Be clear that I LIKE PA and have supported it. So the following is meant as constructive criticism...and I acknowledge that not everyone will feel the same.
It's certainly a new look. Not sure that I like it better or not, but there are some changes that I find counterproductive.
1. There's much less separation between the body of a message and the signature text. It makes it much less efficient to read.
2. The list pages for the individual forums (fora, if you prefer 
), now have the original posting date and time on the title of the post, on the left. Only replies are listed on the right column. Additionally, the right column now starts with the poster's name, then the time. These are issues for me because I visit fairly regularly and just scan for what's been updated since the last time I was here. That scan now needs to look at the left column for posts without replies, and parse the right column to get to the date and time. It's much less efficient.
It would be appreciated if those features could be changed back -- especially if others agree.
JK
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See the "Please pardon our dust, upgrade in progress" link at the top of the page: https://portableapps.com/news/2015-03-10--drupal-7-upgrade-partially-com...
Specifically: "Forum design incomplete; Mark Read, badges temporarily disabed"
The current forum layout is the Drupal 7 default look. The old forum layout was the Drupal 6 default look with several hand done tweaks for things like stats, recent posts, mark as read, etc.
The new custom forum layout I built for Drupal 7 was supposed to be completed a couple days ago, but it failed to integrate properly due to a conflict with another piece of the site. I also wound up doing another all-nighter on Wednesday night (after the all-nighter on Monday night) to get the website moved from one cloud server to one twice as powerful to handle the increased load of Drupal 7 after discovering that Rackspace's cloud server instances can't be scaled vertically on the fly as you can with other providers.
I'll be working on it over the weekend. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: I just applied a quick temporary fix for the signatures to provide some distinction. You should reload the whole page to see the slight changes.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
My reply #16 below says it's a reply to #15, but actually it's a reply to #11. The link itself is right, just the text is wrong. Others (that I've checked) seem to be correct though. EDIT: OK, add one (for now) to these, since this reply comes before them. (oops)
They're all wrong and set to the reply before. It's a bug in the module, not something I have any control over. They do link to the proper thing though.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
So it's like the broken clock that tells the right time twice a day vs. the clock that's just a few minutes slow. (If you only look at it those couple of times each day, it'll always look "accurate".) Another forum I'm familiar with just has the username being replied to in the text (something else about the link that never changes as replies are added), which makes more sense to me than trying to maintain the ever changing count.
I agree that the signatures are much too readable as in-body text, they need some extra styling to differentiate/de-focus them. I also think new posts within a thread need some alternate styling, because just looking for one word ("new") at the top of the comment is too difficult and easily missed.
If you are only interested in checking out new posts, use the recent posts page linked from the nav menu on the left. It aggregates all the changes within the forum (except off-topic) in a date-ordered list.
Unlike the near-default forum look and functionality, the recent posts page is a custom view I put together, so it is closer to what the final look of that particular page will be. I hope it's functional as is now.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank John. Sorry if I jumped the gun. I appreciate your reply and the work being done.
I also appreciate the pointer to Recent Posts by Winterblood.
JK
Using recent posts I'm finding the Replies column OK
Replies
nn grey
(n new) red
but the
Title column has
Title (in red) plus [updated|new] in a slightly different red
which doesn't work for my eye. Title in grey and updated|new would make more sense to me.
I'm aware this is WIP and not making any demands. I actually quite like the new look and feel even though I wasn't expecting to.
Wm
It's still in progress. The title will be red since it's a clickable link. Consistency and all. I haven't been able to style new yet. And I can't seem to move it to adjust it as I can the number of replies in the comments field. Let's leave this for when I can get things further along.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Change the non-clickable red [updated|new] to something more distinctive perhaps?
I'm not suggesting what you should change it to, that is up to you.
In case it is me, I'm using FF latest stable without any specific theme, i.e. my Add-ons / Appearance is Default 36.0.1. In case it matters I have 4 extensions none of which are appearance orientated (AdBlock, PlacesCleaner, Saved PWEd, SQLiteMgr). Is it possible that if I chose a theme (I am a functional rather than pretty orientated person when it comes to design) it would make a diff?
Also, as a fairly regular visitor I don't work through the forums in any order and used to use the link down the bottom and then mark as read if I'd seen enough. I've found the Mark All Forums Read option on the drop down but can't quite see what the difference is between
"Active" vs "New & updated" topics.
As other people in this thread have said, I'm not moaning or demanding, just putting to the fore things that I am noticing.
Wm
So I added a little custom CSS (using Stylish) to make the "new" use white text on a red background -- a lot more visible.
This latest look for the forum posts with all the boxes and buttons I really don't like at all.
As stated here and in the upgrade announcement, it's a work in progress. We have to use the Advanced Forum module within Drupal to get the functionality we want (like marking posts as read which doesn't appear to exist elsewhere any longer in Drupal). So I start with that and then work on its layout piece by piece.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I just thought you might appreciate some feedback as you progress instead of waiting till some future time, especially since I don't know exactly where you are with that progress--it looked pretty "complete" before (as in, not too much different from how it's always looked). But if you'd rather not have any feedback till you specifically ask for it...
It looked ok, but not like it did before, as Drupal 7 uses a more oddball way of showing comments that requires different theming. Plus you couldn't mark all posts as read, badges didn't show up, etc. It'll be a work in progress for a little while.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I've made a small commitment (see .sig) to allow adverts. Lots of small amounts of money for something I like makes sense to me.
What does the Ad Left Skyscraper tickbox do ?
Wm
It doesn't do anything right now. Ad Left Skyscraper allowed logged in users to hide the old ad on the lower left when we were originally trying it out. I'm testing out some other ad sizes as of last night with our new layout. It turns out our old layout and ad sizes were limiting us a lot as many companies no longer bid on ads in those older smaller sizes anymore. I'm trying it out for a few days to see what kind of a difference it makes with the newer sizes. Fun fact, in the rare instance that an older/smaller size has a higher bid than the newer larger sizes, AdSense will swap that in. So, using these newer sizes opens up a wider range of bidding ads which will hopefully get us a bit more revenue.
I'm also exploring using other 3rd party ad networks with an eye towards more control over ad types. AdSense does show a few full video ads that auto-play... without sound, thankfully... but they are more distracting than I'd like. Unfortunately, it's all or nothing on AdSense in terms of rich ads with higher revenue (and the occasional silent video advert) or text-based ads with small and shrinking revenue.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I've been playing around with the look some, and reducing the min-height of a post from 230px to 150px makes a substantial difference to me. All of that "wasted" (blank) space on a large number of posts was rather bothersome. Now, things seem to flow better. EDIT: OK, I've changed my mind from my initial reaction. What with your continuing updates and my continual [minor CSS] tweaks (primarily, just reducing blank spaces), I like the forum look/function now (as well as the site update as a whole, which was my initial reaction there anyway). (TBH I'm not sure I remember what the forums looked like before, having spent so little [recent] time in the forums; almost all of what I remember was the release article comments, which are quite different.)
I'm on Win8.1 now and thought the "Latest Releases & News" bottom left disappearing was an XP artifact.
Shouldn't they be there regardless of when I last visited? I'm not aware of any subtle, "I don't want to see this"
Wm
The list of actual released apps is only available on the homepage, where it used to be in the old design. It is not on every page as it would necessitate every page on the site (200k+) being regenerated constantly instead of cached for anonymous users.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
If I'm going to get adverts let them happen, I don't like the streaming on auto ones either
I'm not anonymous which is why I am irritated.
Wm
Why did you ask a question about the release list, get an answer and respond with something entirely different? Are you asking about the app list or the advertisements now? If you don't like the silent video-ish ones, there's nothing we can do about that. AdSense gives you the choice between text ads, rich ads, or both. If you select text only, you barely make any money as text ads are all but dead. But please let's keep this discussion on topic. Someone was asking about the new forum look. Random tangents don't make sense.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!