Home Page Redesign

Nate--IRL--

rockatansky wrote: »

Hi

How long do we have before this stops working?

http://www.boards.ie/?.

Thanks.

I'd like to know this too - can we keep it?

Nate

wnolan1992

Rabies wrote: »

I'm still using the fancy Cloud skin and old homepage.

A few min ago I clicked the Cloud/Boards logo to return to the home page and I got sent to the new page :eek: Refreshed a few times and still the same.

Clicked back to the thread I was viewing, forum view went back to normal. Clicked home again, and all was back to normal.

Using chrome on mac.

Mini bug fart or something else?

Pretty sure it's by design unfortunately. One of the guys said earlier in the thread that the homepage is no longer on vBulletin so it'll always boot you to the new look.

I don't think I have to spell out what'll happen when they move the forums themselves off of vBulletin to the new "style".

looksee

Don't know if anyone has mentioned this but on the home page at the moment, LC forum, post '5th Year 12/13 OT' has 4,294,968,342 thanks! I don't believe it!

Boards.ie: Danny

looksee wrote: »

Don't know if anyone has mentioned this but on the home page at the moment, LC forum, post '5th Year 12/13 OT' has 4,294,968,342 thanks! I don't believe it!

This has been reported already as a bug in site development

Danny

Nate--IRL--

wnolan1992 wrote: »

I don't think I have to spell out what'll happen when they move the forums themselves off of vBulletin to the new "style".

Funny you should mention that, I've that a few times where a moderately popular forum gets "improved" and the user base melts away over time.

I think boards is bigger than that, but I do think it will take a hit in user base size.

Nate

Boards.ie: Danny

jack presley wrote: »

I would have thought this thread would be trending at this stage

I mentioned much earlier in the thread that it should be very hard for AH, Soccer and Motors to reach trending status. The trending list currently consists of only those forums ...it is a bug. On Thursday this thread was trending all day. I'm looking in to it now.

Danny

syklops

Nate--IRL-- wrote: »

Funny you should mention that, I've that a few times where a moderately popular forum gets "improved" and the user base melts away over time.

I think boards is bigger than that, but I do think it will take a hit in user base size.

Nate

The cynical part of me suspects that they don't care too much, because many of us here long enough to be so reliant on the old theme are also computer-savvy enough to employ things like Ad Block Pro, so we are not making the the kind of money that they want.

New, naive users are more valuable.

nesf

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

I mentioned much earlier in the thread that it should be very hard for AH, Soccer and Motors to reach trending status. The trending list currently consists of only those forums ...it is a bug. On Thursday this thread was trending all day. I'm looking in to it now.

Danny

Trending is utterly borked at the moment. If it's not AH/Soccer/Motors it's some 2 post thread from a quiet forum with little traffic normally.

Boards.ie: Danny

nesf wrote: »

Trending is utterly borked at the moment. If it's not AH/Soccer/Motors it's some 2 post thread from a quiet forum with little traffic normally.

Yes, I'm looking in to it

Danny.

Boards.ie: Nicola

syklops wrote: »

The cynical part of me suspects that they don't care too much, because many of us here long enough to be so reliant on the old theme are also computer-savvy enough to employ things like Ad Block Pro, so we are not making them the kind of money that they want.

New, naive users are more valuable.

I really really don't want to come across as harsh but I'd like to reiterate what I've said previously, we do not want ads to be our main source of revenue in the future so any changes made are emphatically not done to increase potential ad revenue.

Our hope is the Talk To forums, which provide a really good service to both members and businesses, will become our main revenue source.

Boards.ie: Danny

Trending functionality has been fixed For the record you'll get our attention a bit quicker by posting that kind of feedback/issue in Site Development. Thanks very much for pointing out the problems.

Danny

nesf

Since you're both, for some crazy reason around on a Saturday morning...


Danny, could you answer this for me:

nesf wrote: »

Ok, let me rephrase the question. Is your new forum software capable of generating the information necessary to recreate the old homepage? Specifically I'm asking that since we cannot go back to the old homepage based on vBulletin can we not just create a new homepage that has the same functionality with the new software.

Nicola, I'd appreciate an answer to my second point here:

nesf wrote: »

Thanks. A point, the forum rather than the thread title is the first thing most people want to see because we all have many forums we will just skip past on the list. Having the forum name more prominent, perhaps before the thread title might work better for people scanning. Date doesn't have to be there before any other information, it just has to be visible, it in itself isn't key to whether one will look at the thread, it's something you check last. The second point, why persist with pagination? Are you trying to reduce the amount of information on-screen to make it more approachable for new people?

Thanks to you both for being around. Can I finally ask why are you moving away from a table layout?

Boards.ie: Nicola

nesf wrote: »

Since you're both, for some crazy reason around on a Saturday morning...

nesf wrote: »

Thanks. A point, the forum rather than the thread title is the first thing most people want to see because we all have many forums we will just skip past on the list. Having the forum name more prominent, perhaps before the thread title might work better for people scanning. Date doesn't have to be there before any other information, it just has to be visible, it in itself isn't key to whether one will look at the thread, it's something you check last. The second point, why persist with pagination? Are you trying to reduce the amount of information on-screen to make it more approachable for new people?

Thanks to you both for being around. Can I finally ask why are you moving away from a table layout?

Sorry I missed this the first time around, I totally understand your point about the forum name being first-I'm going to add it to our list and see what, if anything can be done.

With regards to the pagination, I'll be honest and say I'm not 100% sure on the reasoning behind it-I will get a proper answer for you though But yes, the overall aim was to lessen the overwhelming wall of text-as we've now seen it's a fine line between 'easy to read' and 'useless' for long term members.

I've no idea why we are both around but I will be getting out to make the most of this sunshine shortly

Boards.ie: Danny

nesf wrote: »

Ok, let me rephrase the question. Is your new forum software capable of generating the information necessary to recreate the old homepage? Specifically I'm asking that since we cannot go back to the old homepage based on vBulletin can we not just create a new homepage that has the same functionality with the new software.

Our API can provide all of the data necessary to generate a home page with the same data as the old one. We appear to be missing some things like unread threads vs read threads but it's certainly possible to get this data down to our User Interface layer.

The UI layer is capable of presenting the data to the users any way we choose, including the old way. Our UI is not capable of displaying the data in one format for a subset of users, and another format for another set of users. It is capable of displaying the format in different colour themes though we currently only have two. For our reasoning please the bottom of this post.

Your next question may be to ask me why it wasn't just done - why we just didn't convert the home page and not touch the layout. It's not something I can answer; design and UI isn't my remit or area of expertise.

Danny

----


The inflexibility of our UI layer to handle different formats (we'll call them styles since that's the familiar term) is a decision made by Boards because developing new features and improvements for a system that has multiple styles is a nightmare. It holds us back while we wait for designs for all the styles. It holds us back while we develop for all styles. The maintenance of these styles is a time sink - we cannot make simple changes because it may affect X style in Y way and Z style in C way. It is undesirable complexity and has stagnated development for the last number of years. There are very few sites that offer users a change of theme colours, let alone an entire layout change and their reasons are the same as ours.

spix

Don't know if this has been mentioned already but for me the main page would be easier to read if the thread title was underneath the other information instead of on top. The first thing you notice is the thread titles, then you want to check what forum its in. It seems more natural to glance up to see the forum, maybe just me though.

http://imgur.com/ox3f4Td

Boards.ie: Danny

spix wrote: »

Don't know if this has been mentioned already but for me the main page would be easier to read if the thread title was underneath the other information instead of on top. The first thing you notice is the thread titles, then you want to check what forum its in. It seems more natural to glance up to see the forum, maybe just me though.

http://imgur.com/ox3f4Td

Hi there, what you have is a fairly strange bug. Please come over to Site Development and post a new thread with the contents you get when you visit our Diagnostics Page. Please don't post your IP address though, it's a bad idea to post that publicly

Danny

spix

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Hi there, what you have is a fairly strange bug. Please come over to Site Development and post a new thread with the contents you get when you visit our Diagnostics Page. Please don't post your IP address though, it's a bad idea to post that publicly

Danny

Not a bug, I edited the picture to show what for me would be an improvement to the layout to make it easier to read

Boards.ie: Danny

spix wrote: »

Not a bug, I edited the picture to show what for me would be an improvement to the layout to make it easier to read

Oh, my apologies then - I completely misread your post.

Danny

nesf

Boards.ie: Nicola wrote: »

Sorry I missed this the first time around, I totally understand your point about the forum name being first-I'm going to add it to our list and see what, if anything can be done.

With regards to the pagination, I'll be honest and say I'm not 100% sure on the reasoning behind it-I will get a proper answer for you though But yes, the overall aim was to lessen the overwhelming wall of text-as we've now seen it's a fine line between 'easy to read' and 'useless' for long term members.

I've no idea why we are both around but I will be getting out to make the most of this sunshine shortly

Pagination confuses me, it doesn't lessen server load because you're pre-caching the other pages and it increases the amount of clicks to get to information for users. If there was a technical reason for it I'd be sympathetic but as a design call it strikes me as the work of someone who doesn't understand much about forums like this one.

Don't add forum first to the list. Add, replace current monstrosity with a table of data that is quick to scan for useful information. That'd be much more useful.


Enjoy the sun.

nesf

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

Our API can provide all of the data necessary to generate a home page with the same data as the old one. We appear to be missing some things like unread threads vs read threads but it's certainly possible to get this data down to our User Interface layer.

The UI layer is capable of presenting the data to the users any way we choose, including the old way. Our UI is not capable of displaying the data in one format for a subset of users, and another format for another set of users. It is capable of displaying the format in different colour themes though we currently only have two. For our reasoning please the bottom of this post.

Your next question may be to ask me why it wasn't just done - why we just didn't convert the home page and not touch the layout. It's not something I can answer; design and UI isn't my remit or area of expertise.

Danny

----


The inflexibility of our UI layer to handle different formats (we'll call them styles since that's the familiar term) is a decision made by Boards because developing new features and improvements for a system that has multiple styles is a nightmare. It holds us back while we wait for designs for all the styles. It holds us back while we develop for all styles. The maintenance of these styles is a time sink - we cannot make simple changes because it may affect X style in Y way and Z style in C way. It is undesirable complexity and has stagnated development for the last number of years. There are very few sites that offer users a change of theme colours, let alone an entire layout change and their reasons are the same as ours.

Thanks, I was curious if the changes were forced or whether they were done because they were considered to be good.

Rabies

Rabies wrote: »

I'm still using the fancy Cloud skin and old homepage.

A few min ago I clicked the Cloud/Boards logo to return to the home page and I got sent to the new page :eek: Refreshed a few times and still the same.

Clicked back to the thread I was viewing, forum view went back to normal. Clicked home again, and all was back to normal.

Using chrome on mac.

Mini bug fart or something else?

Ah Hah! It wasn't the top link, it was the bottom little Boards.ie Ltd link I clicked.

That sends me to the new home page. Where as the top link keeps us with the current home page.

Sneaky!

syklops

Boards.ie: Nicola wrote: »

I really really don't want to come across as harsh but I'd like to reiterate what I've said previously, we do not want ads to be our main source of revenue in the future so any changes made are emphatically not done to increase potential ad revenue.

Our hope is the Talk To forums, which provide a really good service to both members and businesses, will become our main revenue source.

You don't come across as harsh and I commend you for staying level headed at what must be a sea of criticism and complaint.

I appreciate that as Boards has grown, vBulletin is no longer on par with your needs, and so the new API was required, and the new API is not backward compatible with the old white style.

Its just many of us did not ask for a change, and weren't aware of the change much before it happened, and are annoyed that we now can't use boards the way we were using it on Tuesday.

Earthhorse

Here's a wee bug I think.

If I filter on the Thanks tab, then go to the 2nd page and click on a link, then hit the back button it brings me back to the 1st page of Thanks, not the 2nd as I would expect.

Dyr

New style is a load of pants but I'll live with it

But what's the jaysus story with "the go to last unread" option? has it been pulled? and the last post being way over wonder on the right masquerading as a post count?

Nate--IRL--

Quick Question can we filter the forums displayed on the main page now? I'd love to be able to filter After Hours topic from appearing in latest posts.

Nate

spix

Nate--IRL-- wrote: »

Quick Question can we filter the forums displayed on the main page now? I'd love to be able to filter After Hours topic from appearing in latest posts.

Nate

I don't think you can filter out forums, you can view them all or a specific one.

the_barfly1

I don't think it's been asked, apologies if it has, but WHY exactly is vBulletin no longer suitable for the sites needs? There are many much larger boards out there in the big 'ol interweb that seem to use vBulletin just fine.

mathepac

spix wrote: »

I don't think you can filter out forums, you can view them all or a specific one.

Buggeration. I'd hoped to be able to lose Pro Wrestling :rolleyes: and some other stuff of not even the slightest tangential interest to me. Shame.

The new site seems to be getting there, the "Followed Threads" seems to work now with the list consisting of threads updated since I last looked.

Thanks for all the hard work but I'd still like to able to say "not this" at the forum level. Pity.

Boards.ie: Danny

the_barfly1 wrote: »

I don't think it's been asked, apologies if it has, but WHY exactly is vBulletin no longer suitable for the sites needs? There are many much larger boards out there in the big 'ol interweb that seem to use vBulletin just fine.

You can piece together some of the issues in a previous post I made here. If you want more information and specifics please start a thread in Site Development, it's rather in depth information that most people will tl;dr if I stick it in here and is also off topic

Danny

spix

mathepac wrote: »

Buggeration. I'd hoped to be able to lose Pro Wrestling :rolleyes: and some other stuff of not even the slightest tangential interest to me. Shame.

The new site seems to be getting there, the "Followed Threads" seems to work now with the list consisting of threads updated since I last looked.

Thanks for all the hard work but I'd still like to able to say "not this" at the forum level. Pity.

They could always add some tickboxes here in the future