Forums | MacLife

niclake13 wrote:

Minor things.

1) Black text.  We need it... gray on gray stinks.
2) No fixed width.
3) Ads at the bottom instead of sides?  That's contributing to the fixed-width issue, methinks.
4) The background.  I just noticed it a second ago, and it's driving me nuts.  No gradient... just white or gray.
5) Theme selection?  There are many people out here that aren't CSS users, or just don't want to go through all that trouble.  Even just 3 or 4 styles would rule.

-Nic

All of these have already been brought up in this thread, and since enough time has passed for everyone to ask for changes, i'm locking this thread.

This thread should be open at least until we get an answer.

Will something be done or not?

justine wrote:

ukimalefu wrote:

This thread should be open at least until we get an answer.

Will something be done or not?

The powers that be can still answer whether or not the thread is open. It's pointless to have the same things posted over and over, though.

Ya, except the fact that there has been NO FEEDBACK AT ALL from the above mentioned powers that be would tend to motivate repeat postings for emphasis.
There have been a fair set of quite serious and well founded objections made here yet not one single word of response.

Maybe you should lock this thread if its going to be ignored anyway.

I think the reason she opened it up again is because of me. I didn't understand that I could post about bugs in here and maybee the thread had already been closed then so I started my own with two bugs that hadn't been announced here earlier.

http://www.maclife.com/forums/topic/92568

The fun thing is that I can't find that thread in "Forum Forum Forum" anymore, she must've made it invisible or it's something wrong with my eyes but the link will take you to it.

It is probably the grey on grey thing going on. Makes locked threads fade into the background.

justine wrote:

arkayn wrote:

It is probably the grey on grey thing going on. Makes locked threads fade into the background.

He linked to it, so he had to see it.

Either that or he had it bookmarked.

Apologies that we haven't fixed this stuff yet, and apologies if you feel we're not paying attention to this thread. But we are listening and we will get to it as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience!

justine wrote:

ukimalefu wrote:

This thread should be open at least until we get an answer.

Will something be done or not?

The powers that be can still answer whether or not the thread is open. It's pointless to have the same things posted over and over, though.

Or it could be they're posted over and over because nothing ever gets done.  For example the User List has been going on for ages.  And this thread from a year ago is a prime example of that.  You provide multiple links illustrating the issue I brought up, yet go ahead and bust out the trigger-happy lock.  Instant resolution!  Anyway, I'm repeating what others have said.  And Susie has since chimed in.  Thanks!

Where's GUI?

My suggestion which I made when we first moved to the crappy PunBB:

Please add a Next Page link to multi-page topics. It is a pain in the butt to click those tiny tiny numbers to move to the next page.


Also, there seems to be some discussion in this thread about the move from MacAddict to Mac|Life and how the forums were operating on a shoestring prior to the move. Has everyone forgotten about our old forums? I think they used phpBB. This was long before the move to Mac|Life and that older software had a MUCH better User Interface than PunBB ever will.

Frank

Alien wrote:

frankly wrote:

Has everyone forgotten about our old forums? I think they used phpBB. This was long before the move to Mac|Life and that older software had a MUCH better User Interface than PunBB ever will.

phpBB is the MS Office of forum software. Has everyone forgotten the slowdowns, data loss, crashes and unavailability of the old forums?

That's what forum software riddled with featuritis at the cost of efficiency and clean coding nets you.

,xtG
.tsooJ

And PunBB has about the worst forum user interface I've ever seen. So it seems we traded one set of problems for another. I'm sure they could have found an option that would run efficiently and have a nice interface if they looked a little bit.

Frank

I think we're stuck in a vicious cycle.

Lack of membership growth and inability to show readership growth in relation to forum use keeps from more being invested into it, like a vBulletin solution which would scale a lot better for the utter size and occasional heavy burst use of the forums. In turn, punbb isn't built for something of our girth, that we're the largest forum to use it is almost irrefutable proof of that, yet while it's an improvement over phpbb, it suffers from usability problems. And I'm not buying the "bandwidth healthy" argument what with the improperly written header/menu we've got up there which throws hissyfits in all mobile browsers instead of scaling.

I think it mostly boils down to us not wanting to be told that "it'll get there" if it never will. If this is the end of the line for technological progression until some hard figures come into play, then tell us so that we can do something about it.

Phydeaux wrote:

ukimalefu wrote:

phpBB has a good user interface, Nothing Microsoft makes does.

Indeed, phpbb 3.0 looks to be even better and probably even easier in the long run for the staff. I would hope that those that make the decisions would look into that and inform us of the feasibility or look into perhaps SimpleMachines Forums, but with the latter there might be an issue with scale. I run into issues when we hit 100 people on at one time, and anything more than I think 50 membergroups/ranks.

And my suggestion to make it easier would be to not worry about transferring all of the posts from the existing forum to the new software if they went that direction. They could keep this software up as a classic for people that need to search for old topics. That would give them a lot more freedom when selecting new software. They wouldn't have to worry about whether or not the existing data could be imported into the new system. They could pick the best software for the needs of these forums.

The bottom line though is that whether or not some people think that punBB is better than phpBB it is clearly not the best software for the job. I think the problem is that whoever the main person that was responsible for the forums at the time of the switch from phpBB to punBB was familiar with punBB and that is how the decision was made. I don't think other options were even considered. I could be wrong but that is the impression that I got and now that person is probably no longer around which is one of the reasons we can't get changes made to the system.

Frank