Formatting gone goofy

I'm glad you posted this. You've reminded me of a job I have to do that I'd nearly forgotten about.

 

Get the blue pills ready Lolimac - we may need them!

 

That looks like the 'Ickle weed' - where's Bill and Ben?

 

On the heading I have nothing to the right of 'Spy' so how can I access my alerts, conversations and so on please?

 

Hi Sheal - look at the top right hand corner above the search box.

 

Me!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Ohhhh right, what a stoopid place to put them! Thanks grannie Annie.

 

You just have to go for it when you get to my age Armandii.

 

I have different views RR, noted here for reference, but this is not my gaff so its up to TPTB to decide if they have merit or not.

The breakages to layout just looked like more-of-the-same. I think its different having a "we are NOW working on the site" posted when work starts to a "There are ongoing problems" banner that I have been seeing for a while. For example: I would not have felt the need to post this "is it just me" message if I knew that there was work in progress.

Confusing for users though ... but I'm pleased to hear it didn't represent a security threat. My point remains though that a rolling-rollout might cause some Chicken-and-Egg side effects which could cause damage.

I am afraid I disagree with that. To me the changes have been significant whilst in rollout. I will post those in a separate message but, for example, the text that I am typing (now) is in Times Roman, but it will Display as Sans serif. Previously it was WYSIWYG. There are now significantly different colours. Styling looks like it is still astray (the footer Bread Crumb looks large, for example). There are inconsistencies, fixed in previous rollouts, which have now come back again (again, listed in my other message). I think it would be more efficient to resolve these issues on a DEV site, without time pressures to maintain a stable service to online users, and then package and rollout to Live, instead of a rollout on the Live site and then piecemeal fixes as users stumble over things.

When the move was made to XenForo a number of members were invited to preview the new system. A lot useful feedback was provided, before it went live, and I think that approach for upgrades would help. It would also mean that anything the Preview users find that needs fixing can be done without urgent time pressures for you, and won't be seen by, and possibly confuse, all users. The half-an-half state also won't be seen, and cached, by Google spiders etc.

It seems to me that changes are rolled out here with a) often no notice and b) no description of what they were. This leaves all users trying to work it out for themselves. Changes have been made quite frequently, and often have then been adjusted based on user feedback. (e.g. The icons for "Like" which were then adjusted as many users complained that some were potentially confrontational or inappropriate). I am sure there are folk here (myself included) who would be happy to do a write up of new changes in readiness for a rollout. I'm keen that you do the absolute minimum that you need to as your service is a great asset and you certainly have better things to be doing with your time, freely given and I would gladly help with testing and documenting of new features etc. if that would help. I know there are others who have suitable skills and have offered in the past too.

Clearly updates need to be applied in a timely fashion for security reasons, and I expect its not an option to pick & choose within those what you get. I'm sure we can argue the toss over the best way of managing change, but I think for this particular audience that rolling updates and changes foisted upon users with no indication just confuses a lot of people and detracts from an otherwise excellent site. Hence my suggestion to do the work on a DEV site and then rollout to Live with the site down, rather than changing under foot.

I am in no way pointing a finger at you RR, I greatly appreciate the sterling work you do, and the moaning of users, myself included, is in fact an indication of what a valuable service this site is and how many are addicted to it!!

XenForo is a great piece of software, compared to the likes of vBulletin and phpBB that I encounter elsewhere on my travels, and its a credit to you that you made such a great choice RR. I hope that the changes you have made today will reduce CPU loading sufficiently that you don't have to spend time shoring things up any more

 

Some observations of things that have changed:

I am finding the new default font (in which the thread messages are displayed) very hard (and for me slow) to work with, its much harder for me to read than the old one, and I'm having to reread messages and discovering that I have missed the "sense" in them (my Dyslexia no doubt ...). Don't know if that is increased condensed spacing of the font, or the much reduced contrast on the other colouring.

Previously when opening a really old thread, that had a new post, rather than immediately navigating to the most recent unread post the site goes to page 1 post 1, but in those circumstances it had a "Jump to most recent post" link at the top. On several posts [old, and did not have recent posts until a new post that I had not read until today] that I saw this afternoon I did not see that link; that link has been present on some posts I saw this evening.

I have also viewed the Watched Threads list, right clicked a post to open it in a new tab, replied to it and then seen "You have XXX alerts" or some message like that to tell me there were new, watched, threads. The number was the same number that had just been seen in the Watched Threads list, and on returning to that tab and refreshing it there were actually no new items. This happened several times this afternoon, I haven't yet seen it this evening, I'll report back if I see it again.

Font in the EDIT / REPLY box is Times, but the message posts in Sans Serif. Also the LIKE is showing up twice (once in the Icon bar, and again in Text, plus people who LIKE the post are in the "Likes List" and repeated under the Author/Date bar). This issue came up before and was fixed.


By comparison this is how it used to look:

Also, numbers displayed in the Times font are "small caps" size, and look incorrect next to letters. This came up in the original tests we did (before the launch of the XenForo site), I don't remember the details, but it was fixed at that time.

Image to illustrate:

 

Not spotted, for some hours, that I had an unread conversation. I did get a popup when it first arrived, but I didn't act on it and I then missed it because the INBOX and ALERTS indicators in the Header Bar are much less "obvious" than the old ones, within the body of the page, with their little red Speech Balloon count next to them:



the previous "speech balloons", which were within the page, were more obvious:



Username in top bar:



is fuzzy when the menu is opened:




Space allocated before the [+] expand button is causing usernames to wordwrap. [+] button could perhaps be positioned differently - there is more space available to the right for example.

Personally I would prefer to see (i.e. without having to press the [+] expand button) the user's Location, which I often need to refer to when answering a question, rather than the custom title they may have given themselves

All my What's New settings have been lost / reset

My online status is set to "Show". I am almost certain that this would have been set to "Hide" (as I do that on all forums) [There are two placed in Preferences where this shows, both were ON]

I find the navigation on Preferences unclear. The current entry is shown (in left-pane menu) by boldface. This looks more like a Heading than a "current entry" marker. I think a background colour "highlight" would be better. (There is a background highlight as well as the bold, but the new colours are so subtle its not obvious)

 

Addressing only a few points not to rehash views.

Username breaking to a new line unrelated to the toggle, thats the default length of the username field, previously we expanded it 10px to the right (done so again)

As for default font, currently we have an enlarged Xenforo default, once the members/staff tell me which font family they want its a simple fix to add it., personally i use a universal font (same font everywhere) on my forums (comic sans or ariel normally) however i cant of course make any sweeping design changes to font used here without knowing nate's wishes.

Changed alert count background to red.

The Fuzz on the tab is text-shadow i dont like it either, its default xenforo, was awaiting feed back before removing (personally i strip it off every skin on my own sites).

As for little notice given : unrelated to my work, I am fully booked with clients, often i am asked to do a job quickly on GC due to some emergency, there frankly isn't time very often to do much more than the job itself,.

As for longer beta time : there was not the time in this case (due to server load) Or the budget to secure my services for that long. I personally find longer Beta easier to work with, at another of my clients the beta lasted 4 months, we did not have that option here however.

The footer breadcrumb size is intentional for easy reading, was part of the design shown to the sites owner and approved.

Whats new settings have not been touched and are skin related, any lost data due to server crash, same for online status.

To expand upon that any changes to settings, position in thread, thread markers, preferences etc are unrelated to the skin redesign, however the crash prior to yesterday was the most damaging and required core parts of the server to be reinstalled by our web host.