly is open, and even the utorrent client reports open whenever I have a torrent running. The site just always says otherwise.

Otherwise, I'm not liking the new site, though I can't give a specific reason why. Something about it just bugs the hell out of me. The same way I feel when I'm on digg.com

[GTHK]

I hate how the FAQ page is set up, I used to use Ctrl+F to look things up real quick and find it easy, but now I need to go through each section. Also, I hate the header, makes Radium look retarded and uses up a lot of screen estate.

[moogly]

You are lucky because each time I go to FAQ, the page is displayed in French, I have to switch in English and use ctrl+f.

[tjobo]

Don't know if you know this but when a user without a signature enters a short text the white wrapping doesn't go to all the way to the bottom. This leaves an ugly grey space underneath. It make the replies hard to read when it changes all the time.

Se screenshot if you don't know what I'm talking about

[Alpha-Toxic]

I'm sorry that I have to do this since I realize that a lot of hard work must have went into the design, but I will unfortunately have to trash it in this post...

// rant mode on

IMHO it's unusable, sorry...

The basics are all there, but after a few minutes my eyes get really tired.

First of all the colours... waaay too bright. Especially the lighter of the post backgrounds and the 2 yellow bands at the bottom. The have reached some limit where I start to involuntarily start moving my head around to find a viewing angle that will make the contrast between them and the white background higher. I remember when ubuntuforums.org made a similar new design that had (and still has) the exact same problem. The stupid thing is that a simple thin dark outline would completely fix this (the old designs actually did exactly that), but nooooo... we have to pretend to be "stylish" and "web 2.0" or whatever. Well fuck web2.0. As it stands now, white backgrounds everywhere would look better!

Then there is the forum width. In the old design it would resize to fill the browser window, not any more... You have a widescreen monitor? Bad luck.

Now to something a bit different. Have you tried the "code" tag? If you tell me that you like how it looks I'll jump of a bridge or something. Where is the border? Quoting has a border, why not "code"?

Then there is the insanely huge empty space between the avatar and the actual text of the post. The old design also had that space, but at least it would resize to fill the browser window. Now the actual post takes only about half of the screen!

// rant mode off

I could go on like that, but I really don't want to offend anyone. I know you put effort into it, I just can't understand where it all broke along the way. What was so wrong with the old design that you had to change it? Well it's back to the "Lithium" style for me.