What do you think about the new look?

[Vaya]

Sweet, thanks! it's clearly their fault for changing the icon

[jackophant]

Thank you @Thrik this is wonderful

[blackdog]

Hey Thrik, I just wanted to leave my 2 cents. Hope it won't sound too whiny, I don't want to diminish the work you've been doing, on the contrary

But, although I like the look and feel in general, I feel the website is slower than before. Especially on mobile is quite a chore. Where before there were the usual limitations you expect on mobiles, now you can see that it hasn't been thought properly (or tested).

the very generous paddings make for a less enjoyable reading.

One very annoying bug I encounter in iOS, is the navigation back: using the gesture, the previous page is displayed briefly, then again the page you were on, then it actually goes to previous page. Because of the response times, I often end up tapping something on the previous page, but because of the switching I interact with the page i am navigating away from.

Another bug I found is about getting to the newest post of a topic: the star works like you indicated, but if there's no new posts from last visit, that link is disabled, you have to click on the last post time on the right. I dunno, just seems inconsistent to me.

[Thrik]

Don't worry I'm not offended, bear in mind I didn't build all of this myself.

Some of the things you describe are clearly issues, however because the software is still relatively new there are lots of bugs going through the vendor's bug tracker and being fixed with maintenance releases. For example, I believe one has just come out that I need to schedule time in to install.

When it comes to things that seem downright buggy such as the back functionality, I would expect those to be fixed relatively quickly now the software has out been out in the wild for a while, and also I am reporting things that seem like they should be fixed at the software level. There's no harm in letting me know about problems, whatever the case.

Regarding the mobile view, I think that we're entering subjective territory here. In my opinion the mobile layout works well in that it retains most functionality without adding very much to the scale of things. There is more scrolling, but in exchange it means that everyday functionality such as 'like' and quoting aren't buried beneath taps like they were before.

I also find the text more comfortable to read thanks to the additional leading between lines; it might not be as efficient, but it's better typography. Also, the forum listing is more loaded with content but actually includes things like articles and various other data now, and of course the articles themselves barely worked with the previous layout.

Speed is something I've noticed, although it is an inevitable side-effect of now streaming all of the JavaScript, avatars, attachments, etc that were often just missed out entirely with the previous layout. I have been taking steps to address it a bit at a time, for example we have Varnish caches and potentially with time CDN-served assets. I'm also experimenting with various server-side ways of caching data and layout. 

I'm not completely dismissing your concerns, there are areas that need improvement; as I say, feel free to share which things specifically are hindering you and I'll do what I can. But overall I would say the mobile experience is a big step forward, as someone who spends at least 50% of my MapCore time using it.

[blackdog]

Cool.

Yes i know you are using software, I just wanted to put my hands forward because I feel a bit guilty when I report things, I know you do this in your spare time.

Guess that on the mobile we just disagree  I know it was clunky before, but just felt more reliable. I especially don't enjoy the writing posts actions.

Anyway, wanted to ask already a while ago: in the past you collected money to keep the site up if I remember correctly… just wanted to say that since I now have a job if be happy to contribute a donation if needed.

[Thrik]

There are bugs with the editor, but again I'm really hoping these will be resolved soon. That's a deep rabbit hole to start messing with myself.

That'd be very kind of you. As it happens, I've been looking into setting up a way of allowing people to easily do this and will get some details up soon.

[El_Exodus]

I miss the signatures Iirc, you said, that you haven't enabled them yet, because some signatures were too big. Afaik there is a way, to limit the height of signatures to avoid such big ones. Are you going to look into that sometime soon, or is the proprity for signatures very low?

[Thrik]

There are a few issues with signatures, including the fact that they bulk out the mobile layout even more and also many signatures' formatting was broken by the update. It's not so much that they're super low-priority — although they are lower than some things — but it's just quite a bit of work to get them working.

What I might have to do is blank all signatures and start again, with a limit on size and I'm not sure if images should be permitted. Although whatever I do, signatures can be turned off by users so I guess that it doesn't matter a huge deal.

I'd be interested to know what people generally think of browsing the forum without signatures, because I've never actually asked?

[Pampers]

I'm perfectly fine without them,

 

Unless these babbies makes a comeback and I can finally express my personality through them again

[blackdog]

signatures were mentioned previously. Every decent platform seems to allow the admin to disable pics in signs, so that can be an option to keep lean. Not missing em too much, but i like to click links to portfolios every now and then so I'd be pleased to see them.

[Sprony]

What happened to "Most liked Content", "Top Posters", etc. I miss that.

[Zezeri]

Yeah, links to portfolios etc are really nice in signatures imho

[jackophant]

As I seem to really be struggling with this website, this problem is again, probably me...

But I've encountered a few times now where I've tried to submit something and it has failed.

• Posts don't send, clicking the submit button doesn't affect anything.
• Adding images to a post via URL, clicking submit closes the input window and the post is empty.

Both of these problems have been solved with a hard refresh.

[blackdog]

Just tried to read an article using Readability; it's not able to process the page (it comes up empty) so I am afraid that the HTML of the new forum is not accessible/not standard :-/

[Thrik]

I don't think that Readability is particularly optimised for forum parsing, I just tried three leading types of forum software with it and it came up with nothing useful for all of them.

It looks like it was just about able to parse the previous version of this software, but in all honesty I think that was a fluke because the current version does make more correct use of accessibility attributes, tags, etc. Maybe Readibility just has a certain formula/pattern of markup that it 'likes'.