Cas Bitton wrote:
With a staggering 75%+ of our members using the most up to date web browsers (Chrome/Firefox/Safari), the latest operating systems (Win Vista/7 90%+).
It makes a lot of sense for us to embrace CSS3 and similar modern web standards. Between the last site design and now, it was a solid 4+ years. A LOT changed over the years so who knows what the future will look like, our next design will probably get released on a piano.
Oh I see how it is... just because a guy wants to use Opera he's suddenly a second class citizen...
skitzor wrote:telling whether I have read a topic or not is much harder. before there were colours, and now it just moves or something. I hope you are planning on customising this a bit.
Probably my biggest issue with the rework to be honest, I normally would just hit the "new posts since last login" button and scroll down the list for anything that caught my eye. Posts with a black dot would snag me because it meant a discussion I took part in had continued but now it's like opening a forum written in Russian, instead of a little black dot we get a star and some **** that scrolls and different coloured borders and I have NFI what any of it means (side note: are we ever going to get a non-American spell check on here? This shizzle has ruined my spelling by second guessing me over half a decade).
skitzor wrote:I agree with the people saying that the comments on articles need to be changed. the problem is that it's now comments, instead of discussion. being able to quote was important, and the size of the boxes available sort of discourage any real discussion.
That would be the second biggest issue as i see it, the comment threads were the most regularly trafficked part of the site (aside from the occasional moral/political thread we plumped out to 20+ pages) and now those discussions can't happen. I feel like it's turned into commenting on some idiots blog rather than a place for discussion like it used to be.
Marius wrote:I have no idea what you're saying, exe, when you go on about forgetting everything. What I would do is achieve my major goals, see how the implementation works, and improve in a cycle.
What he's saying is that if you want to design a new model of Ferrari you don't forget everything you ever learned about automotive engineering and then start making Volkswagons and say "it's a work in progress". Many of us chose GoN as our home because it wasn't some pretentious, flashy, hightech for no reason gaming forum, it had a few things going for it that, when combined, made it better than any other Australian gaming site:
* it was easy on the eyes, 99% of gaming sites are a **** of bright colours and stupid ****, orange and gray was soothing and as it stands now IGN.com is easier on the eyes than this place is (I just checked), the same applies to Kotaku (and BOTH have better layouts).
* easy to use, icons/tags/symbols etc were all pretty damn obvious and very simple in appearance. The current thread icons and notifications are complicated for no other reason at all, imagine if you got in a new car tomorrow and the little headlight symbol on the headlight switch was written in elvish... it might be okay once you'd driven the car for a week but that wouldn't make it feel any less stupid OR make it any more intuitive.
* lack of clutter, why do I need to see the headlines on EVERY page rather than just on the main page? Why do I need not one, but TWO iinet ads right next to each other? The spacing on those is really annoying by the way, it forces you to look at the ads and that's never been a GoN thing, remember the shitstorm during the previous advertising ideas?
It feels like someone said "lets rewrite the back end but maintain the old site and then we can tweak it and update the layout etc" (which is what should happen) but somewhere along the lines everyone in the office next door drank too many energy drinks and then walked in and decided to help redesign the site... all it takes is for a few people who don't understand what the original charm was to suggest "this would make it more professional etc" and suddenly there's too many cooks in the kitchen and your nationally famous apple pie is a cheesecake with apple puree on the top.
The new site seems to run fantastically, I LOVE the quick edit and a couple of other features but IMO with a few simple changes it could be EXACTLY what was wanted in an update:
1) Give us back the comment threads linked off the end of articles, the articles can stay the same, just make a mandatory link at the end that says "comment thread for this news item (### posts)".
2) Fix the files/radio etc (that's still in the works though so i wont harp on about that).
3) Simplify the thread notification icons again, no scrolling distracting junk, no different coloured borders for stupid reasons, no hard to see "you posted in here" star. Ease of use can coincide with a professional appearance, you don't need feature bloat... there's absolutely no reason at all to have two different types of [img] tag for different sized pictures, it's just silly.
4) stop spamming news articles at me, either put them in the sidebar on non-main pages or just remove them. I get my news from the main page (just like 99% of everyone else), i don't need to see a link to the blizzard article when I'm reading the blizzard article.
Those four changes^ and a slight toning down of the white paint eyesore would make this place into a supercharged version of the old site, rather than a "late to the game" ripoff of IGN style sites or some pathetic bastardization of 3fl. I'm pretty sure everyone at some stage has had a favourite sandwich shop or fish and chip shop which was universally loved but decided to go fancy and a year later had faded into obscurity, matrix this **** up by all means possible.... but don't turn our sandwich cart into a Subway, there's already plenty of those and the previous cart stole most of their customers for a reason.
kittycatArcane wrote:The forums also now eat the right side of big pictures instead of the resizing it did before. Just tossing it out there =D
That's because there's now [img-large][/img-large] as well as the normal tag .... it's just silly feature bloat (and slightly annoying).
retaxis wrote:my opinion:
site took a step forward in design, 10 giant steps back in functionality.
just my 2 cents, bye.
That's pretty much the crux of the matter, technologically it's a giant and well needed leap into the future compared to the old site. Functionally however, it's like designing a 10 million dollar pen to write in space that can only write in fluro green Cyrillic.
by kittycatArcane » 5 Jul 12, 1:44 am 
