Thank you for your work on this Zanniej. You truly saved us here (and at the eleventh hour, too, so props for the dramatics!), and it's appreciated. It also looks very good. I like a lot of the new functions, too -- notifications, super easy access (for me anyway) to the mod and admin tools. I think I like the fact that we only have a book icon for unread forums (though I miss the "fully read" book icon, too), just because it makes it very easy to see where I have unread messages.
All in all, amazing work!
A few quick thoughts, though, on some things we can tinker with over the days and weeks to come for improving the new forum and its functions:
1) Per the above post (and Arn's post), embedded YouTube videos currently "erase" anything that comes beneath them. (The content is still there when you quote it or edit it, but it doesn't show when you publish).
2) We probably will need to design a new banner. Might be a good opportunity to host another community banner contest, if we don't want to just give it to the Media Team? But at least for the near future, it would be nice if we made it so that clicking on the banner takes the user back to the index page. It was a much quicker way to get to the index than searching for and clicking on the breadcrumbs, and I know I used it frequently.
3) The color scheme probably needs a little additional work. It's currently not very easy to differentiate between posts (due, I think, in part to the fact that all of the colors kind of blend in together). Maybe a slightly lighter background color for the user messages on forum posts, with the darker lines and padding left to separate them from the message above and below?
4) I am personally partial to having the user information on the left with the message on the right, as I've said before. It helped me to quickly see who was speaking and also served to differentiate posts as above. But I'm willing to see if I can get used to the user-on-right layout if it's the simplest way to organize the new forum. It could just be a "this isn't what I'm used to" feeling more than anything else, so it may change over time. My eyes just feel like they're working too hard shifting to the left instead of to the right.
5) As others have said: We'll want to get a link to the wiki on the header at some point, as well as the paypal donate button and the discord link. If you need the code for the paypal donate button, hit me up, Z; I think I can generate one for you pretty quickly off paypal itself.
6) Maybe get rid of the
rainbow-animated button (which apparently doesn't work right now, since that part was supposed to be rainbow-animated)? You can leave the function if it's beloved by all and something you're proud of, but as it stands the function bar itself is "broken" (by which I mean that the "YOUTUBE" function button starts into a second row, where a single-row function bar would look a lot cleaner and crisper).
7) I kind of miss having the color swatch immediately available to me on reply messages. Having to click the rain drop function to open the table is a little bit of extra work. Not sure if the emoticons are better to have "open all the time" or not, compared to the color swatch? Or if we could put a color swatch above them or below them? Not sure.
8) I don't know if this is happening for everyone or if it just because I am a mod/admin user, but everyone's
user profiles show the anti-spam bot measures for some reason. See what I mean inside the yellow circle:
I'm sure there'll be other thoughts to come! But those are just some starters. I may even come around on some of those above "first impressions," with time and with "getting used to it." But for now that's what I've noticed through an afternoon's worth of forum work.
