TestTubeGames Forums

When viewing any blog post, I get this at the top of the page: When viewing the blog itself, I get just a page containing this: Also the forum's weird. Is it an update? I'm not quite sure I like it, both because of the style (there's a lot of unused space; the forum doesn't expand to fill the available space; Preview/Submit buttons have inconsistent colorings on hover/click). Additionally, many common links go to different places (ex. The TTG logo doesn't go to index, which breaks my workflow). This happened within about 12 hours or so, I'm sure.

Edit What is this weird automatic expanding box. Also text has turned to symbolic buttons, which doesn't look that good to me.

Also, yes, I posted for the first time in more than a month to complain about this

Edit: As of now, the blog issue has been fixed, and some parts of the forum have gone back to normal.

A Random Player wrote:Also, yes, I posted for the first time in more than a month to complain about this

Haha, now I know what it's like from Facebook's perspective when they change the layout

Short story long:
Earlier today, the forum was giving me a really strange error message when I tried to make a new topic, or reply, or do anything involving submissions. Huh. Weird. I searched and searched for a solution, but nothing worked. Was confused. Then finally bit the bullet and updated the forum (a bunch of bold, red text has been nagging me for like a year to update, but I hate updating)... hoping it would clear things up.

Updating the forum version changed all those little things you noticed. Some of which I've been able to change back, and others I'm looking into. I was as surprised as you were at the little changes here and there that we're discovering.

...though for about 2 minutes, I thought I'd accidentally deleted all the posts in the forum. So, hey, I'll take a few design changes here and there

Along the way, I needed to update the php version of my website (apparently *that's* a thing too?) and that broke wordpress... until I updated wordpress after seeing your post.

Seeing a trend here? Updates are for chumps.

Thankfully the posting problem *is* gone. And I'll see what I can do about the layout changes. I agree that some things are weird, like the picture of a quote instead of the word. Who chose that?!

Edit: Welp, the wordpress update broke the calendar. Which means: g'night everyone! Today is over!

One notable change (I believe) is that the forum now notifies you of new posts. I don't really like this; I had gotten along fine with refreshing, and now this forum is just going to be another one of those subtle bandwidth users. Not that it's a lot, but I dislike when a seemingly static page automatically updates; breaks the assumption that "I've loaded the HTML, and it's done now.". I have a similar complaint about the expanding post/edit box, but most other things I can live with (excluding the page width, and partially including the style of buttons like for the search box. Also whose idea was to put the advanced search as what looks like a secondary option of search, when it's just a link? I'm no UI designer, but... ... ...also the magnifying glass looks off-center. And what's with the split button at the bottom left of thread pages?)... 'specially the Notifications/Private messages [0].

As you can probably tell, I dislike significant change, especially when it appears ambiguous as to whether it's good or not.

Edit: Bleh, looks like I've written a wall of text. tl;dr:
Dislike: Automatic notification of new posts in the tab/windows
Expanding post/edit box
Page width (see Rocket/Space game)
All the buttons everywhere
I believe there's subtle extra spacing in places like the options/attachments boxes.
Preview/Submit buttons red on hover, blue on click?
New navbar? Actually, I'm not so sure about hiding logout/UCP, etc..

Quick comparison (I have some old screenshots if needed, as well): http://web.archive.org/web/201310040731 ... /index.php

Edit: Eww, that link color looks like I've already clicked everything.

Edit: Perhaps someone's already written a mod (/config file? I'm not too familiar with this system) for phpBB that restores some of the functionality.

Edit: Of course, the xkcd forums are still in the old style.


Edit: All in all, I'm not that concerned about the style; don't break the forum over it or anything. I'm sure we'll all get used to it in a few months or so; it just feels weird and a bit "clunky".

A Random Player wrote:Edit: All in all, I'm not that concerned about the style; don't break the forum over it or anything. I'm sure we'll all get used to it in a few months or so; it just feels weird and a bit "clunky".

Phew!

I do understand the UI frustration. Bad UI is one of my pet peeves as well (not that it's not something I'm guilty of, too!)... I mean *why* people would choose to make things some *weird* ways... ergh.

I looked in to reverting back to 3.0... and it looks like a no-go. I imagine we'll get used to things that I can't fix/improve.

I did change the width of the forums, since that grated on my a lot, too. Very obvious, and certainly not a visual improvement. I raised the max width by 30% or so, and now you also have the option (in the user setting panel) to enable a setting that disregards the max width entirely -- so the forum fits your screen.

I've been having trouble finding out how to fix your other big pet peeve, the page reloading automatically. I'm not having luck there, though. I'll keep looking for a bit and hopefully find some 'switch' I can disable... but it might just be totally integrated into 3.1.

Beyond that, we'll give it a bit of time to get used to it -- and if there's any particular thing you *can't stand* after a couple weeks, I'll see if I can get into the css to tweak it. (Naturally I don't want to lose too much dev time, of course)

This isn't that related, but I have noticed that the blog's title is now that of the calendar. I recall that the two are linked, so it seems something happened to mix the two up.