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OMFG, what have you done to the forums?!
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 7th November 2008
Thank you to those of you who took part in the beta.
The most obvious change you will have noticed is that we’ve separated out a few of the forums to give you a more refined experience in the forums. There was a lot of feedback on this when we rolled out our last major forum upgrade and that feedback came up again in the beta.
bit-tech Site Discussion and Feedback have been separated, as have Hardware and Software, General and Serious Discussion and also the For Sale forums (for those with enough posts).
There are also some more subtle changes as well – they include native support for thread prefixing, thread tagging, tag and search clouds, image galleries and user reputation.
Currently, user reputation can only be handed out by the forum moderation team (so be nice to them and you never know, they may give you some cheesecake) although we may roll it out to a larger group of users in the future. We tried user reputation once before and it was abused, but we think it’s a valuable feature if used properly which is why we’re taking a more cautious approach to it this time around.
Finally, for those of you looking for the "dark" theme, it's selectable using the drop down box in the bottom left hand corner of every forum page – it's directly above the site footer where it says "Score Guide".
If you spot any bugs, or just want to share your thoughts on the changes, please do so in the forums!
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Comments (196)
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Please bring back a "classic" or just a "dark" theme. I'm not asking for the entire forum to change permanently, just an option like on the previous two versions of the forums.
If this is in works, just not implemented yet, please accept my apologies.
Edit: cheers for merging my thread into the official one, as this thread hadn't existed yet when I made this post :p
There should be the option to change the forums colour scheme using the drop down box in the bottom left corner, just above "Score Guide" in the footer.
If you're still having problems, post away... ;)
Ah, didn't even see that, went looking the hard way through "User CP" and didn't find an option. Hadn't even thought to look down there!
My eyes thank you.
Takes some time to get used to the new look (even though it's not vastly different), but i quite like it.
There, no no-one else can post that since they'll be copying me and everyone hates copycats.
I take it you've let Jamie go back to bed now?
PS: Joe - L4D isn't all that
Love the new tubes.
Opera
V.9.52
Build 10108
XP SP2
Good job. Much more logical. When I get used to it I'm sure to love it.
I think the dark theme could be a little... darker - there's not that much difference between it and the light one now.
(
are those Rep. markers I see?They ARE rep blobbies...)Just a shame it didn't happen about 3 days after tags were introduced :(
And 100 posts per page.
What you need to do is fix the size of the first column that has the bit image in and instead put the thread tags in it so that it looks nice and cleanly layed out when you click new posts even when there is no thread tag, rather than the what it is now, or an additional column for the thread tags (and perhaps slightly less wide thread tags?)
All in my opinion of course.
Everyone who requested a invite to the beta was given one. If you wanted to improve the forum why didn't you participate?
Not quite sure on the icons though :\
no one told me bout no beta
See its gone back to the UK and USA seperate which is better IMO :) but dont like it that the icons at the top of a forum section are gone :/
ps: i can see the FS. section. If you're feeling kind great! - If not, thought i'd give you the heads up
Obviously never saw the post?
My post sounds harsh reading it back, sorry about that, comes across a bit blunt :o , just trying to offer some feedback.
EDIT: Doug beat me.
Keep up the great work!
...Not sure about the category tags
Looks ok tho!
Well done guys, The site rocks now :) it will always rocks no matter what happens :D
Otherwise, good effort.
Can with have this as an option and just make the viewed threads darker?
Bit-Tech Cheesecake :D
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/1018/picture1copyfe4.jpg
Those :B
I don't see the need to split them up... That just feels like we're going backwards.
EDIT: That's actually the right one... forums.bit-tech.net/favicon.ico
Maybe you need a hard refresh (CTRL +F5)
Just bm'd, cmd+shift+r'd and still got the ones shown in the screenie :(
Have you CTRL+F5'd? Looks a bit b0rked.
That's me fixing it, getting rid of all the colours, I can't be the only colour blind person who doesn't want to relie on colours to know which post is which;
I mean what the hell -> http://img222.imageshack.us/my.php?image=borkedag8.jpg
Give me shade please, not all different colours :(
There's an option to disable thread colouring in the userCP - it's under "Edit Options" :)
That was because people expressly complained the tags were too visually intrusive before so we simplified them :(
a shame. mainly because that's why i liked them -- i found threads caught my eye a little better.
still, loving the changes anyway!
The rest of it is a bit ...... too colourful for my taste. I agree with people suggesting different shades of a colour rather than the fireworks :p we have now.
Dark theme 4tw :)
I'll try and explain, I browse with my browser set to only show images that are cached and not to load flash, basically cuts down on bandwidth when using 3G which I do alot.
When I visit a new site I load images I want this puts them in the cache and then each time I visit a site all images are loaded from cache rather than downloaded, this has worked for every site I visit even old bit-tech, now though each time I come I have to load the new posts/edit/quote images and things like that, any ideas why?
Strangely its not consistent, some load some don't, really odd?
In fact, the reply buttons are too!
awesome.
Looks nice, but can we add tags to existing threads? And is there some more info on the reputation system except that short piece in the FAQ's? I have a score to settle
Lower right, under the page choice there's the Edit Tags option, you can add two more to a thread.
Sorry, but I really don't like it.
It feels like those crappy free forum system. A different theme is definitely needed.
Clicking on "User CP", gives you a the list of subscribe thread, which is normal, however they are in super bright green. On a CRT this equals to a headache!
[edit]
ok dark theme is better, still VERY UGLY, unprofessional, very amateurish. but usable [/edit]
I actually really like them. Having them brightly coloured means those of us with desktop gamma turned up quite high to compensate for a poor quality monitor don't have to lie our heads sideways on the desk to see them.
Don't worry about it, you'll get used to it. That gut instinct to say "OMG UGLY!" (which, by the way, you're better off ignoring, because gut instincts are usually best ignored) is just there because you've gotten used to the old appearance. You'll get used to this one and after a while you won't even notice it. Happens with everything - remember when we first got XP after all the cool greys of 2000? Everyone exclaimed, "eww, bright blue bubbles!" After a month nobody cared.
Much preferred the old ones, especially the lolcat lol tag :'(
Apart from the tags, i like the rest of the changes though!
I'm a fan of eye candy and this doesn't have much IMO
Also for some reason i have 2 subs with new posts but when i list subs there are lots more i haven't read.
I think you should of phased the new look instead of changing it all in one go. ie bring in the new icons and buttons, then modify the theme, then finish off any bits that were left. It would probably stopped mixed emotions on the new look.
The we got vista and it was wow that looks good.
Edit: having said all this if i joined now i would think it was the norm and wouldn't make a comment about how it looks
The front pages have gradients and transparencies and multiple colors. Shopping has a COMPLETELY different layout, much more modern and Web2.0, shiny, etc. (and it doesn't have a link to go back to BT home)
And then you come to the forum.. and it's yet another layout style (and favico).. There's no consistency at all through the site's main parts. If you were to pull out the banners, it could be 3 totally different sites on different domains/servers.
Being a web developer too and working on websites everyday, it's especially frustrating because a general rule of thumb is a website should really flow from one page to the other and retain a good portion of shared styles and layouts.
It just feels so mix and match and random. Bleh. Almost makes me want to just view with all styles and CSS stripped out.
Edit:
I just saw what thread views looked like.. I rather liked the pictures for the thread categories or w/e it's called, made it much more personal and fun.
It just feels like a big, 2D, flat picture, colorbook when you combine the new funky colored thread icon things, plus the thread overlay coloring.
Sure, there's a dark theme, but to me that one looks even worse because the colors look like crud, looks like a sewer version, it's got icky greens and yellows and stuff.
And again, there's random curves and roundness and 3D designs amid a blocky, rectangular and flat layout.. it doesn't make any sense at all.
Honestly, to me, it's a horrific and absolutely ugly layout just from the poor layout design and complete lack of continuity and flow throughout the thread, post, and forum displays and it's even worse when you look at the entire BitTech site over-all.
Sticky'd on the top of every forum for the past two months. Last time changes were made there were complaints that the forum users were not consulted, so this time anyone who wanted to provide feedback was able to play around on the beta version.
When posting with a picture added, the forums usually scales the image to fit the comment area, as the forums did before... this is good, however when clicking on the image to view it at real scale (so one can actually read the text) the old forums displayed the image on its own, of which I would be able to zoom or not and scroll across the image, new forums, the image is displayed in some php/ajax/java??? applet which yet again scales the image, so the image is still unreadable when you click on it. :(
Only way I could view some of the images would be to copy the image link then manually paste that into my browser OR scroll click to open in new tab.
Is there an option (per user option maybe) to display this image applet thing or not, as its pritty useless?
example below using res of 1680*1050
http://pandora.ispeeds.net/~delph/bit/scaled.png
This image scaling is even worse on lower res screens such as my limited lappy at only 1024x768.
Edit... this is getting a lil fustrating specially on the mods section, poorly scaled images everywhere, arghhhhh :'(
Some nitpicking, though:
The tags should have been a bit darker. Bright color G with white text is a bit hard to read. Maybe use the same colors as the "tags" on the front page? (those up there^ who says "hardware", "modding", "gaming", and so on. ) maybe use a slightly larger font to make them easier to read. (We all know that after a while, we won't need to read them, but know what they are from their color, but it looks nicer. ;) )
Also, Why are some threads tagged, while some aren't?
I would also like to see an even darker theme. Especially thinking about the art and photo section here. It's a bit too bright for my eyes as well.
Oh, and the blue borders on the front page/header and the ones on the forum have a slightly different color. (A tad brighter on the forums)
As I said, I'm only nitpicking here. Just want to offer my opinion. :) (And I can't believe i missed the beta... I did read about it, tried to find it, but it didn't work, and forgot all about it unfortunately... )
Other than all that, I haven't seen any other flaws. :)
i'm with you here, but there was a poll in the beta forums this and the split it up crowd won.
i'm glad i waited until this morning to complain about how ugly they looked last night, all seems to be fixed now. or maybe the old stylesheet was still in my cache or something, whatever. all looks good now, good job guys.
Yeah, I wasn't fussed either way... but the serious crowd decided they needed their own place to talk about serious things and super serious shizzle.
Or is it just resort to scroll click?
Only If it has relix and cheesecake.
The colour scheme won't stay set to dark for me here, worked fine in the beta :?
This seems like a dude with an enormous... p*nis:
http://img113.imageshack.us/img113/856/pineswk2.png
There is really too much blue for my liking, it's a bit too much like the default XP theme for me.
at least thay did not make the page width not limited to 1280/1024 as some forums do
seems ok but i realy do not use the fourms much so unless it was main paged i would of never seen any msg about it
[IMGLINK] instead of [IMG] and it wont be resized.
where did you find that little guy? he's awesome.
edit - nevermind, i see him now. on that subject, what's up with reputation? how do i give it, how do i get it, and why do i have an icon under my name saying "add to supertoad's reputation", but it just tells me what my reputation is? and why is the add to reputation button not under other people's names?
yup thats what I was on about earlier, thats what makes the forum look messy, most forums put the thread tag/prefix in its own column to get arounde this, this works because the un prefixed one just has an empty column in its place and all the thread titles end up in line.
Its much easier on the eye that way.
Also, this forum is soo ugly I feel like leaving and never coming back. My timer is on for a month. If in 1 month there is not news of a release theme or coming up theme, I will REALLY leave. This is beyond ugly design which render this page unusable. A 5 year old kid can do better. This is abysmal!
Again, regarding the split of general discussion, sometimes it is difficult to figure out what exactly is the extent of what is going to be posted. For an example - take what I saw today in a National Geographic magazine and tell me if it is serious or not.
To some this may be just an interesting factoid or perhaps some funny Aussie joke might be made. While others may want to discuss the realities, legalities, and moralities of compulsory voting. By automatically making the split at the beginning of the discussion probability, discussion will be more limited. Also, people who would like to make a post (but can't decide which forum it belongs in), may not even post a new topic at all.
The tags were very nice. Adding both atmosphere and functionality. If you wanted serious or politics all you had to do was click on a filter. If you wanted to focus on something else there was a nice selection of filters. I don't think people used them as much as they could/should and just look visually alongside the topic for an indication on piecemeal basis. Sometimes the topics shift into seriousness or become light hearted and prompts a shift in tags, but it was possible to make that choice to shift which the user won't have with the new set up.
Please bring back the filters and the tags.
+1
I think the new layout and groupings are fine but tbh I prefered the old theme.
+1 for darker dark. IMHO The current "dark" is much better than the "light" theme but it's still a light theme. For a dark theme the background would have to be at least as dark as the dark blue background that flashes when the forum loads (though I'd prefer a real dark grey) and would require a light coloured (white / yellow / cyan) font. For a "real dark" theme see: blackviper.com
Other than that ;)
(But please don't use reputation points - any forum I've seen them on they get abused - and anyone who spends time here learns more about the other posters than simple rep points can tell.)
No, come on.. say what you really mean :)
I think it (atm) looks less fluid. Umm.. a bit clunky?
It's usable, just needs a guy to brush it up.
How about some icons for the "main forum page" e.g. hardware, it does look a bit-bland (pardon the pun).
Yes sorry it's after the Beta, hey why not have a competition for icon designs!!!
Thats a brill Idea - do I get some rep for that :-)
Matt
Edit: Nevermind I just found it, It didn't load on the first page
I like a bit of change every once in a while. I can still find what I'm looking for...
Any chance of a choice of colour schemes?
IT kinda looks cheap and too basic looking, just like a 13 year olds first forum. Bring back the decent filter tags. :)
perfect for all those mod brown nosers lol
Oh god no, that puts me off alot of forums. Scroll twenty pages for 5 lines of text from 3 posts is stupid.
The structural changes are definitely for the better, it makes for a nice compromise between the split design pre-beta and the bundled-together design from the beta, a nice middleground.
Keep it up :)
There is one thing i could say bad about it i guess, and that is how everything is still square :) The site still looks old fashioned, there's not one rounded corner anywhere! I guess net has a circle around it, but the site is very windows nt, instead of looking more round, modern and pretty like xp or vista. Some people like ugly square furniture & benches with pointy corners, and some people loved that pointy top madonna used to wear. I prefer pretty rounded furniture and curves.
EDIT: Bad thing #2! Getting rid of the thread tags is definitely a step backwards, not cool
It'll have nothing to do with "I love you bit-tech :D" and more to do with a constructive response or awesome post :)
I only have a couple probs. Everything looks a little....."blocky" Something as simple as softening the lines and corners should do the trick.
I really liked the old tags. Not just because of the pictures but they were actually easier to read and I was able to distenguish the different ones easier.
It's a little hard to look at the different threads when some do not have tags and others do and it's all (I'm not sure how to say it) "Jagged" or in dissarray. Maybe make it mandantory to tag threads again?
Again, I like the new organized layout. I can find things easier. I know it takes a lot of work to make everyone happy but I just thought I'd share my 2 cents. I would still come here every day if it was a white page with rainbow print and pictures of kittens everywhere.
I'm running FF, BTW
Edit: Its gone now i started a new page
I think there is a option in the CP, take a look there.
Edit: Its in Edit Options : Thread Display Options : Thread Highlighting
Then there are some tickbox's to chose if you want thread's highlighting.
Threads that are closed and are read (Dark gray background). doesn't have the locked thread icon on the left. Unread threads does have it, though.
I think the new tags might work but you need to make the text more visible and create them for all categories... it's just confusing in the places where they're missing.
If you don't have tags for all categories then it REALLY is visually intrusive.
I do agree though that the new design looks a bit plastic'y. And somehow it seems a lot harder to read/navigate...
Except for updated forum software it's pretty hard from this users perspective to see the gain... sorry.
And yeah it's too easy to come in now and not having participated in the beta but hey that's how it works when you go public with something. Out of beta doesn't mean you can still make minor alterations to the design.
I do think it's a good go at a refreshing breath of new air. With a few tweaks over time it'll be a lot more solid.
Of course it does look like a Tijuana Taxi:
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh137/jhanlon303/PC%20Modding/Jetway_Case/bit-tech.png
I'm just here to get get help and give it when I can!
John
If that's the case, get cracking on a Greasemonkey script to mod the colors.
That said, I love the new colors. IMO, the only thing I don't like is the fusion of 'Fisher-Price' and 'Web 2.0' on the edit/quote/reply buttons. I was going to leave that thought on the beta forum, but a bit late for that now, eh? :(
also, i miss the highlighting in the new posts listing.
Read the rest of the post, it was called sarcasm!I was on the Beta so I've helped to contribute (I didn't want the seriouz stuff back though)
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://forums.bit-tech.net) { /* your css goes here */ .alt1, .alt1Active { background: #ebeff9 !important; } .alt2, .alt2Active { background: #ccf !important; } }Nothing against Jamie's taste, but he's a bit of a Goth, inne? :DMembers don't pay fees here, so if that's what you want to do, nobody will stop you :(
I don't mean to antagonize, it's just a bit strange that you're using that as a threat.
I find is more strange that someone is willing to give up good content because they don't like the color of the media...
Anyway, FF have a plug in called "Stylish" that allow you to edit the look of a page locally.
edit: Another bug:
this thread: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=149172
Show almost at the top in GD. It says That Oasked replied at 17:10 today, but when I look at the last page the last reply is from April.
So in short: You messed up. :p
J/K ;) :)
I shall fix it next week.
Tested in Chrome + Opera. Might just be a weird one-off though.
Edit: http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/4931/capturegw3.jpg
This happened to me yesterday and there was a couple of us who said about it.
I think all it is, is that the page is full and the next post made will start the next page.
In all seriousness, could you please take out this lightroom plugin? It is designed poorly and works like s*it. (Sorry, it really is.) Plus it is a plugin my 13 year old cousin would want for a site of his, but not something one would expect from a professional site such as this one.
As has been pointed out it is almost impossible to get a picture showing full size if your screen is smaller. And without looking at the source code (or quoting a post) it is impossible to follow links behind a picture, in some threads leaving us with many small thumbnails.
Plus it is really annoying that clicking on a picture does not close it but rather loads up the next image. In a project log for example this just doesn't make any sense, as you would want to read the comment.
I cannot believe nobody would notice this during the beta testing. Will we see more of this "cool" crap in the future because you have been bought, or is it just a matter of bad taste (which will disappear eventually), and this site will remain professional?
You make a good point, there is a new tag for images which are hard linked to a larger version [IMGLINK]. This isn't ideal since there are links going back with IMG.
There is a option to allow users to control how the resizing works so maybe it's worth turning that on so you can control what it does.
Also, wouldn't this cause problems for people using Flickr (And many other hosting services) where the rules say that any posted image MUST contain a link back to the page on Flickr?
Everything up to the vbulletin stuff loads and then it says the site is unavailable.
Works ok in other browsers though
I'm getting the same issue in IE7, it either comes up with a`warning saying internet explore is unable to open site or the top menus but not the forum. working fine in firefox
John
Like this?
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh137/jhanlon303/cannot.png
IE7
John
green and yellow really pop
oh well, they work fine in firefox 3.1
"Internet explorer cannot open internet site http://forums.bit-tech.net/.
Opertation aborted"
W - I - N
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)
Timestamp: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:11:01 UTC
0.
Message: HTML Parsing Error: Unable to modify the parent container element before the child element is closed (KB927917)
Line: 0
Char: 0
Code: 0
URI: http://forums.bit-tech.net/
This is what IE8 says
(If you need to ask, you don't need to know)
Opertation aborted"
Disabled image resizing, everything works fine now. :D
Click on this image http://forums.bit-tech.net/images-dark/buttons/firstnew.gif
For example - my PrometheusCU thread has been sitting at 66,784 views for 3-days now, and I know there have been views, and the fact that there has been posts only cements that.
I was wondering as it was starting to look like a very slow day on the forums, theres been people viewing the photography forumn all day, but not looking at any threads according to the counters.
1) with the google ads obscuring some of the words of the adjacent post (which might be related to when wide pics are in use. It happens both on FF3 and IE7.
Here's a screenshot of what I mean.
http://i365.photobucket.com/albums/oo91/ModMindedShare/Stuff/bittech1.jpg
Related to that is that the new format has posts lined up on the left, but the right is off depending again on photos in posts.
2) View first unread is not working (not showing up when I've read posts in the past, and am checking back in, despite there being new, unread posts)
3)Also, is there a link to a description of the various icons on the post? I'm not sure of some of the new stuff there.
Overall, congratulations on the upgrade and smooth transfer. I always appreciate your having this site/forum, and especially like the photo hosting option. (Maybe for my next mod!)
Thanks! ;)
This is an ongoing character encoding issue, did you comment from the site or the forum and which browser?
1. Looks like you are on a low resolution monitor, try going into your User CP and setting the image resizeer under 'Options' to 640 pixels width.
2. Could be a cookie issue.
3. Hover over an icon and it will usually tell you what it means (or look for the alt text).
I'm only getting that with threads i have posted in, not threads i have viewed. :(
http://forums.bit-tech.net/picture.php?albumid=15&pictureid=33
You can see on my screen the image is on both green and yellow. You do not get the image on threads that have not had any new posts.
You shouldn't get it in threads you've read all of, it's first unread post, the clue is kind of in the name
For clarity's sake, this is what I originally posted:
2) View first unread is not working (not showing up when I've read posts in the past, and am checking back in, despite there being new, unread posts)
Mmmm, cookies.
I'm a little confused. I read bit-tech from several different computers, including my home pcs, mobile phone, and work pcs.
Are you saying that each PC stores last viewed separately as cookies, and that it's not on your server? I figured there was a database somewhere over there keeping track, and that no matter where I was checking in from, there would be one unread list (as long as I was logged in.) No?
I'll have to look into that some more, and see if I can track which posts I read on which device, and see if that jibes.
It's also frustrating me, cause it appears to be skipping me past some replies and not others (not always to the last post, either.)
Finally, my notifications on sub'd threads seems to be iffy. Sometimes I'll get notified, sometimes I won't, even when set with instant updates...
I'll admit, there may be some operator error involved here, but not too much. :)
By the way, I'm gonna subscribe as instant update to this one, just to test.
Only staff/mods can give rep, as previously mentioned, which I personally can't understand. I keep getting PMs like this:
...
Sorry I missed this Jamie...
The IE7 ( I think?) and it was done via. the comments page from the article.
Sorry, too early in the morning, and not enough coffee.
Yay! Its Ginger Reyes Christmas time!