New Site Header (June 2014)

[MT Alex]

Anyone else trying out the new site interface skin? To enable it go under your general settings, scroll down and select it from the drop down menu under Forum Skin. I like the new look, better yet, it totally changes the Home Page as well. Think of it as a sneak peak to what was discussed in Podcast 29. You should really check it out.

The only major suggestion I would like to see come to fruition is one that is a standard on most other forums. It's nice when you visit a thread you have already read through to wind up at the first unread post. For example: you read 15 posts in a thread, go to work, and when you return home that evening there have been 7 new posts in said thread. No problem, clicking on the thread title *BAM* takes you right to post 16. No backtracking through pages or scrolling up or down to find where you left off. Perhaps I am in error and this is another function that can be turned on in the General Settings, but I don't think so.

EDIT: Oh, and a "Thanks" button for helpful, humorous, or just generally worthwhile posts.

 

[Craftydan]

hmmm . . . interesting.

Look isn't bad, but as skins go, not much functional change. The persistent banner is really making this browser crawl though. I am using an antiquated machine, but the way my cursor is stuttering, I think there's a bug in there -- it's updating way to fast to stay at the top of the screen instead of rendering once and staying as a static top layer.

yup. next thing I do is turning this off . . .

I've wanted a "like" button before too, but they discourage interaction -- if it's a choice between saying "great job" and clicking a button, I'll click the button, but if I start writing great job -- in for a penny, in for a pound -- I'm more likely to put some more into the comment . . . suddenly my post becomes more than just a "like". Sorry, it's not like I have any more pull to see it show up, but I'd vote against it if I did.

I *HAVE* seen this forum do the "latest unread" function, but I think it was someone playing with the engine at the time. One of those "cool! I didn't know it would do that!", followed by "huh, it's not working anymore . . . " a user option to turn that on would be nice.

I have wanted an awards/recognition system added . . . perhaps a Karma system, so when someone posts something cool, helpful or lends a hand, you can give them a community bump in status. I've also wanted a way to recognize partcipants and winners in site compitions to encourage others to participate, but as I said, it's not like I have any more pull

 

[c172ae]

and yes, I would like a Thanks button

 

[MT Alex]

Pic

and yes, I would like a Thanks button

All be darned, that is a new function of the latest skin, so I hadn't paid attention to that button, yet. It would still be nice if it happened by default.

Also, thanks for the input, CraftyDan.

Edit: I hate to keep piling things on, but it would also be nice if posts that were quoted that contain attachments just gave the link to the attachment. Other sites do that and it really reduces clutter, it saves the same picture being posted several times in the same page when the post is quoted.

What else? A "who's viewing now" column under the thread is also pretty handy.

 

[jhitesma]

All be darned, that is a new function of the latest skin, so I hadn't paid attention to that button, yet. It would still be nice if it happened by default.

Actually it's there on the old skin as well. And I'm pretty sure it has been for awhile. Just easy to miss.

 

[MT Alex]

Actually it's there on the old skin as well. And I'm pretty sure it has been for awhile. Just easy to miss.

You're right! It is hard to miss. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to go to the first unread post when opening an existing thread, anyhow. Sometimes it's to search for info but, more often than not, it's to continue on with the discussion.

 

[Balu]

Don't klick on the title of the thread, but on the "blue circle with two arrows pointing down" in front of the title which has a tooltip saying "go to first new post" and voila.

The new header has a broken link: "http://ftnewdesign.herokuapp.comgetting-started" is missing a "/".

I'm not sure if I like the "overlaying" header part. On smaller laptop screens the height of a browser window already is really small and this type of header makes it even smaller. Also quite often it costs a lot of performance on older machines.

PS: The "First unread" also links to an anchor so it is on top of the window resulting in the first few lines disappear under the header.

 

[MT Alex]

Thanks Balu!

 

[jhitesma]

I never bother with it because for some reason I always seem to have major issues with last read tracking on vBulletin based boards and FT is no exception. I can only think of one vB based board I frequent that doesn't have the issue...but they're running and older and heavily hacked up version of vB and spent months fighting with it to get the last read tracking working correctly.

Many times I miss posts because a thread with new messages is marked as all read, and I also end up re-reading the same posts over and over because threads I have read (and sometimes even marked as "all read") still show as new. I suspect part of it is because vB probably relies heavily on cookies for that and I read from multiple computers - but it should have some server side tracking going on as well that would be persistent.

Just the one thing about vB that's always bugged me and why I've only ever hosted phpBB based boards when I've had to host them myself.