Not sure if this is the right place to post this, sorry if not.
Am I the only one that finds the new forum absolutely terrible? The UI is so clunky and it’s really difficult to navigate. I was surprised to see only a few other posts talking about it. The changes seem to make the UI looks a little sexier but totally sacrifice usability for superficial visual upgrades.I personally have gone from being a daily user to almost never using the forum.
Any chance the forums could be improved to more intuitive and user friendly?
If the majority likes it as it, I’ll hold my peace.
The old forums were barely functional as forums. Just making something appear the way you wanted it was a major chore.
The new forums have tons of useful features like notifications, smart linking, formatting options that don’t look like garbage, one continuous stream of posts so you don’t have to navigate to multiple pages to read one topic, better searching, tiers of user levels with associated privileges, badges, muting/tracking topics, @mentions, polls… I could go on but you get the point.
To suggest these forums are less functional is insane.
Oh and navigating… I just go to “Latest Posts” and it tells me if a new post was made… way better than refreshing the various individual forums to check if new posts came.
That’s one way to put it, haha. Usually I’d say it’s just being a jerk lol.
Also used another helpful feature when I did this… highlighting the part I wanted to quote and hitting the quote button that appears contextually. Quoting was such a pain before.
Just throwing my opinion in the ring - most (although not all) of those features are useless clutter to me. In any case, I didn’t say it compromised functionality, I said it compromised usability. The UI is unintuitive and not very user friendly. In my opinion, it’s cluttered and lacking focus.
I was just curious if anyone felt the same way. Like I said originally, I’m happy if the majority of people are.
Saying it was only superficially upgraded implies new functionality was not added.
What do you want to do that you are having trouble doing? I haven’t had any issues.
Also, are you using a computer or a mobile device? Both versions are better than the old way, but mobile is a little annoying at times to navigate bigger threads.
Navigation around the forum is confusing - there’s far too many categories and subcategories to go through. I’d prefer a clear index. As well, I feel there’s too much information on the screen, for example all the avatars showing who has posted in a topic, etc, all the extra buttons, the bar on the site. All the white on white.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I much prefer the standard Simple Machines Forum design, which has all the same functionality, perhaps isn’t as graphically pretty as what they have here.
Like I said… I basically never look at the category page. I use the Latest Posts page. There’s no real reason to just navigate to individual categories unless you want to purposely ignore stuff.
And I would fight anyone who wants to go back to a world where you can’t mute topics. That’s by far my favorite thing here.
I love the new forum features that others have cited above. But I will admit that I feel like I miss a lot more of what’s going on now. I think the old forums had a small-space feel, which has its good and bad points. The new forums feel more spacious, like being in a much larger room, with more separate conversations going on. But I’m slowly refining my navigation method, and am keeping up a little better now.
I think part of the problem is that the system works differently for high-volume versus low-volume readers. The ‘Latest’ view works well for high-volume users, because they can keep up with what’s going on. But the ‘Latest’ view fills up too fast for a low-volume user to keep up.
For low-volume users, it’s a lot easier if you use the ‘New’ view to browse new thread titles, and only open the ones you’re interested in, and click ‘Dismiss New’ to remove all the remaining ones. Once you’ve opened a thread, decide whether or not you want to follow it. If so, set it to ‘Tracking’ at the bottom of the thread. If not, set it to ‘Normal’ or ‘Mute’. Tracked threads will appear in the ‘Unread’ list when they have new activity, so you can start each foruming session by catching up with the conversations you’ve been following.
It’s safe to say that whatever forum system to be used as an alternative to the old forums would have its strong and weak points. These forums have small things that could be tweaked to make it better, but compared to the previous interface offered originally for WaniKani, these are far superior. It took me a minute to get used to this interface in order to use and navigate through it, however not to the point of being dissatisfied.
Also not a fan of this UI/design, but by now I’m already used to it.
Frankly speaking, this design is underwhelming at best; the information density is high, and Discourse makes a poor job on highlighting what’s important from what’s secondary, and it might take some time to get used to it. The old one was much more cleaner, elegant and easier to understand/use (actually, one of the best I’ve ever seen IMHO).
On the other hand, featurewise, the new forum is hands down a hundred times better. It’s so rich in cool and helpful thingies, that I won’t even bother citing all of them here. And it’s not like Discourse UI doesn’t have its design wins (like the post scroll bar on the right).
In the end, I think it’s like what @LucasDesu said. Putting the good and the bad on a balance, I have nothing to feel any discontent with the new forum.