I agree with essentially all of the points raised in this thread.
Shrapnel games is, so far as I can tell, an excellent publisher, and technically they also appear to be highly competent (thanks Mindi, Richard, and anyone involved in that aspect of things). However, I must admit I think site design is not a forte. There are a startling number of features in the new forum design that simply fail to follow simple principles of user-friendliness. Here are some examples:
- An astonishing proportion of the vertical space on a page is taken up with the names of the poster and other stuff. For a typical short post, e.g. that of Executor a few posts above, perhaps only 20% of the space used by his post is actually used for content. This makes the thread hard to read and disrupts the flow.
- Below the last post on a thread we have a Bookmarks box, which frankly I imagine will be used very rarely at best, and then a Tags box, which similarly is not a key feature. Only then do we get to the quick reply box. Only a small proportion of the space in the quick reply box is actually available for text entry (and that in a tiny font which I presume is simply a temporary glitch). So, the process of replying to a post has several obstructions. Do these obstructions really make it difficult to reply? Of course not. Do they make it far more annoying than necessary? In my opinion, certainly.
- In the main page of a forum, there are many fewer topics visible at once than before. This is quite serious, since only those on the front page will really get attention. In the Dominions 3 forum at least, there tend to be more topics currently in discussion than will fit on the front page.
- Maybe I am just stupid, but I can't work out how to tell which forum topics have items added since I last read the topic. The key at the bottom tells me that the envelope should have some paper poking out of it. None of them do, so I don't know what to make of that. Those red envelopes are poor symbols anyway. The majority of the visual space of each symbol is a red envelope. Since that's present in all of them it conveys no information and is just a distraction. Better to have symbols which are more different (and also less garish).
- This point arises completely from ignorance of web design. I understand you have opted for a fixed-width design rather than the old variable scheme. Given the large number of people using widescreen monitors etc, may I be so forward as to ask what the rationale there was? This is not a criticism, as I simply don't understand the issues involved. Were it possible to add an option to use the full width of the screen, this would undoubtedly make many people happy.
Finally, I'd like to make a couple of comments about PMs. Firstly, the option to download the PMs as XML, CSV etc., while very welcome, will be useful to a minority of users. Most would not know what to do with such a file, and I have to say I'd have no idea how to display it conveniently, short of writing my own program.
Secondly, I'm at a loss to understand why such a tight space restriction is needed. I imagine there are perhaps 1000 regular users of these forums, but let's say 10000. I imagine a typical PM should require 1-2KB to store (1000-2000 characters is not short), but let's say 10KB. Finally, let's imagine a generous limit of 1000 PMs, which of course in reality not all users would fill. The resulting disk space required would be 10000 * 10 * 1000 = 100 million KB = 100GB. You can easily and cheaply buy a hard disk these days with a capacity of 500GB. Hell, if that's the problem, just give us a donate button and we'll buy you one, it wouldn't cost much at all. So perhaps the problem isn't disk space, in which case I would be genuinely interested to hear where the bottleneck lies.
I do realise there has been an insane amount of work gone into making these forums work, and I do greatly appreciate that. There is just room for a few tweaks in order to make it the nice place to spend time we have been lucky enough to grow accustomed to.
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