I HATE the new forum (More each day)

That shorter lines are easier to read is pretty well established, but why the hell is there only one column? Short of poetry, have you ever seen a book with only one narrow column across the middle of the page? That’s bonkers.

1 Like

Is the new scroll bar that jumps around and is in different place than any other website also better? The one that doesn’t work at least once per visit because god knows why.

The top bar that wastes the real estate on a wide screen display and doesn’t provide much useful information is also good?

Let’s not beat around the bush, the desktop users were sacrificed on the altar of smartphone god.
Which would make perhaps sense on social media site but on a forum dedicated for desktop software not so much in my opinion.

I like reading what people write on this site so I stayed but using the forum itself on a desktop pc is painful.

2 Likes

Look at polycount for example it’s also shares this nasty column design, probably it was written on the same engine, but at least it’s more or less fits the screen and it’s not hard to read.

As mentioned before, I used to prefer my forum threads take up the entire width of the screen, but that on my 27 inch monitor would mean I constantly have to shift my head to read anything.

However, it does not mean that there couldn’t be an additional column for additional content if the user’s screen is in the HD resolution (such as one for recent activity).

Not really. Just don’t maximize your browser window. On my 55-inch display, that’s what I do.

It would be rather inconvenient though as there’s some websites that come out better when the browser is at fullscreen.

Imagine an internet where you need to set the browser window to different sizes depending on what website you visit (for best viewing). :confounded:

2 Likes

Like I said, I already do this. It’s not as bad as you’d think. Now, not being able to expand past a certain point, that’s really annoying.

In my view, a website should ideally have a few standard viewing modes depending on the common resolution ratios out there.

  • HD
  • Portrait
  • Standard definition

I’m not sure if we would need to take ultra-wide 2:1 ratios into account quite yet.

1 Like

As a matter of fact I am pretty sure that the engine used on Polycount is completely different.

But regardless : When the most recent Polycount update came around a few years ago … it was genuinely awful too. And it wasn’t criticized because people feared change - it was a genuine step back caused by fashionable blog-like/social media-like features that the moderator at the time thought were the next big thing. Huge fonts, article-like layout with wasted columns of empty space, oversized avatars, and so on.

All that fluff can always be justified with some fancy marketing pitch : “putting the user at the center of the experience”, “having a focus on quality content”, and so on. But the truth is, these are all empty words. Anything that wastes screen space and/or the user’s time is a no-no. These aspects got gradually taken out by the next Polycount moderators and now the website is back to being a simple/robust/readable forum again.

Sadly the new thread scrolling paradigm here on Blenderartists seems to be way harder to get rid of - because if it was possible to turn it off, the mods would have done so already. This makes me quite pessimistic.

4 Likes

You can do a search of this category for ‘CSS’, but I’d suggest you start by looking at this thread:

Have you ever seen a website with multiple columns of text?

Not trying to be snarky, just curious.

Dang, am I the only one who thought the old site was “unusable” and refused to use that? I absolutely love Discourse! This is way better, awesome job Bart and everyone else at BA!

1 Like

I agree. That’s why I keep my browser in a 4:3 mode. Web pages just look better that way. It doesn’t bother me that I can see my desktop or other programs under the browser.

The new site giving me OCD using the blue ‘New’ notification.
I’m here for Bge, where bge notification = zero.
…clearing up blue ‘New’ dot, makes me wonders around artworks and othe topics.
Then, I forgot what am I looking for… here.

Turn off automatic tracking or watching of topics if you linger for a prolongued time (4 minutes I think is the trigger, so it is pretty quick).

I have just all notifications turned off, and all automatic watching/tracking, unless I reply on a topic (which you can always untrack/unwatch)

3 Likes

Hey Jester! :slight_smile:

You can control when Discourse will set a topic to ‘Tracked’ in your preferences:

1 Like

Thanks guys… heres my setup.

@bartv, I know, we’ve been using Discourse as the Rhino forum for 4-5 years already :slight_smile: I have it set to never both here and on discourse.mcneel.com (:

2 Likes

Where’s the list of threads you’re tracking now? Not just unread but all of them. I miss this from old forum and can’t find it anywhere.

You’ll find that in your Preferences > Notifications > Categories