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  • Congratulations waross on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Can we PLEASE go back to the old forum! 19

The number one rule of running a business: know your users. Engineers in general are resistant to change, so I am not surprised to see the backlash. If there were broken features in the old forum configuration, why not just fix those and keep the same interface? Or allow users an option to toggle between layouts.
 
My experience with changing forum is that there is a lot of grumbling for a while but then people get used to it. Since the vast majority of users of the site are not members I would guess they care very little either way. I for one am quite happy with the state of the site as is.
 
I'm starting to get used to this new site. The tweaks as we go along are helping a lot. The old shade of green was far more appealing than this cold, faded-blue, and more distinctive. It would be good to have one button to click on to go back to the list of new threads, located at the end of each thread. The back arrow is not very conveniently located on some devices.
 
If there were broken features in the old forum configuration, why not just fix those and keep the same interface?

This is like saying 'if the original intel processor was too slow, why not just make it faster instead of introducing new ones'??

Forums run on software packages designed for that purpose. The people who administer this forum aren't writing their own forum code; they are using a commercially available package. Like any other software package, they get maintained and eventually become obsolete. Once they are obsolete, 'fixing things' is no longer possible unless you have infinite time to code, which I feel safe in assuming is not the case for the people administering this forum.

The previous version of this forum was a software system that had been obsolete and unserviceable since, I'd guess, at least 2004.

Or allow users an option to toggle between layouts.

This is like asking a computer manufacturer to let you toggle between MSDOS and Windows 11 at will.

This update to the forum is not just a new cosmetic 'skin' over the same foundation - they migrated the forum to a new system. You can't just toggle back to the old one.
 
Good stuff:
  • I like that an image can be copied from some place and simply pasted in-line; no more uploading and forcing a link to the internal database to see it.
  • Apparently it has a moderation hold for new users that should stop the advertainment spammers trying to sell access to women in Thailand or the Chinese reps hopping in to say their factory can make anything you want.
  • I like navigating to the last post, though I have a trackball that made scrolling through 500 messages to get to the bottom nearly instant, so it's not a huge gain; I know others would ask for a fork on topics due to scrolling, so this likely helps them.
  • The old platform would automatically subscribe you to forums just by visiting them. This one does not. (copied from admin posting)
Not good/not bad stuff:
  • I think the user icon could be dispensed with.
  • I would prefer the posting blocks resized to the content so that more than a few posts are available without going to the next page. Maybe there is a configuration to shut off paging.
  • I think putting the name of the poster at the place the icon is would be better
  • It looks like a waste of space to have the full width status bar for the message. It currently holds the time of the post in really large font and can indicate if the original poster is responding - but that status is on the right hand and not where I look to see who is posting or when, so it's not so useful.
  • Active sub groups get only the latest notification. In the old version the forum would be marked and going to it would show the list of threads. If I didn't view any threads the forum would lose the new-posts mark. Now it feels like I have to use a mallet to turn off ALL the new notifications for the threads to get the forum to no longer indicated new threads when I don't want to read all of them. Maybe it's just the change, but it was effortless before.
  • It re-sorts the preferred forums list to have the ones that have changed at the top, so if I am interested in one in particular it could be anywhere in the list depending on activity in the other forums in the list. A bit distracting.
Bad stuff:

  • Not really; at least not after I figured out how to shut off e-mail notifications.
 
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After I turned off all the default notifications, 'Unwatched' all default threads, cleared all new posts, and then set only the forums/messages I am interested in to 'Watched', I am starting to like the new format. The large font size and wasted space in the page view is irksome since it forces a lot more scrolling. Perhaps the iterative changes from user feedback will address the major pain points.
 
I think that the forum is slowly becoming better. "My Forums" is back but I got the feeling that my list of forums had grown :). My mistake was that I decided to "Unwatch" everything and start over. And for each individual forum I add I have to make individual settings, that is a lot of mouse clicks :).

Based on what has changed since last week I would say that the launch was premature.
 
A great thing about the web is that styles can be controlled by the user's browser. The user (you) are in control, if you want to be and know how.

I like the Stylus extension. It allows changing the styles of the site, and is a lot less complex than a more complete override system like Tampermonkey.

So view page source, find an element you want to change the style of, look at the class value, and use that to write some CSS for that class.

E.g.

Code:
/* Eng-tips.com compactification */
/* Comments like these don't change anything on the site, they're for human-readable explanations. */
/*
Comments can span multiple lines, like this one.

I'm writing these comments in [CommonMark](https://commonmark.org/) syntax.
The MDN [CSS reference](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS) is very useful for finding out what you can change & how to do it.
Your browser's development tools (usually Shift+F12 brings this up) should have some sort of "inspector" tab, and a way to pick an element by clicking on it.
*/
/*
To change something on the site, open the inspector and find the element you want to change. It either has a `class` directly or a parent item has a `class`.
Get the name of that class (e.g. the text within a post is in a `<div class="bbWrapper">` block, so the class name is `bbWrapper`).
Then it's a matter of writing the override:

```
.className {
    property: value;
    another-property: value;
}
```

Replacing the className with the class name you want to override, and the list of properties & values with the ones you want.
The semicolons are optional if you only have one property in the block, but recommended anyway so adding more is easy.

You can add `!important` after the value to ensure your version overrides the site's original styles, if needed. 
See [MDN's page on important](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/important) for detail.
Most of the uses below aren't actually necessary, but they don't hurt for our purposes.

A lot of this is overriding [font size](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-size).
*/
/* The big set of pictures & links to "similar" threads at the top of the page. */
.more-like-this-article-ul {
    display: none;
}
/* Your username in the top-right of the navigation bar.*/
.p-navgroup-link {
    font-size: x-small;
}
/* Your avatar image in the upper-right*/
.avatar--xxs {
    display: none;
}
/* The `HOME`, `FORUMS`, etc. links on the top nav bar.*/
.p-navEl-link {
    font-size: x-small;
}
/* Reduce excessive padding on the top nav bar with `HOME`, `FORUMS`, etc. */
.hScroller-scroll.is-calculated {
    padding: 1px 1px;
    margin-bottom: 0px;
}
/* The arrows for the `WHAT'S NEW`, `MEMBERS`, and `GROUPS` buttons can make vertical spacing messy on this bar.
   The one for `FORUMS` is controlled by JS AFAICT, so full Tampermonkey userscripts might be needed.
   Also used for the `NEW POSTS`, `FIND THREADS`, etc. bar.
*/
.p-navEl-splitTrigger {
    max-height: 40px;
}
/* Reduce the size of the section links bar with `NEW POSTS`, `FIND THREADS`, etc. */
.p-sectionLinks {
    padding: 1px 1px;
    max-height: 30px;
    .p-sectionLinks-list {
        font-size: xx-small !important;
    }
}
/* Reduce padding from the header */
.p-header {
    padding-top: 1px;
    padding-bottom: 1px;
}
/* Hide the header logo (it's huge, and CSS can't resize images) */
.p-header-logo.p-header-logo--image {
    display: none;
}
/* Keep the search box aligned to the right, and reduce both vertical and horizontal padding */
.p-header-content {
    justify-content: end;
    padding: 1px 1px;
}
/* Reduce the size of the magnifying glass in the search box */
.xb-searchWrapper {
    font-size: x-small;
}
/* Reduce the size of the text in the search box, and limit its max height */
.input {
    font-size: x-small;
    max-height: 20px;
}
/* Avatar next threads */
.node-extra-icon {
    display: none;
}
/* Text about each thread */
.node-extra {
    font-size: x-small;
}
/* Eng-tips.com compactification for thread view */
/* Message body text */
.bbWrapper {
    font-size: small;
}
/* Message poster's username */
.message-name {
    font-size: small;
}
/* Message poster's engineering specialty, e.g. Automotive, Chemical, Computer, … */
.userTitle {
    font-size: x-small;
}
/* Message poster's account creation date, number of posts, and location in the left block next to the post */
.pairs {
    font-size: xx-small;
}
/* The text inside the message header. Date, number of stars, share button, etc. */
.message-attribution {
    font-size: xx-small !important;
}
/* The bar at the bottom of each post with the `Report`, `Great post!`, `Like`, and `Reply` buttons */
.actionBar-action {
    font-size: xx-small;
}
/* Each message poster's avatar picture.
You can change 'block' to 'none' to hide those and make the layout even smaller */
.message-avatar {
    display: block;
}

/* General options for the site */
/* How much horizontal space the main body with all the posts or subforums takes up. */
.p-body-inner {
    min-width: 85%;
    max-width: 95%;
}
 
I can read the posts now because I recently had to force Chrome to bring up all pages with a dark background due to some recent eye surgeries. The old forum colors made certain text and backgrounds hard to read.
 

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