[Closed] Forum Update

I'm fairly certain this site runs on Wordpress so the forum is part of one of the "themes" that you tell Wordpress to use. It's not something written in STW towers. On my work computer this is actually more readable than the old forum - there was something weird in how my graphics card handled the old version that made the text very indistinct.

@Cougar - My comment was more an observation of what was there before. I'd much rather there be on-site links than what's little more than click-bait.

I echo previous comments. Crikey the contrast between the font and background is pretty hard on the eyes. Even with the grey background on every other post its testing going on migraine inducing. You are lucky if this isn't a problem for you. Not opposed to the follow us link but maybe it should be smaller and stay up the top of the page. Will I still visit the forum if no further changes take place? Yes. Will I stay as long and read as many posts? - nope. Will I carry on my subscription? Unlikely.

Also the load speed for the pages is absolutely mental now. 5+ seconds here.

The server has had issues, they tried most of yesterday afternoon and evening to resolve this.

Looks like we have an issue with a network card on our server, which means we will have to wait until the morning to get our server provider to look at it.

Taking out the subjectivity of whether people like the new font and colouring or not, I'm not sure it meets accessibility guidelines (WCAG); I have a feeling that at the very least the contrast ratio is too small making it difficult to read for people with eyesight problems.

You should probably check that, as I'm sure you want the site to be fully accessible.

Although I appreciate it appears frustrating from our end, I wonder how many people on here are considering how it feels to have worked the weekend and attempted to do your best, only for the whole "office" to tell you how shit you are as soon as you walk in the door.

Can't be the most motivating job can it, receiving all this in between tasks.

2 minutes of tweaks isn't hard to make things readable again with no real care for design.

If the idea is to monetize this massive forum then some investment is needed.

Also running off a single hardware server is crazy. I guess money really is tight at STW towers

So when I'm posting on a thread that I've click on... do I really need to see the thread name 4 times in various sizes and shades?? What a flinking mess.

I'll chip in my thoughts just in case.

Really don't like the new font and shading. Much harder to read on all formats. I suppose it does look prettier though.

Not a fan of the Facebook advert at all. Partly because I'm paying to be ad free but also its the same content on every page. Maybe this is a placeholder to start showing other content but I'd still like the option to turn it off unless that content is well chosen

Losing the 'forum' link at the bottom of the page is a real pain. Something that used to take one click now takes three, and two of those clicks are a bit awkward

At least we have two line titles and the ability to jump to the last page.

Font is bigger and now scales on my BlackBerry. Not dared try an edit yet.

Edit and... we are go!

Look I’m not being a jobsworth… but [UX] is my job and this update has been handled terribly.

I hate to come here and agree with the negativity but I have the same job and I couldn't agree more. It's painful to watch.

[i]I hate to come here and agree with the negativity but I have the same job and I couldn’t agree more. It’s painful to watch.[/i]

Ditto.

“watermarked background is horrible and blurry.”

might has well not have bothered it's so light.

Overall, some positives: I like the new colour and size of the forum. The site itself seems more responsive, and on mobile, it looks a lot better.

negatives: the font colours are too washed out, especially on the quotes, it's very hard to pick them out particularly on the blue/grey background. With all the white, nothing stands out font wise.

Also, the site is as slow as balls. This has always been my bugbear with anything built in Wordpress. While it does a lot of the work for you, there is so much loading in the background that it makes navigating the site a chore

Certificate error is now resolved.

Losing the ‘forum’ link at the bottom of the page is a real pain.

Scroll up a bit, click the Forum link?

Scroll up a bit, click the Forum link?

Yeah, there are ways round (hit Home/Cmd-up—provided you don't have focus in a text area—or swipe your phone screen a dozen times) but it's a good example of how basic navigation workflows aren't catered for.

You get to the end of the thread and want to go back to an up-to-date forum page? You can't now, you have to go back to the top, hoping not to accidentally tap on something while repeatedly swiping, and then do it.

You want to go straight to the end of a thread? You can do it: tap a tiny number to try and get to the last page and then swipe down a dozen times again. But there's no single-tap route there, and the page numbers are so small it's eacy to end up on the wrong on. Obviously no access to the first unread item, which has been a basic feature on other forums for donkeys' years.

Even the "next" buttons have disappeared from the pagination navigation: it's now tiny numbers there, too.

There's always a way to get where you're going. It's just that a competent interaction designer will get you there quickly without having to think about it and with minimal chance of making an error along the way. Especially for really frequent tasks.

Scroll up a bit, click the Forum link?

That doesn’t appear in iOS mobile version on Safari for me.

Would be interesting to see the results of the accessibility audit STW undertook before going live with the new site design, particularly in relation to font choice/colours. They [i]did[/i] do one, didn’t they? 😀

Where's the 'my activity' function gone?

Legibility and navigation have taken a real hit for me. I'm sure it all looks very stylish with the grey font over very similar grey background (and quotes are awful) but usability has gone out the window for those of us with impaired vision.

I'd be interested to what extent the recent changes have impacted visitor numbers and participation.

More of a reader than a poster. I really like the new colours and fonts. I use Chrome on desktop, the Facebook stuff doesn't bother me that much - but I don't pay for a P.

I know it's really (I mean REALLY) minor, but I think the 'You need to be logged in to post' message at the bottom of threads used to have a hyperlink to the login page which isn't there. Sorry if I'm not remembering this correctly.

Regarding the returning to the top - as soon as I start scrolling down through a thread a small light grey 'up' button appears in the bottom left hand corner of the screen which takes me back tot the top.

RM.

Seems like coming back here is like the "big fat gypsy wedding" of the internet. For the last few days I have re-logged in just to see how bad it is getting.

Scroll up a bit, click the Forum link?

Ok, not a huge effort but compared to selecting a forum button that was already there at the bottom of the thread its a pain

Edit (maybe): Just to echo what Bez said, yes you can navigate to where you want to get to but it should be simpler than it is. I've just scrolled to the bottom of a thread what do you think I might want to do next? Its actually go back to the forum and read some more and not start following STW facebook or go back to the top of the thread and read it again BTW 🙂 which are currently the only two options at the bottom

Comment from Mark regarding the fonts etc,

We will be looking at the whole design aspect of course and the point is that what we have done now with all the fundamental work behind the scenes is make those kinds of adjustments much easier. But first, we are optimising delivery with the server. 

usability has gone out the window for those of us with impaired vision

Or even just low quality screens. Designers tend to work on nice screens where colour reproduction is good and tonal contrast is consistent across the range. Savvy designers will plug in a second scree: a bottom-of-the-range panel like you find in most offices, where colours are over-saturated and the tonal range (particularly at the top end) is completely distorted. I've had to feed back to others before that things they've designed look great on a Retina but disappear completely on a cheap Dell.

do you know your instagram link at the bottom of the page doesn't take you to Instagram?

Cheers Nick, I didn't realise that.

Comment from Mark

Ooooh! It's like a seance.

Receiving messages from the other side through a medium

Link hands everyone 😉

“feature” of the forum update not bothering simon shocker.

It's a forum, I have quite simple requirements. Not being able to post or see other people's posts would be a big issue. As long as that works then everything else is trivial. I quite like now being able to see what is going on with the rest of the site (side bar and menu bar you can hover over to see content) as my bookmark goes straight to the bike forum and I've rarely looked at the front page. Now I can easily see if there is anything of interest there 🙂

Ooh, get you with your side bar 🙂 No side bar here even with the browser full screen and zoomed out. Just a Facebook widget.

through a medium

More like a small*...

* ta, Terry Pratchett

I don't really get all the hate.

I would prefer a touch more line-height (1.3em instead of 1.2em makes a huge readability difference).
It's particularly tight in the Reply To text area. (which btw is ignoring the Verdana font for the rest of the site).

I would prefer a touch lighter background on the nth-child(2n+1). It's currently #eee and #f1f1f1 looks better imo as the contrast is a little too much between the replies and it also makes the non-black text harder to read.

But this is constructive criticism rather than throwing my toys out of the pram.
The big thing for me is still the ability to see if someone has replied to a thread I've contributed to. At the moment, I just run through the last few replies clicking on the hashes and checking each one just to see.

Just a Facebook widget.

Well that's what I meant but it has links to content on the site.

[i]We will be looking at the whole design aspect of course and the point is that what we have done now with all the fundamental work behind the scenes is make those kinds of adjustments much easier. But first, we are optimising delivery with the server. [/i]

Again, that's all the right stuff to be doing. However, call me a bluff old traditionalist, but one generally does all that in the dev and test environments first to make sure it's correct before releasing into prod...

For me (Chrome on Ubuntu) the top menu bar only appears when I scroll up slightly. It should really be visible all the time. On my iPad the background to that bar is transparent so it's really hard to differentiate the text of each menu item.

Fwiw, I like the new font / colour scheme. All been readable for me even with flux enabled on my laptop.

However, call me a bluff old traditionalist, but one generally does all that in the dev and test environments first to make sure it’s correct before releasing into prod…

🙂

I'm logged in on the iphone, ipad and two desktop PCs. In the past whenever I moved from one device to another I had to log in again (or deal with adverts), which used to drive me nuts. Now I seem to stay logged in on all four devices. That alone makes the whole exercise worthwhile for me. Thanks.

For me (Chrome on Ubuntu) the top menu bar only appears when I scroll up slightly. It should really be visible all the time.

It's also a usability problem for people with touchpads: it's hard to lift your fingers without a small unintended movement, so if you use two fingers to scroll up to make the bar appear, then lift in preparation of using a single finger to move the pointer, it often just vanishes again. (And it's visually distracting, too, with no significant benefit for a bar that small.)

(I realise it's almost certainly default theme behaviour, just pointing out why it may be worth removing or making less sensitive.)

By the way, I'm clearly in a minority (of one?) here, but I like having all the content (even the facebook stuff) accessible from any page on the forum. In the past I'd have to log onto facebook from time to time to see if Will had posted one of his videos. Now I can just scroll down the widget on the left to check this as well as scrolling up and checking the links at the top to see what's on the main site. Very cool. On the ipad I just double tap the text in a post to make that column fill the whole screen if I want.

EDIT: Just one request. Could the Forum link at the top be made into a dropdown menu (like the others) so that I can just jump straight to the Bike (or any other) sub-forum ?

[b]mattsccm[/b] wrote:

Of course the other issue is that computer  stuff is always done by experts who have no sodding idea that those with less technical understanding or interest don’t like it. The moveable heading is a case in point. Its fashionable. Bugger the practicality.

Point of order - I'm an "expert" currently working on fancy web stuff and I think I was the first to complain about the moving header. Though I take the slightly unusual attitude for a dev of listening to my customers.

Given that the update is trying everyone's patience, sticking that facebook ad on the screen is a niggle too far. Please get rid. It is a real irritant on the PC.

Could the Forum link at the top be made into a dropdown

I'd already though the same thing, it's on my list.

while some comments are valid - a lot of what is going on here is some people just can't handle change on any kind.

I like the new font, happy enough with colours to but I only access the forum via my work laptop, I can understand why people on smaller screens or with impaired vision might be struggling.

It seems a lot slower which isn't good but if that's where the current techy focus in then hopefully that will get sorted soon enough.

Is this really running on hardware in STW towers though? Surely it's the perfect thing to host on Azure or AWS?

(And it’s visually distracting, too, with no significant benefit for a bar that small.)

No significant benefit? Hovering over the buttons gives me previews & access to all sorts of useful content.

New forum looks fine to me - my main concern is still how I monitor my postings - the old allowed me to access all my postings