Taking a few minutes to look at the new forums, the overall design and UI may look more “polished” than the old one, but has a severe decrease in readability and density of information.
Let’s take a look at a side by side comparison of the forum index:
-The new forums shows 6 categories that are listed with no space in between.
-The old one shows 12 categories, that are also grouped into 3 general areas with a nice visual separation between them.
-Already you can see that the new design takes up more horizontal space(tho a lot less atrocious waste of space than on index)
-The new forums shows pictures of users instead of usernames that participated in the thread. This is completely useless information.
-The “new or updates topic” notification blocks the colums headers “Replies/Views/Activity”, making you guess what those numbers mean.
-The dev tag has been moved to the middle of the screen, mixed in with other random user portraits, instead of being uniquely and obviously availiable to the left side of the topic name.
This continues in every section and aspect of the UI design.
tl;dr The new UI is a downgrade regarding usability, clarity and density of information in favour of being “shiny”.
I’d feel a bit shafted having my language moved so far down the page - but I think it would alleviate the damage to my mouse’s scroll wheel. It’s really tough situation that deserves more input.
It looks more dynamic, but i agree - some points are (again, if i may say that) aesthetics over functionality. Especially using less space for things like “popular links” and “suggested threads” - but use more than one small line per post.
Is there a way to filter out the localization forums that aren’t applicable?
Can we dismiss the “new” posts section somehow so we don’t see a massive list of items there and only get what is relevant to subscribed threads or feedback of topics we’ve posted in?
You can actually mute entire sections of the forums. In the top right corner you’ll see a circle, clicking on that gives you options to Track, Watch, leave normal, or mute notifications for that section.
I am a person who interacts using a keyboard and mouse. Please consider that in further creation of the forums, as going for the whole “unified over all designs thing”… not a good move. It is like how windows got rid of the start menu in Windows 8, wanting to make it easier to create stuff. They then brought it back in Windows 10 because it was a bad idea.
Another couple of things: A forum post would be better being a different shade to the rest of the forum itself (much like the current forum is) to help it stand out and please… please fill out the entire width of the forums. Having so much dead space, which I presume is for someone on a touch device, to scroll up and down for historical posts taking up around a good 1/5th of the actual forum area is a poor choice.
Move that option to one in the literal space either side, which is somewhat faded out, but when used does the same job. I’ll have a more in depth look when I get back home tonight, but so far… I’m impressed at appearance, but it definitely needs a lot of work in getting into something actually properly usable.
For a moment I was like “hey, this doesn’t look bad”. But then I visited the link and remembered how horrible Discourse is. Threads would actually be readable if that weird mongoloid date slider wasn’t taking half the posting area for some reason. Seriously, what even IS that?
The entire design of the forums seems like its sole purpose was to waste screen real estate. And if your goal was to optimize it for mobile; congratulations, failed horribly.
If everything is set defaulted to “normal” we’re still notified of new posts until you mute the section creating it as far as I can tell. There appears to be no option to set a topic new. I can only set to to a valued time interval and I’d rather just turn it off.
Also +1 for being able to reply to a thread while still moving around in other sections. Nice.
Edit: I still get notifications of “new” posts in the Russian localization based posts in “new” posts even though I’ve muted the entire section @CCP_Falcon
