forum look not user friendly

do you ?

not user friendly . too colourful, confusing

is it permanent ?

I concur, it looks exact copy of all these typical forum, I must say it does look cluttered, whose idea this is I don't know, but for me it looks like a step backwards.

We must give it time to get used to the new look. I think it's much brighter than before. Please do list what things you think are not very good rather than just saying it's no good.

Thanks amber, it's too bright and that makes it difficult to see posts, unlike the previous, you need not look hard before spotting posts.

what I dont like:
1. cant see number of replies in post listing. this was my way of identifying where I could contribute.
2, cant see the last reply by - another useful indicator of the soundness of advice was a useful feature
3. not very minitab friendly - post header and post author are too close to each other
4. dont like the icons - everything in circles is not very user friendly. could New topics be in triangles or some other shapes?

I am a champion for change by profession, but this change to this forum I cannot agree with.

Thanks, I'll raise those issues.

wpilr_nov12 wrote:what I dont like:
1. cant see number of replies in post listing. this was my way of identifying where I could contribute.
2, cant see the last reply by - another useful indicator of the soundness of advice was a useful feature
3. not very minitab friendly - post header and post author are too close to each other
4. dont like the icons - everything in circles is not very user friendly. could New topics be in triangles or some other shapes?

I am a champion for change by profession, but this change to this forum I cannot agree with.

Hi wpilr_nov12,

The old version of the message board was about 10 years old. We needed to upgrade long time ago. Of course it will be a bit strange at the beginning but I am sure you'll like the new version once you got used to it.
1. You can see the number of replies.
2. You can see the last reply.
3. not sure what you mean by minitab. What relosution are we talking about?
4. these are the default icons for phpbb 3

The theme is responsive so we are hiding certain things on smaller screens. That might be the reason you are saying that you can't see last reply, number of replies etc.

1.
Is email advice about new posts on topics one contributed to no longer automatic?
2.
There is now a tickbox "Notify me when a reply is posted". If it ticked and a notification arrives one is required to log in before the reply can be viewed. Is this intentional?

Please navigate to your User Control Panel >> Board preferences > Notify me upon replies by default

In case of other questions regarding the use of our new PhpBB 3 based immigration board, please see the user manual

minitab= I am on samsung 7in tablet, using firefox. (sorry cant afford a larger device after alll immigration expenses).

if I hold my minitab landscape everything is just as it used to be. hold portrait, and earlier mentioned problems arise. anyway no more a problem.

I believe change is always good though difficult to acept. With time we will realise the new features of the new format.

Something I would have hoped for and saw a few members of the forum asking for was an app for Apple/Android. Any chance to get that in the near future?

Pqek wrote:I believe change is always good though difficult to acept. With time we will realise the new features of the new format.

Something I would have hoped for and saw a few members of the forum asking for was an app for Apple/Android. Any chance to get that in the near future?

I am sorry, but we don't have plans for creating a mobile application for Apple, Android, Windows in the nearest future. I think the current board theme is generally mobile friendly. So the potential development costs of applications for all major mobile platforms would simply outweigh the benefits. We do however plan to make some improvements for the theme, so that it would look better on both mobile and desktop versions. Opinion of our board members is important for us, so if you have any feasible recommendations on how to make the message board more user friendly, please feel free to express them here!

I've given this a few days now ... and I find a few elements frustrating:

• The loss of the crumbtrail at the top of the screen is annoying. I cannot jump to any location in the trail
• There is not enough differentiation between the stickies and the main threads on those icons. Previously it was very clear. I've now set my profile to only see the last 2 weeks of posts as I kept mistaking stickies for new posts.
• There's not enough definition on the rows colouring ... I'm finding they merge together - both on the board listing and the posts. Long threads become quite hard to read.
• I'm getting post viewing oddities where not all the posts in a thread appear on the first time I click ... but a back button and re-click later (on exactly the same place) ... all the posts appear. This is inconsistent.

But - I do like:

• The reduction of signatures to be smaller - this makes them more readable
• The movement of the user information to the right - it's more sensible over there as it's out of my 'standard' reading line.

As a quick example on the viewing posts problem - I just did two posts - the one I just posted above and one on Family Members.

The one on family members redirected me (without me clicking anything) to JUST my post (with nothing else on the page - but I'm only post 4 so it wasn't a pagination thing) ... but this one redirected me to the entire thread but focused on my post.

Weird.

Edit: The problem appears to be a CSS positioning one - when I saved this post - it rendered the entire thread to me but the top 6-7 posts were under the header at the top - I have a screenshot if you'd like it. Chrome developer tools showed me the HTML was there for those posts - they were just rendered 'up screen'.

(For info - latest version of Chrome on OS X 10.9).

MPH80 wrote:As a quick example on the viewing posts problem - I just did two posts - the one I just posted above and one on Family Members.

The one on family members redirected me (without me clicking anything) to JUST my post (with nothing else on the page - but I'm only post 4 so it wasn't a pagination thing) ... but this one redirected me to the entire thread but focused on my post.

Weird.

Edit: The problem appears to be a CSS positioning one - when I saved this post - it rendered the entire thread to me but the top 6-7 posts were under the header at the top - I have a screenshot if you'd like it. Chrome developer tools showed me the HTML was there for those posts - they were just rendered 'up screen'.

(For info - latest version of Chrome on OS X 10.9).

I think I have dealt with the problem that you mentioned. If you see other strange things, please report them here.

before spammer used to open new thread but now they are posting in an existing thread

i've seen quite few in last 2 days

We appear to be having an increased level of spam due to IP addresses being un-banned. However, we should have it under control soon. Please do use the report button and report any posts that you believe are offensive or spam.

Administrator wrote:

MPH80 wrote:As a quick example on the viewing posts problem - I just did two posts - the one I just posted above and one on Family Members.

The one on family members redirected me (without me clicking anything) to JUST my post (with nothing else on the page - but I'm only post 4 so it wasn't a pagination thing) ... but this one redirected me to the entire thread but focused on my post.

Weird.

Edit: The problem appears to be a CSS positioning one - when I saved this post - it rendered the entire thread to me but the top 6-7 posts were under the header at the top - I have a screenshot if you'd like it. Chrome developer tools showed me the HTML was there for those posts - they were just rendered 'up screen'.

(For info - latest version of Chrome on OS X 10.9).

I think I have dealt with the problem that you mentioned. If you see other strange things, please report them here.

I'm afraid it's still going on for me - although I notice the crumbtrail is back!

It's something to do with the anchor in the url. If I remove the #<post number> from the URL - the thread displays correctly, albeit without the jump to the right post.

Edit: IGNORE ME! ... I did a full refresh of the site (shift-f5) to ensure I didn't have the CSS cached ... low and behold it fixed the problem.

Thanks!

I've made some changes to help with differentiation between the stickies/announcements and the main threads.

I've also added RSS feeds, URLs now are more user-friendly, we got a listing of related topics under each topic. What should we improve next?

wpilr_nov12 wrote:what I dont like:
1. cant see number of replies in post listing. this was my way of identifying where I could contribute.
2, cant see the last reply by - another useful indicator of the soundness of advice was a useful feature

On phones (at least i-phone), the responsiveness of the site removes those two figures which I found very useful in determining whether I should read the post or not.

On phones, the post text box is bigger than the screen and it is difficult to go back and correct text if hidden (out of bounds).

Do we need to display the moderators username in every section heading in the index page?

On phones, the ads are quite big and don't fit the area.

Jambo wrote:

wpilr_nov12 wrote:what I dont like:
1. cant see number of replies in post listing. this was my way of identifying where I could contribute.
2, cant see the last reply by - another useful indicator of the soundness of advice was a useful feature

On phones (at least i-phone), the responsiveness of the site removes those two figures which I found very useful in determining whether I should read the post or not.

On phones, the post text box is bigger than the screen and it is difficult to go back and correct text if hidden (out of bounds).

Do we need to display the moderators username in every section heading in the index page?

On phones, the ads are quite big and don't fit the area.

Thank you for the feedback, Jambo! I'll discuss these things with the designer and we'll make some changes.

BTW recently we had small problems with one of the database that lists spammers. As a result it detected good users/emails/domains as spam. The database has been disabled now and all should be back to normal.

When you click "View your post" before we were able to see "last post by who" on the right side of the page but now it doesn't show that. So, if i post / replied to a thread i can't see if anyone else replied after me unless i go to that thread .

Just a note to say I'm liking the new definition for stickies - MUCH clearer!

MPH80 wrote:Just a note to say I'm liking the new definition for stickies - MUCH clearer!

Great to hear that MPH80!

I removed the list of moderators from the forum list page. I've also updated the responsive layout so you can always see last post by, number of posts, views, topics etc. You might need to refresh the page to see the changes!