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NeoGAF 2.0.0.1 Update: A Space Odyssey

12Goblins

Lil’ Gobbie
Anybody else feel like the changes killed the activity?

I used to like it, but the avatars on the thread titles need to go...
 

Nymphae

Banned
Anybody else feel like the changes killed the activity?

I used to like it, but the avatars on the thread titles need to go...

I literally just came in here to post this. Not sure if it's just me but I'm reading fewer threads, the main forum pages are just tiring to look at. I scan them less for interesting thread titles, maybe just me though. I really hope it will be possible for people to revert to the old style.
 

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Visitors unchanged, but post activity has freefalled since the update yes. This is a major concern and indicates a significant subset of our regular users are uncomfortable with the design. We were looking to implement changes faster here, like a quick nav for the top and so forth, but there are technical roadblocks with the new theme in various ways. Mobile is good, but I'm with you folks that I don't care for the avatars in the thread list, and the left nav is totally superfluous on desktop.


Ok, here's my last word on this.
First: If it's not broken, don't fix it: There was no need to change something perfect already. At least do what reddit did, and let people use something like old.reddit.com (or opt out in the options)

Now, I tried to adjust to it during this week, but I just can't.
- The forum is slower and clunkier on my first PC and bugged on my second PC (older FF browser).
- The thread list, and I'm not exactly sure why, has become very tiring for my eyes and unpleasant to try to browse. I look at the first ones and instead of keep reading I just close the site because my eyes can't take it. Very, very unpleasant.
- The damend sidebar keep opening itself every damn time I reopen the site. Incredibly annoying.
- The followed thread list has gone from a quickly reachable spot to the annoying sidebar.
- Since I've seen it mentioned: I prefer the square avatars, but I don't mind round ones.

Trying to use the forum during this week, for me, was really unpleasant, annoying and cumbersome.
So.
I'm out. Farewell, and thanks for all the fish.

Guys, we will try to sort things out for the community. It's flexible, especially on modern software. It's as simple as a toggle to offer the option of the other design. That's what this thread is for: to get feedback, and tune things, make sure everything's :messenger_ok:

If it's not okay, not trending to okay, bare minimum you'll get the option to use your preferred design.
 

Redneckerz

Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Visitors unchanged, but post activity has freefalled since the update yes.
This was my understanding aswell. However, i think a lot of it has to do with the sidepane that takes up a portion of the screen.

I just realized how you could get back to full screen: The three bars in the left corner grant you a wide screen of posting, which makes it more reminscent of the previous look. I don't know if this was communicated as such, but if it weren't, it really improves the readability of the site.

The avatar bits in the thread headers seem a bit unneeded yeah, however the note get square ava's back: I understand people value their ava and that on some it is cut off, but that seems more like a QoL issue than anything else.

The flickering of the top bar however is really distracting. I am glad that the page now visually indicates when its busy with itself but it attracts eyes, which is, quite literally... not a good look. (Badumtss)

Other than that, i have readjust for the most part, especially with the sidepane now being able to hide it.
 

Scopa

The Tribe Has Spoken
Yeah, mobile seems pretty good (or I’m just getting used to it). It’d be interesting to know if the majority of the users unhappy with the new design are using desktop.

And yeah, I criticised the avatars in thread titles on day 1. I preferred the usernames. A lot of people change their avatar too frequently for it to be relevant.
 

Kadayi

Banned
EviLore EviLore

I've been using the dark theme, however, whatever the default body font is, it's very hard to read, especially on a high-resolution monitor because it's San-Serif like Arial rather than a Serif Font like Georgia or Times New Roman.

Your body font should almost always be a Serif font because it is much easier for the eye to read the letter forms at speed and on mass. You should only really use San-Serif fonts for Titles or very short burst of texts like promotional material. Trying to read San-Serif for any length of time is quite fatiguing, on the eyes and the brain. Open up almost any Novel and you'll see the text is invariably a Serif Font versus a Helvetica or Tahoma. That's not an aesthetic decision versus a practical one.

In the short term, I recommend changing the default body font for posts to Georgia, Book Antiqua or TNR and see how that impacts matters. You might want to bump the size up according also. Try reading the two examples below and you'll see what I mean about the speed and ease of reading aspect.

Default: -

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the
book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or
conversations?"

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of
making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.


Book Antiqua at 15 points: -

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the
book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or
conversations?"


So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of
making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.


The former you're spending more time just digesting the words, whereas with the latter you're more engaged with the subject.
 
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EviLore EviLore

I've been using the dark theme, however, whatever the default body font is, it's very hard to read, especially on a high-resolution monitor because it's San-Serif like Arial rather than a Serif Font like Georgia or Times New Roman.

Your body font should almost always be a Serif font because it is much easier for the eye to read the letter forms at speed and on mass. You should only really use San-Serif fonts for Titles or very short burst of texts like promotional material. Trying to read San-Serif for any length of time is quite fatiguing, on the eyes and the brain. Open up almost any Novel and you'll see the text is invariably a Serif Font versus a Helvetica or Tahoma. That's not an aesthetic decision versus a practical one.

In the short term, I recommend changing the default body font for posts to Georgia, Book Antiqua or TNR and see how that impacts matters. You might want to bump the size up according also. Try reading the two examples below and you'll see what I mean about the speed and ease of reading aspect.

Default: -

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the
book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or
conversations?"

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of
making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.


Book Antiqua at 15 points: -

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the
book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or
conversations?"


So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of
making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.


The former you're spending more time just digesting the words, whereas with the latter you're more engaged with the subject.

While i agree on your design theory, honestly reading that antiqua font on my phone was hard, but i blame it on the size of the text not the font
 
Hmm. Every post now has all the background code?

I see
<div class="bbWrapper">Classic themes are now available, more information can be found here: <a href="https://www.neogaf.com/threads/classic-themes-now-available.1468559/" class="link link--internal">https://www.neogaf.com/threads/classic-themes-now-available.1468559/</a></div>

On your post btw Beard, and every post on the forum now? I just refreshed and it's showing up all over.

Scopa's post above shows:
<div class="bbWrapper"><div class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote "> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/goto/post?id=253600154" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-253600154">heckmanimation said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent"> While i agree on your design theory, honestly reading that antiqua font on my phone was hard, but i blame it on the size of the text not the font </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink"><a>Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </div>Agreed.</div>
 

haxan7

Volunteered as Tribute
Hmm. Every post now has all the background code?

I see

On your post btw Beard, and every post on the forum now? I just refreshed and it's showing up all over.

Scopa's post above shows:
For me on Chrome it does

c03ujbo.png
 

Beard of the Forest

The No. 1 cause of forest fires is trees.
You may have trouble parsing this text until the bug is fixed, but rest assured we know about it and it's already almost done.

Edit: was actually done before this post was finished :messenger_beaming:
 
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Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
We are still dedicated to fixing up the Modern theme experience based on everyone's feedback so look for some changes coming down the pipe pretty quickly on those as well. I'll continue posting updates to this thread as they become available.
 

Tesseract

Banned
ya i wanted to be nice, but i absolutely hated that design

it was an instant turn off, and somehow made reading text on the page unbearable

this was my experience on desktop tho, i quite like the mobile version
 
We are still dedicated to fixing up the Modern theme experience based on everyone's feedback so look for some changes coming down the pipe pretty quickly on those as well. I'll continue posting updates to this thread as they become available.

I'd prefer the modern theme, except I'm not a fan of the side-bar (I prefer the quick access buttons at the top), and the name of who posted last and who created the thread doesn't appear when zoomed in too close. I zoom in past 150%, because I sit pretty far back, so the modern theme actually loses some functionality for me.

Love that people have the choice now, though. Keep up the good work.

[edit] I just noticed that the bookmarks feature seems to be broken on the classic dark them, and probably the light one as well. You can set new bookmarks in the classic theme, but you can't open the bookmarks menu to view them.
 
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Grieves

Member
I prefer the look of the classic theme but I can't see alerts on mobile with that so the functionality of the modern theme wins out for me.
 

Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
[edit] I just noticed that the bookmarks feature seems to be broken on the classic dark them, and probably the light one as well. You can set new bookmarks in the classic theme, but you can't open the bookmarks menu to view them.

The bookmarks menu on the classic themes is available by clicking on your account menu at the top of the page (Your avatar + name) and in the resulting dropdown will be "Bookmarks". Clicking that will take you to your list of bookmarks.
 

GoldenEye98

posts news as their odd job
I really tried to put my finger on what makes the new design "less readable". Specifically the thread list page on desktop seems to be the worst (which is also arguably the most important of the site). The two things that come to mind are: The color choices; specifically the text under the thread title(user, time stamp...etc) on the light theme...it's too light a shade of gray. So you have all this extra text in between each thread title that isn't very readable. The other is the use of user avatars next to each thread title. I think it just adds an element of context-less randomness to the page. I think if you were going to use images next to each thread it would have to be relevant to the threads topic not the user. You could either pull any images from the OP's post/from any links and put there, force users to upload an image when creating a new post that would be used there, or just have generic icons (Discussion, News...etc)....obviously for a quick temp fix you just add the neogaf icon there like on the old theme.

I think both of those things(color choices, avators) just add an element of confusion and busyness to the page that kills the ability to quickly read and scan the thread list page.
 

Aranea

Member
Thanks for the classic light theme. I will be using that one until square avatars become a thing on the modern theme as that's pretty much the only thing i don't like about the modern theme.
 

Kaby

Banned
The font is not clear on the cheap TN monitor. My eyes are bleeding -_-

P.S. All fine on IPS and VA.
 

Kadayi

Banned
While I agree on your design theory, honestly reading that Antiqua font on my phone was hard, but I blame it on the size of the text, not the font
I was only going off the fonts available from the drop-down. Principally the problem with the modern theme is the default font is just too small and a tad squashed, making reading it quite difficult at even a moderate distance on PC. Flipping between the classic and modern, it's clear that the former's font style albeit san-serif is much more legible (larger letters and better spacing), and probably all that's required is cascading that font to the modern themes to alleviate the reading issue. What's looks great on a phone or a tablet which is close to your face is an entirely different matter when it's double that distance away on a high-resolution monitor.
 
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Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
The issue with the top navigation flickering while typing a reply should be resolved at this time.

If you continue experiencing this bug, please let me know.
 
The bookmarks menu on the classic themes is available by clicking on your account menu at the top of the page (Your avatar + name) and in the resulting dropdown will be "Bookmarks". Clicking that will take you to your list of bookmarks.

Thanks for that. The blue "bookmarks" area of the top menu bar seems to be gone now, but the dropdown menu option worked perfectly.
 

Kaby

Banned
Probably this one is not the best style / template / theme for XenForo. But definitely much more better than standard in some aspects.
 

Fuz

Banned
Guys, we will try to sort things out for the community. It's flexible, especially on modern software. It's as simple as a toggle to offer the option of the other design. That's what this thread is for: to get feedback, and tune things, make sure everything's :messenger_ok:

If it's not okay, not trending to okay, bare minimum you'll get the option to use your preferred design.
Ranting is kind of my thing.
Also I've been here for 10 years, I'm kinda attached to and fond of this place now. And the change made it unusable for me, so it was... disheartening.

And I've seen too many examples of sites that changed for the worse just to "look modern cool" or adapt to mobile devices while sacrificing usability, speed, user-friendliness and readability, enforcing it and removing the choice. Reddit and GAF are the only virtuous exception I know of in that regard. Was not expecting to have a choice given to us.
 
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Kaby

Banned
Was not expecting to have a choice given to us
You can change theme to the old one in the theme chooser on the bottom left corner.

BTW I personally like an old vBulletin engine. Why it was (forum database) moved to XenForo 2.0?
 

Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
Lots of updates and tweaks have been implemented according to user feedback. Should we call this version 2.0.0.2? or perhaps 2.0.1.0 - the version we make contact? Here is a short list of changes:
  • The homepage has been updated - the "NEW" tag has been removed from each listing, as well as information about the most recently bumped thread. I have added a clock icon that indicates the date/time of that forum's last reply. Visually it's been tweaked to be a more efficient use of space. These changes also apply to subforum listings, such as the "Off-Topic Community" forum link above the Off-Topic thread list.
  • The breadcrumbs and page actions (post reply, etc) at the top of each page have been combined into a single row. This reduces the amount of space used at the top of each page, significantly so on mobile where the page action was previously centered and had significant margins applied.
  • Dialog triangles have been added to the new theme, which result in better visual cues between the post author and post content.
  • "OP" indicators (the light blue circle next to the thread author's posts) on mobile should now be in the correct position and are now visually identical to their desktop counterparts.
  • Classic themes have been made available for users wishing to use the old visual styles. They have been updated to the new forum layout and have had some features (such as bookmarks) back-ported to them.
We have a ton more updates and tweaks like this in our development pipeline, so stay tuned. We encourage user feedback that helps drive these changes so that we can make NeoGAF a great experience for everyone, so keep it coming!
 

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Lots of updates and tweaks have been implemented according to user feedback.
We have a ton more updates and tweaks like this in our development pipeline, so stay tuned. We encourage user feedback that helps drive these changes so that we can make NeoGAF a great experience for everyone, so keep it coming!

Will the search option change to show the results in order by default and not by relevance in the list of future updates?

By changing this i don't need to go to advance search if i want to know if some information is previously posted and i can use the quick search function.
 

Kaby

Banned
Ok, so. Why my previous questions were ignored?

I'm a new member here, because I've registered since May 18 of 2018th but I was a visitor as a guest.

And as far I know activity was much more cool. (in the past 2017 and before)
 
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Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
Will the search option change to show the results in order by default and not by relevance in the list of future updates?

By changing this i don't need to go to advance search if i want to know if some information is previously posted and i can use the quick search function.

This is definitely in our list of things to fix. We are looking to implement it as an account-wide user preference, so that users can choose their default search functionality rather than simply outright changing it for everyone.
 

Scopa

The Tribe Has Spoken
This is definitely in our list of things to fix. We are looking to implement it as an account-wide user preference, so that users can choose their default search functionality rather than simply outright changing it for everyone.
I don’t know if it’s fixable, but search in general is broken. I’ve searched for thread titles that I know exist, with exact wording and they don’t show up in search results.
 

Palliasso

Requiescat In Pace
Staff Member
I don’t know if it’s fixable, but search in general is broken. I’ve searched for thread titles that I know exist, with exact wording and they don’t show up in search results.

Providing exact examples of search queries that don't show said thread titles, and links to those actually existing thread titles would be helpful in troubleshooting this issue. Screenshots of the search page omitting the results would also be beneficial. Feel free to PM this information to me if you'd like.
 

longdi

Banned
Furthermore, classic dark theme has more empty left and right border, compressing the important text box centrally.
Those with larger widescreen display is forced to turn left and right more often in the modern theme, where the left/right borders are non-existent.
Increase the left/right borders sizes for more readibity modern GAF.
 

greyshark

Member
I don’t know if it’s fixable, but search in general is broken. I’ve searched for thread titles that I know exist, with exact wording and they don’t show up in search results.

Providing exact examples of search queries that don't show said thread titles, and links to those actually existing thread titles would be helpful in troubleshooting this issue. Screenshots of the search page omitting the results would also be beneficial. Feel free to PM this information to me if you'd like.

I'll echo this - ever since the first redesign a few months ago (or was it a year?), I've been using Google to search for past posts on NeoGAF.
 
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Scopa

The Tribe Has Spoken
Providing exact examples of search queries that don't show said thread titles, and links to those actually existing thread titles would be helpful in troubleshooting this issue. Screenshots of the search page omitting the results would also be beneficial. Feel free to PM this information to me if you'd like.
Next time it occurs, I will screenshot and send the info your way.
 
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