[tried deleting, didn't work]

So I held off commenting for several days to see how (and if) things progressed. On the forum (only part of the site I usually use) the large font (14 is fairly large for composed text; 12 is more typical IIRC) and vast swathes of empty space are really distracting, exacerbated by the giant "profile" banner atop each post. On a standard size laptop screen, this ensures that only trivial posts can fit on the screen. I guess I could run a couple of rooms over and plug into my expensive monitor where I'm sure that isn't a problem, but it's not worth the effort.

I'm also fairly upset to notice that, without warning or a means of opting out, you're now publicly displaying user email address such that every Tom, Dick, and Harry spammer with a web crawler has probably already harvested it. This is not good netiquette. Please at least give us some means of opting out! The obfuscation (s/\@/- AT -/g and s/\./- DOT -/g) indicates you were aware of the issue, but it's not 1998 anymore and only the stupidest crawlers are likely be fooled by it today. I guess I could set an invalid address, but that puts my whole account at risk the next time there's an unannounced site-wide password reset.

EDIT: not a complaint but more of an FYI, the new site has no robots.txt. Not sure if that's a problem or not.

I said the same about the font size, and was told to zoom out!!!

The new site is better.. but preferred the look of the old forums without the huge banners for each post with name number of posts uploads etc etc… would be far better, as other people have posted with that info to the left of the actual posts… (and with a smaller font on the main page and forums page!)

Also i dont understand the fascination of sites these days with HUGE blank spaces to the left and right…. Seems FB started this and everyone else followed suit…

Thank you for letting the initial shock settle :). Again, I'm sorry for having to do it without notice, but the old site kept bringing down the server. I'm getting that there needs to be a bit more options as far as customization goes.

If you visit your preferences, you can turn off displaying your email. It shouldn't be like that by default…. I'll make a quick change for that.

I do have a robots.txt it's just off. Googlebot is testing the site ;).

Yeah. I guess I expected a concern for visual efficiency on a coder-oriented site, as we have a greater tendency to notice such things. But we each have our own way of doing things. I'm actually trying NOT to inject too many of my personal preferences in here; I would personally prefer something around size 10 – that's generally considered small, but still acceptable, I've been told. But I acknowledge that there are probably normal-sighted people, perhaps many of them, who would have to squint uncomfortably or zoom in to deal with that.

On side margins, most (non-mobile) screens in use today have around 75% greater horizontal resolution than vertical, so it's easier to forgive wasted horizontal space than wasted vertical space. That may be where it comes from.

Yeah, okay. As reasons go, that's a pretty solid one.


Hmm, right you are, and it works fine. Apparently thoroughness isn't a major character trait of mine today. I apologize.

Newspapers did it first. It's about column width. Text is easier to read at around 50-60 characters per line[1]. Newspapers take advantage of this by printing more columns. FB, etc,. take advantage of this by using the width on the sides for other features, such as site navigation and advertising.

FWIW, I have a hard time reading the re-designed site as my eyes keep skipping to the wrong location when trying to find the text in a post. Mostly, I end up in the fat profile banner.

[1] http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-read...

Do people really hold their phones sideways to read web sites? I don't. If the site can't render in a readable way holding the phone normally, I usually just bookmark it and wait until I'm at a real desktop to read it.

My main suggestion would be to tighten up the display a bit. Trim the gaps between posts to be a thin line, Then , I guess I'd suggest reorienting the header bar for each post into a avatar-width column to the left. The elements IN the bar are all short bits of text which would easily fit under the avatar itself.

It could be Firebug if you want this for FireFox/IceWeasel. Must confess when I first read this I thought you wanted to intercept JavaScript not CSS on the fly and was just about to wave the flag for GreaseMonkey.

I would say that I'm not a JS expert but even I managed to write a simple couple of lines of grease monkey script (below) to get ride of a click to remove animated "cookie warning" on the UK Government's Official Jobs Board that I was "required" to use a while back - if one refuses cookies by default {like anyone with half a grain of sense would, on a site that wants to track your job seeking so they can take away social security payments for NOT spending 8 hours a day using it} it comes up on the top of every bloody page and eats a portion of the screen; a couple of lines in a grease-monkey script was a much needed solution when the only other way to get rid of it is to accept a cookie from them telling the server NOT to set cookies.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        Nuke Universal Jobmatch cookie warning banner
// @namespace   http://jobsearch.direct.gov.uk
// @version     1.1
// @grant       GPL
// ==/UserScript==
var div = document.getElementById("cookieBanner");
if (div) {
    div.parentNode.removeChild(div); // Removes it entirely
}

At the risk of going completely off topic I invite anyone to try the UK Gov's site and see just how user-hostile it is…

It's been a good number of days since the new site was released, and I have to say it's still very much an eyesore. In the meantime, I feel like this discussion has lost a bit of its original focus.

There are a couple of very simple things you can do to make things a whole lot better. In order of eyesoreness:

1. Decide which font is going to be your main, and which font is going to be your headline / emphasis font. Right now, the site has up to 5 different fonts used on a single page. Some page elements have no font assigned at all, so they will default to a system font that's different on different machines. That's just amateur hour.

2. Decide what your base font size is for readable text. Then all other font sizes should be within reasonable range of that base font size. Right now, you have clearly outsized page elements. They flow badly. Maybe you're going for mobile-friendly design, but ruining the site for desktop users is really not how you do responsive design. You do that using media queries that resize or re-style certain page elements based on device screen size.

3. Add padding (and proper word wrapping) on all boxes containing text. I've not seen this since the early days of the Internet, and it's not the kind of blast from the past I care for :)

I've released a small patch that's opened up user customizations for comments. If you check out your preferences you have full control over font size, font colour, font family, background colour and hyperlink colours. It does nothing outside of the individual comments, but it'll at least make it easier for some to consume content. Fwiw, it wasn't designed for mobile. All my work is done from my couch on my tv (1080p), with testing done on a monitor that's 1600x1200 and an iPhone 6 occasionally. I'm really just that bad haha. What I learned about designing UI's I read on the bootstrap site.

Plamzi, I apologize that the theme hasn't progressed as much as you'd like. Please understand MudBytes isn't my job and the first and last week of the month are 60h work weeks. Progress will slow around those times. The html/css is on the bottom of my priority list. Right know I have to keep data integrity, performance, and stability on the top of my list, while making the user experience as painless as possible. If my alterations are still not acceptable, shoot me a PM if you're interested in getting more involved.

Stylebot

That's the one I was thinking of.

I understand fully, having walked miles in those same shoes. If I could help it, I would keep quiet and just wait. But I can't help it, you see! Especially not since MudBytes is on a very short list of sites I hit every single day, and since the dev has a thread in which they actually respond :)

You can put me on an ignore list if you have one already. Or add one if you don't, and then put me on it to test if it works.



If you're rolling your own, and if the past is any indication, stability will be a problem for a long time. And since performance, one of your passions, never really ends, my sense is there will be a long wait indeed.



I've gotten a lot busier since last I offered, and now I have my own MUD-related site to care after. At some point right after you launched this new site I felt like maybe we could discuss merging sites and joining efforts. But I'm not so sure it's a meaningful topic anymore given what you've shared in the course of this thread.

One thing that strikes me is in the site feed on the main page, it seems unnecessarily redundant to have multiple instances of comments in the same thread. If one particular thread were to be considerably more active than others, a good portion of the site feed would read comment after comment in the same thread, for instance, and I feel like that would hurt the flow and ease of accessibility for multiple discussions that are going on.

Still adjusting, but I'm patient. This stuff will get worked out with time.

A thousand times this:

That's a great start. It looks tremendous to me, with black text on white background. A few more small changes to tighten up the space and Robert will be your father's brother.

Any chance of customising colour of quoted comments? Those are really hard on the eyes with dark background and angry orange.

If you really feel keen, allow theming of smilies, so we can choose what set to see. I like the old small yellow ones ;-)

Also when I posted this comment, the background was some dark colour although it appears as white backgrounf below when editing.

The main thing for customization is to be consistent.

My suggestion is to make everything a CSS class based on the use of the thing, rather than where it lives. For example, the default theme (which I like) uses white text on a medium-grey background, but the editor text area defaults to black on white.

Those should both use the same CSS classes so they both inherit the same colors, fonts, etc, based on user preferences or defaults.

If you have Firefox (and maybe some older versions of Chrome) you can use the Stylish add-on and user styles (https://userstyles.org/stylish) to mess with the CSS on sites.

If we're going to have site configuration options, there might as well be almost a theme's worth of it. A theme definition option (or least for some pre-defined styles that look nice) would be useful in case you don't want to tweak every option yourself. In particular being able to change the background color would be nice for maximum choices of contrast with the comment box. I'd also recommend making the header and options bar (reply, delete, etc) belong to the same css class/group/whatever and make that a have a configurable background/text color as well. The reason being that an ideal theme (to me) is one where the actual text of the post/comment is the part that most readily draws the eye. It might also be nice to have control over the text/background of the inset blocks for code/etc, but it might also make sense to have two options: black, several shades darker of whatever the comment color is.

P.S.

The name of this forum is 'Annoucements'. There's an 'n' missing there.

My comment colour is white background, black text. But sometimes this happens. In this case, I clicked on a link to a recent comment on the home page.