Can we have an option to use the previous theme please?

[Roswell]

I understand that it's preference, but I am super duper not a fan of this layout. Can we have the option to enable a "classic" theme or something?

 

• Distinguishing who is the OP is now a chore. It used to be colored red which would naturally catch your eye and was aligned to the left of content where your eyes naturally gravitate when you start reading. Now it's unintuitively all the way out in the middle of nowhere on the right where nobody looks and in a light blue which is not easy to catch.
• The alignment of just about everything is way off, it's not pretty to look at. Content boxes are just seemingly thrown wherever with no regard to surrounding elements, nothing aligns and in turn just looks jarring.
• Padding is way too much.
• Signatures are now enormous and dominate threads.
• Fonts are more difficult to read and icons are wonky and large.

 

I could go on, but I'd just like the option to go back to a more usable experience.

 

 

[kelvinhall05]

3 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Distinguishing who is the OP is now a chore. It used to be colored red which would naturally catch your eye and was aligned to the left of content where your eyes naturally gravitate when you start reading. Now it's unintuitively all the way out in the middle of nowhere on the right where nobody looks and in a light blue which is not easy to catch

This is the only real problem I have, which has already been mentioned several times and will likely be fixed soon.

 

 

You'll get used to the rest.

[Roswell]

1 minute ago, kelvinhall05 said:

This is the only real problem I have, which has already been mentioned several times and will likely be fixed soon.

 

 

You'll get used to the rest.

The layout and lack of alignment goes against just about every design philosophy out there. Sure I can get used to it, but I'd rather go back to a more pleasant experience that was correctly implemented.

[Spotty]

Just now, Vitamanic said:

Signatures are now enormous and dominate threads.

Do you have an example of this? I haven't noticed any issues with signatures here or on the beta forum when testing.

 

Looking at Kelvinhall's signature in the post above it seems to collapse to a reasonable size.

 

The only thing that I am thinking it might be is if you were looking at a post from a user who has lots of badges and text under their profile image which can cause posts that are only a single line of text to stretch out. That was the same on the old theme though, so being able to switch to the older theme would not change that.

 

1 minute ago, Vitamanic said:

Fonts are more difficult to read and icons are wonky and large.

It's now using the same font as the old forum theme before the update. Which icons?

[WaggishOhio383]

Someone else already made a topic about this. According to @colonel_mortis, it's not possible to make the old theme available.

 

 

[WaggishOhio383]

10 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Fonts are more difficult to read and icons are wonky and large.

Also the font was recently changed back to what it was on the old forum version. I didn't like the new font either, and I'm glad it was changed back.

[TempestCatto]

The dark theme now is ass imo. I liked the old one better. It was grey scale. This one is more black scale. It just looks worse to me.

[SupaKomputa]

4 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

The layout and lack of alignment goes against just about every design philosophy out there. Sure I can get used to it, but I'd rather go back to a more pleasant experience that was correctly implemented.

This one is cleaner i think, as for the alignment i don't feel any difference in my monitor.

[TempestCatto]

I also really fucking hate this thing:

[kaiju_wars]

5 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

I also really fucking hate this thing:

the topic?

 

[TempestCatto]

2 minutes ago, kaiju_wars said:

the topic?

 

No the banner thing. It's just a waste of screen space and useless. The old themes didn't need this and portrayed the same info in a more efficient manner imo.

[NTDaws]

I honestly don't care about any of that lmao. It works like it's supposed too, I have no complaints. Everything is perfect.

[LogicalDrm]

There were couple of things in beta which were left and of which I would agree on criticism. Like the new Author badge. It should be in same orange mentions are. The place is fine as is, you get used to it. Like to many other smaller things. How many of you lot were there when the last major overhaul was made 5 years ago?

[TomvanWijnen]

8 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

How many of you lot were there when the last major overhaul was made 5 years ago?

I was there. I left for about 3.5 years because of that overhaul.

[Mark Kaine]

22 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

There were couple of things in beta which were left and of which I would agree on criticism. Like the new Author badge. It should be in same orange mentions are. The place is fine as is, you get used to it. Like to many other smaller things. How many of you lot were there when the last major overhaul was made 5 years ago?

There are a lot of things that will be easy to get used to, some things like the super tiny font (on my phone at least) not so much. 

The thing is though, why this change, where are the improvements? There also wasn't a real explanation why these changes were deemed necessary afaik... That would have surely helped to accept the changes I think. 

I also think there were probably some under the hood changes as well but things like mobile notifications and editing in quotes on mobile still don't work (I suppose) 

 

As for the notification thing I don't know if it can even be fixed, it does work on discord for example - it might just be an android 10 thing tho. 

 

But yeah, the question is why, the forum was at least visually almost perfect, the new spacing and alignments, and all the different gray shades don't really improve it, they just made it incoherent, in my humble opinion. 

 

Never change a winning team. 

 

If there was a legacy theme, exactly how the old layout and color scheme was I'd switch back immediately and never think about it again.

[LogicalDrm]

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

The thing is though, why this change, where are the improvements? There also wasn't a real explanation why these changes were deemed necessary afaik... That would have surely helped to accept the changes I think. 

The theme and features come from software. Since the core software changed, they changed how base themes work. This custom theme is built from that base theme.

 

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

But yeah, the question is why, the forum was at least visually almost perfect, the new spacing and alignments, and all the different gray shades don't really improve it, they just made it incoherent, in my humble opinion.

It also took about 3-5 months of testing and fixing last time major upgrade was made. Now I think beta was online just 1-2 months.

 

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Never change a winning team. 

If this logic would be always followed, why must Apple remove things people like? The Google/Apple design philosophy (whity and roundy) is the most stupid and boring out there. I was really happy this forum didn't take that approach when it was popular last time.

[TetraSky]

1 hour ago, Vitamanic said:

Distinguishing who is the OP is now a chore. It used to be colored red which would naturally catch your eye and was aligned to the left of content where your eyes naturally gravitate when you start reading. Now it's unintuitively all the way out in the middle of nowhere on the right where nobody looks and in a light blue which is not easy to catch.

I'll be honest, before this forum change, I had not once seen or noticed anything that would indicate someone was the OP of a thread.

Now with this change, one of the first thing I did notice, was the "Author" bubble in the top right of a post if it was made by the OP, which I did notice right away on the Dark Theme.

 

Was there really something before?

 

So to me, this change is a welcome one. To each their own I suppose?

1 hour ago, Vitamanic said:

• Signatures are now enormous and dominate threads.
• Fonts are more difficult to read and icons are wonky and large.

Not too sure what you're going on about on that one. I have no such issue on my end.

Signatures looks as usual and the fonts look the same to me.

[Mark Kaine]

14 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

The theme and features come from software. Since the core software changed, they changed how base themes work. This custom theme is built from that base theme

I see, that probably explains why we won't get a legacy theme then I guess. 

 

Still I wonder why, maybe better functionality down the road? 

 

14 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

It also took about 3-5 months of testing and fixing last time major upgrade was made. Now I think beta was online just 1-2 months.

 

Yeah true, I'm aware this isn't the "final form" I'm just giving feedback to the changes I actually see.

 

 

14 minutes ago, LogicalDrm said:

Google/Apple design

I just feel generally a lot of design choices nowadays are aimed to make usability and readability easier, but actually accomplish the opposite and those are a very good examples of how not to do it, Microsoft too... I also hate the trend of having "black themes" not actually being black, white on gray is just very hard to read for me (and unfortunately it's basically everywhere!) 

 

I did modify my Steam client for example to be truly black (and small) it's great... But I shouldn't need to do this in the first place and it's not feasible to do for any application, device etc either... 

[TomvanWijnen]

1 minute ago, TetraSky said:

I'll be honest, before this forum change, I had not once seen or noticed anything that would indicate someone was the OP of a thread.

Now with this change, one of the first thing I did notice, was the "Author" bubble in the top right of a post if it was made by the OP, which I did notice right away on the Dark Theme.

 

Was there really something before?

Yes, there definitely was something before! My experience is exactly opposite that of yours; I always saw the tag before the change, and always miss it now. I guess it has something to do with where we naturally look.

 

2 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

the fonts look the same to me.

The font has fortunately already been changed back.

[Spotty]

6 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

I'll be honest, before this forum change, I had not once seen or noticed anything that would indicate someone was the OP of a thread.

Now with this change, one of the first thing I did notice, was the "Author" bubble in the top right of a post if it was made by the OP, which I did notice right away on the Dark Theme.

 

Was there really something before?

Next to the post time/date stamp was orange text saying "Original Poster"

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, TomvanWijnen said:

Yes, there definitely was something before! My experience is exactly opposite that of yours; I always saw the tag before the change, and always miss it now. I guess it has something to do with where we naturally look.

Exactly! I don't even see who's the op now anymore... 

 

I know there's a new tag... But it totally evades my views now, never had that problem before it was crystal clear who was the op lol. 

 

 

Btw another good example, why this red box with the empty spaces around it?  It makes it very difficult to even type anything because there's so little real estate now (that goes under alignment issues imo) 

 

Just give me the whole space of my screen to type, pretty please? -.-

 

 

 

 

 

I don't even know where I'm supposed to click to type now, oof... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

1 hour ago, LogicalDrm said:

 Like to many other smaller things. How many of you lot were there when the last major overhaul was made 5 years ago?

i miss the BB code editor. 
 

[TempestCatto]

1 hour ago, LogicalDrm said:

There were couple of things in beta which were left and of which I would agree on criticism. Like the new Author badge. It should be in same orange mentions are. The place is fine as is, you get used to it. Like to many other smaller things. How many of you lot were there when the last major overhaul was made 5 years ago?

For me, I'm more apt to looking at a user's profile pic and name. So having the OP badge on the same side as that makes much more sense to me, rather than having to actually look for it. All of the other info about a user is right there, why move the OP badge away from that? It's senseless to me.

[Spotty]

2 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

why move the OP badge away from that? It's senseless to me.

I believe it's because that's where all of the tags are now. Author, Solution, Popular Post, Featured Comment

 

[TetraSky]

12 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Next to the post time/date stamp was orange text saying "Original Poster"

Legit never saw that. 

 

Well, I guess people will get used to seeing the tags on the right side sooner or later.