Opera’s new Forums design (feedback)

Opera’s new Forums design (feedback)

- forum sites are painfully sloooooow – many failed & repeated attempts to open a page
- layout is distracting & disjointed - doesn’t flow very well
- too much wasted white space btwn posts
- too much space btwn poster’s icons & actual posts - excessive eye movement right & left is slow & tiring

Originally posted by skye11:

- layout is distracting & disjointed - doesn’t flow very well

It looks like it's unfinished, a missing stylesheet or something. If this is actually the final design, it's going to be a painful experience to post here.

My feedback:
-the layout is distracting, it's hard to find relevant info on previous posts due to the annoying lack of structure and contrast.
-there's so much white that it's painful to the eyes.

Issues:
-permalinks don't work. -- FIXED
-there's no info about the "join date" under the username like it used to be.
-my location is cut by the "message/post bubble". Probably a fonts issue but it worked fine with the old forum.

Seriously, the layout is a pain in the ass if you need to find info in the threads, post commands, scripts, etc, which is what this forum is all about; it's still a technically oriented forum, right?.

I liked it this way

The old My Opera forum was excellent.
My feedback on the changes:

• The old font was easier to read.
  
• Post content was better separated from the metadata. (Information such as posting time.)
  
• I consider the balloons a bit too childish.
  
• The white background for quotes doesn't look nice on the gray background of the post.
  
• The new Topic closed notification is huge.
  
• The Unread image appears more or less inside the text area: ugly. (Look at it when there is a lot of text, no white space.) The grey image is also ugly on the blue background of the first post.
  
• The poll results window looks out of place.
  
• Signatures are too prominent. They should not distract too much.
  
• The Report post button is too prominent. You don't want to encourage people to use it too often.
  
• I like the old default avatar better than the new one.

So, I consider most parts of today's My Opera update an improvement, but not the forum upgrade.

What I see here now is what they had on the test site, so this should be what it looks like. If you're seeing what look like speech bubbles coming from the user names - that's what it looks like.

My only suggestion for them, if they can - Haadka's post is a perfect example. The date appears so far below the message because it is below the "Send private message" icon on the left, I do find that much empty space inside the speech bubble annoying. Any way to adjust the styling so that there isn't so much empty space on short replies?

some parts of the new layout are quite nice (top bar), but imo the post-layout (like speech-bubble) sucks. old one was better here. speed seems to improve, @18:00 I couldn't load a single page, now they all show up, they only take a little to load.

PS: ... or not. got some non-replaced strings just right now, eg.

_ ( ' F o r u m s ' ) // without the spaces

and that stuff. also just got that at the postcount @ the desktop teams blog. also had some 503-errors just as posting this again -.-

They are updating things as-we-write.

I think they broke something because things including buttons begin to look like this:
_ ( ' Text here ' )

Edit: I am late.

crappy hard to read fonts

Originally posted by Tracio:

-the layout is distracting, it's hard to find relevant info on previous posts due to the annoying lack of structure and contrast.

I second that. Speech bubbles could use some background (stronger-then-now blue for topic starter & some grey for rest of us/green for friends). I'm not saying it should lit as christmas tree but some contrast would be more then welcome

Viewed through Opera Mini, the forums are hard to read. The time and date of posting are at the bottom of the post with a gap above and below. The 'unread' is in the way of the post. There are two 'REPORT POST' links on each post. I much preferred the old layout.


Edit: I've also just noticed that the "Status:" mis-identifies Opera Mini 4.2 as 4.1

signed, the unread is also annoying in the normal version. I'd really prefer a marker between the last read/first unread post, like many IMs do it.

Gotta say - on Opera Desktop - this forum opened astonishingly fast (previously, any forum was always a bit slow, but I always figured that was simply because of how many elements or whatever where on the page). This design looks nice and crisp. I like the speech balloons. About the only thing I miss is people's avatars (if you're looking for someone's post, for example, it's often easier/faster to discover via a visual cue (avatar) than text). Of course, the page I'm looking at as I write this could change the next time I look in ... but I like it! Good work, hard-working behind-the-scenes Opera folk!

Avatars are visible for me....

PS. While writing a reply I see the following message:

Topic History

Last 5 replies to topic.

But after that come the first 5 replies.

Only got here a few seconds ago (although I am a fairly long standing user) and I love it!! And it seems much faster.

I noticed that the quoting system is not the same as in the past. There is no nesting of a poster's name with quoted text, which makes discussions harder to follow...

Annoyances so far - profile pictures are gone and uploading a new one doesn't work ( as in - 'Your profile has been updated' but the picture is still empty ).
Also, why can't I pick a picture from my files as profle picture? Why do I have to download it just to be ale to upload it again?

Wow, this is....kinda weird

It's way too white - the posts look a little lost in the middle of my screen, and I'm only on 1280x1024 so widescreen users must be blinking a lot. It's ok in the other screens, but not appropriate for forum threads or the main forum page itself. I see "Friend's Latest Posts" is almost indistinguishable from Spotlights and Subscriptions now.

I like the new 'Inbox' look, although a bit of new functionality would have been nice. It seems odd to give it its own link again at the top but not upgrade it.

It's good to see that the ability to search for Groups has returned - indeed I do like the new look of the 'explore' set of pages.

Profile pictures appear to have completely vanished everywhere, but I see this has been purposefully disabled temporarily along with a couple of other things.

Strangely I can see 28 friends in my list, but the Edit Friends page only displays 20 and I can't see the other 8 on there. But that's an old bug.

The ability to choose the Top Bar colour is a nice thought .

It's a bit odd that on the Subscriptions page, the Latest News tab shows (well, it would if it was enabled) the user profile pics, but the Blog and Photo tabs show the avatars instead.

Finally, I see one new smilie and also 4 new fields on the Profile page

Oh, and what happened to the 'Report user/photo/blog' buttons?

I get too much "openess" with this new design. I thought someone had put a picture of "Unread" in their post not only to find out it was actually an un-read post. That should be put somewhere else... I like that this design gives openess, but there's a little too much white.

Originally posted by rmccabe916:

I noticed that the quoting system is not the same as in the past. There is no nesting of a poster's name with quoted text, which makes discussions harder to follow...

I agree completely.

Well, the white that's everywhere seems space-wasting to me. But what I really should have said was that I like the new format for displaying an individual message . The message list itself is too spread apart.

Originally posted by theoddbod:

The message list itself is too spread apart.

That's what I meant

One little oddity - using Opera 9.62 and resizing the window, I'm getting some odd resizing of the main Forums page that means sometimes I get no scrollbar but part of the right-hand side is missing.

Unread image moved over post & little bubble background change:
new_myopera.png

What do you think? (Except for the fact i have no graphic skills )

Hi,

Just wanted to say I like the new design of the Opera forums so well done.
I am finding it much faster and easier to navigate to different sections.
I must admit I never did like the smiling man that used to be on the main page.


cheers
blinkybill

After using it for a few hours now... Minuets... Here are my few...quirks.

1) Too much white.
2) Menu elements are greyish along with the box on the Forums, I have a hard time telling them apart. (This appears with other menu's as well.)
3) Friends talk bubble is not green.
4) Uh...that's about it.

Good things:

It's really easy for me now to access my inbox, files, design sheet, and many other aspects of the website due to the new top bar.

forum speed is fixed - great!

more on forum design & layout - should be simple, subtle & transparent - should not steal attention or distract
'quote bubble' is an eye-sore and grabs attention from the actual content (again, excessive white space btwn posts)

I prefer a single compact area of posts that I can quickly scan/read & scroll down
2 separate columns - white (poster's username/avatar) and dark (post content) is really distracting & takes longer to read
the eyes must constantly shift left & right to read, which is slow & tiring

please be more space-conscious & efficient with the layout, taking into consideration READABILITY (esp. reading speed)
make the darkened part of the post extend all the way to the left to unclude the usernames & avatars
and make entire post area a solid color (with simple separater bars) - or use alternate color shades for every other post

oh, also...
I prefer the Date be larger and prominently placed on top, at the start of each post, rather than below and tiny

I don't mind the vast expanse of white so much. It was very slow loading around 7pm (GMT), in fact I found it was easier to log in with SeaMonkey. It looks OK to me at the moment. It is certainly less cramped than the original style. What do I know? I have only been here for a month. I will comment more fully later.

The layout is aimed at wide (860px+) window widths without provisions for smaller (like in my case, I like to browse with a window width of around 700px). On the old layout, fit to width would fix this, but on the new layout, it messes up the display.

Originally posted by Southern Cross:

1) Too much white.
2) Menu elements are greyish along with the box on the Forums, I have a hard time telling them apart. (This appears with other menu's as well.)
3) Friends talk bubble is not green.

agreed. Speech bubbles are cute for comments on a blog but don't fit well with forums. Light colors on a white background are hard to read.

@staff: Are all the old css files and images still online and available? I was going to script a new (old) skin. This is not a good change for the forums at all. The same can be said for the forums home page. It looks incomplete. I keep waiting for an image to load behind it all so I'm not looking at light grey on white.

EDIT: Also the way the search seaction at the top of the page is in the way of the forum bread crumbs is not pretty.

Hello everyone .. 3 comments on the new look ..

1- too much wasted space on both sides

2- the pure white background is really hard on the eyes

3- site response is now very fast (not sure if that's tied into the new format or not).

Other than that, it looks much more professional. Good work.

The date and time have a grey broken line underneath. I associate this with a tooltip. But this is a regular link. Confusing.
(The broken line was also part of the old layout, but the date and time were always inside a box, so it did not confuse me that much.)

Originally posted by Suntana:

However ... I'm <SPAN style="color: red">NOT</SPAN> particularly enthused how my Avatar shows up on my <SPAN style="color: blue">Blog</SPAN> on the Upper Left though. It seems to clash.

I hate it on mine too. It trashes the design of the page on customized blogs. And anyway, I know who I am so what's the point?

I can live with the changes but must admit that the thread/post views are quite nasty. Too much white as another poster points out, and not really the right "eye candy" for a forum; it's more appropriate for a blog. Embedded threads of replies are not appearing correctly either.

Of course there will be those that prefer the new layout and look, which is fine, but it would be nice if we had the choice of styles as part of our user profile.

With regard to our own my.opera pages, I really don't like the change to the header bar; I like it even less than the last change. It started with Opera's own branding being kept discreet on users' pages, but with each change (the last two being steps in the wrong direction imo) things have become more intrusive and do not style well with my blog pages at least. The opera ad-graphic that I placed to the right of my blog has also changed, and now looks all wrong.

Of course I appreciate all the good work Opera is doing here at my.opera, but there's one thing I don't understand. Since good site design involves the separation of content from presentation, and on the assumption that most all of the look and feel is CSS anyway, why can't we choose various style elements to taste: on the server side for our own blog sites, and as part of our user profile for viewing the rest of the my.opera community pages?

Seb

Uh Oh! I'm NOT liking the ALL Italics font on the Explore Blogs area. It is difficult to read.

Off-topic comments removed. Please do not hijack people's threads.

personally I prefer the old more "flat-looking" and compact "panel-based" forum than this new "bubble-based" view, but as long as it's functional, it's fine by me.

And this new forum look somehow eerily reminds me of the Apple discussion forum

Flaming removed.

FINE, alright, let me reword this as politely as I can, but the simple fact is there is enough wrong that it calls into question the knowledge of the people involved, and the truth REALLY is going to hurt. I'm not going to sugar coat there being THIS MUCH wrong with the new page.

The narrow fixed width layout is a waste on larger screens (like my 1920x1200 pixel widescreen), and being wider than 800px relies on fit-to-width on devices like my EEE (on which opera doesn't even want to work with the default OS), when there is NO good reason for fixing the width as there's plenty of content that could adjust to a semi-fluid layout.

The font sizes are absurdly undersized and all declared in px. Anything less than 12px is usually useless to large font/120 dpiusers like myself, or those who under *nix use the 100dpi instead of the 75dpi setting. At the very least the page content should be declared in %/em or even pt so that you have fonts obeying the system metric. (which is why MOST forums other than phpBB started using pt in the first place - it's one of the few fonts to obey the system metric - even in netscape 4 & Gecko)

On the main index you have that oversized banner pushing the actual page content - what people visit the page FOR completely off the screen at lower resolution heights (like the 800x480 of the old EEE's or the 1024x600 of the 10" and it's competitors).

In terms of markup, the HTML has multiple flaws that are likely making you resort to CSS hacks, burning bandwidth for little return in value, and just plain mistakes that result in a markup and site design that is more 1997 than 2008.

First off, there are 34 to 60 validation errors on the markup depending on what page you check. This means you do NOT have HTML, you have gibberish that shouldn't by all rights even work in ANY browser - and means that most likely you are relying on correct handling of errors to even render the page. (I really wish HTML parsers just stopped dead when they hit an error - programmers have gotten a free ride on that for WAY too long)

You have inlined CSS and Javascript functions in your markup, that's all stuff that could/should be offloaded into external files so you actually make USE of browser cache to maximum effect.

There are multiple instances of characters that do not appear to match your character encoding.

There are also multiple instances of deprecated tags and attributes when you are using a strict doctype.

Figure in the extra bloat from unneeded/unused DIV's, unneeded/unused classes and ID's, paragraphs thrown around non-paragraph elements, and one can quickly explain the 33k of markup for 3k of actual page content found on the main forum index - anywhere from three to five times as much markup as is needed to generate a page for the content you have.

I said this on the IRC channel, and I'll say it again here. It continues to bother me how my favorite browser, one that is perhaps the best in terms of accessability and a champion of standards compliance, has a website that is the polar opposite. WCAG? Valid Markup? Separation of presentation from content? Offloading like elements and non-changing content to cached documents? Any of these ring a bell?

... because for right now, you do not have ANY of those things.

You know, I watched Fred's little presentation of back-end optimization, and frankly while it certainly seems you are putting tons of effort into optimizing the handling of your static content, a great many of the 'problems' you are trying to address in terms of load could be much more simply addressed by proper use of HTML/CSS, minimalist semantic markup and separation of presentation from content. I'm willing to bet that in terms of HTML and CSS served you could reduce the bandwidth consumed 50% or MORE across the board with little 'reduction' in visual appearache, and in some areas like buttons have major improvements. Also, serving less markup means less code for perl to have to parse on every pass, meaning lower overhead and less need to be spending so much time profiling your hosting and load balancing.

Take the average board index - I could easily recode that with the same basic appearance, but go from 143k in 35 files to somewhere around (let me count by hand here) 40 to 60k to 8 files. The savings in handshakes alone would be worth the effort.

Mein gott - I just noticed, the only documents you are serving gzipped is the javascripts.

If I have time tomorrow I'm going to sit down and write example templates FOR YOU to show you EXACTLY what I mean.

Originally posted by skye11:

- forum sites are painfully sloooooow – many failed & repeated attempts to open a page

This does not seem to be related to the design, which is what the thread title indicates that this thread is about. Please try to make sure that you stick to the topic you started.

As a general note to everyone, please stay on topic. Hijacking threads with unrelated posts is not acceptable. Nor is flaming and similar things.

Originally posted by Suntana:

However ... I'm <SPAN style="color: red">NOT</SPAN> particularly enthused how my Avatar shows up on my <SPAN style="color: blue">Blog</SPAN> on the Upper Left though. It seems to clash.

Agreed. I've currently hidden my avatar on my blog using this custom stylesheet: (in case someone else is interessted)

#editme{
display:none!important;
}

I noticed that when you 'quick quote' something or someone and he/she uses some formating in the text, the html of the quote shows up. That didn't happen to me before... (look in the thing i quoted above to see what I mean...)

Another issue to add to my original post: when you log in on a forum page ( for example: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/whatsnew.dml ) it always takes you to your account page rather than keep you on the same page like the old forum did. This is really annoying.

Now that we know that this is the intended design and there's not a missing stylesheet, could you please provide alternate stylesheet(s) for the forum so all this white and lack of contrast/structure doesn't hurt eyes?, you provide a bunch of them for blogs so perhaps offering one for the forum could help...

Originally posted by Tracio:

Now that we know that this is the intended design and there's not a missing stylesheet, could you please provide alternate stylesheet(s) for the forum so all this white and lack of contrast/structure doesn't hurt eyes?, you provide a bunch of them for blogs so perhaps offering one for the forum could help...

I agree, there is too much white here on the forums. And add my own posts used to be in green, now they are grey... Can they change that back? (Any color that is not white or grey will do...)

Originally posted by sirnh1:

I noticed that when you 'quick quote' something or someone and he/she uses some formating in the text, the html of the quote shows up. That didn't happen to me before... (look in the thing i quoted above to see what I mean...)

It's been doing that since about the time 9.5 came out ...

1. The layout for poster's "profile" section on the left-side doesn't match with the bubble dialog, we need some kind of outline/color to group all those elements together into "one section"...

2. The background needs some kind of texture or colors, a blank-white space is too hard to anyone's eyes...

3. "Report post" icons are too much of distraction, it's a function that we rarely use... So, maybe it should be tone-down a bit (make it smaller) & place it somewhere less obvious to be spotted.

4. The UNREAD icon need to be place in somewhere that's not interfere with the content... It need some kind of color too if the background is white...

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

Originally posted by sirnh1:

I noticed that when you 'quick quote' something or someone and he/she uses some formating in the text, the html of the quote shows up. That didn't happen to me before... (look in the thing i quoted above to see what I mean...)

It's been doing that since about the time 9.5 came out ...

Really, I never noticed that... (Maybe I need more sleep )

this theme is not good at all. it is a backward step..

not what i expected from the opera team.

thanks for your comments and suggestions. some forum layout updates will be made once we have taken care of the backend/stability/speed issues.

The fonts are sort of 'spidery' i.e. much thinner and rather difficult for me to read without eye strain.
Is it not possible, please, to revert to the previously used fonts ? (Ubuntu 8.04).

Old vs New

the excessive white space btwn posts that many of us complained about existed also in the old design, but each post had a blue DATE header, making them appear more distinct - and the user/avatar area on the left was shaded, appearing more connected with the post content - posts must appear distinct & easy while not imparting a “train-track” feel that we stumble over

old design:

- Date header (perhaps a bit lighter) will make white space unnecessary (don't hide date in tiny font at the bottom)
- username/avatar area should be subtlety shaded to appear to merge with the post content
- the bubbles pointing indicators are distracting & dumb, totally unnecessary

best improvement in new design: increased number of posts per page

Originally posted by Macallan:

Annoyances so far - profile pictures are gone and uploading a new one doesn't work ( as in - 'Your profile has been updated' but the picture is still empty ).
Also, why can't I pick a picture from my files as profle picture? Why do I have to download it just to be ale to upload it again?

I would avoid uploading any profile pics until they have finished the forums......and I'm making a post so i can see if I still have my AV

right now the only thing that's annoying is the site is slow...