New Forum Layout / Design Feedback
 

Guys,
This new forum design is dreadful. The links/buttons are way too small, and the colour scheme makes it harder to read. What on earth was wrong with the last one?

Nothing !!!
Change for the sake of change

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/tech...g-reports.html

This is awful, please go back to what we had

Hey it could be worse, I looked at some of the other sites this company runs and holy smokes, they are gawd awful.

Agreed. I looked at some of the automotive forums owned by IB and they look hideous.

Is it just me or is the sizing of everything getting smaller since they updated it last week? Seems a bit smaller this week. Also, that god awful yellow highlighting I'm the thread starter is ridiculous. What was wrong with the blue bar from the previous iteration? That was fine for the job.

I'm coming back to FT after a week away and the template changes seem nonsensical and add no value. Usability always takes a hit when you make changes, but this doesn't seem to be driven by any agenda in particular. Navigation is harder all around. Forum-menu columns load in jagged, uneven fashion. I find the site is clunkier and less responsive in Chrome, especially the post-composition template.

Can anyone explain the rationale behind this downgrade?

Their ratiobale seems to be, "This is our website not yours and we know better." Seriously.

It seems you've been all the fun facts in the master thread:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/tech...g-reports.html

Welcome to the club! :(

Couldn't agree more! And every so often I randomly get the mobile site which is even worse!

The awful highlighter yellow was not there at the switchover time iirc , so is not , I believe, something that is unbreakably tied to rest of the change

It was originally a black box around white text after the 15th. I can't see how they think this site is usable. at 100% zoom, it's impossible to use, the text and links are way too small, but I doubt they will fix this to be honest.

That surely depends on screen resolution and size of monitor
The yellow really needs to go - it is annoying and distracting , but I have no issue using IE at 100%

I think post 8 probably sums up the likelihood of addressing end user concerns raised

Can you turn off the 'auto loading' of posts and go back to the page/breadcrumb layout somehow? My screen is jumping all over the place when I try to go back into a thread and read back some older posts. It's horrible to keep track where I left off this way.

If you are referring to what I think. you can go into quick links -> edit options and then disable infinite scroll

This is an "upgrade?" It's awful. And why did the Omni button disappear from the top of the page?

"Thread starter" to refer to whoever has started a thread. We were used to calling the person the OP, original poster. Will FT go back to all those posts in which we addressed the initial poster as an OP and change our post wording to TS? Will be interesting to see how that is handled.

Nothing, but apparently our <redacted> at Internet Brands decided that if there isn't anything wrong with the old design, we must break it! :rolleyes:

thank you!!, that was it

only works when logged in though

Any reason not to leave yourself logged in?

This is one of many things that highlights the ridiculousness of the whole "enhancement" forced upon users. Although trivial, it's also perplexing that IB spent time to change something that not only is standard parlance (original poster) to a goofy new term that no one on here uses - and in an awful yellow-highlighter design that even a middle school boy wouldn't use in his web page design. Perhaps if the person who took the time to program the thread starter change had instead used their time for even a modicum of beta testing, a few of the errors seen in the rollout could have been prevented.

I haven't been on FT as much lately, so today is one of the first times I am seeing more of the new look. First impression: I don't like it one bit. Perhaps there is a way to shut it off individually, but I dislike how the page will constantly scroll until the very end. I'd rather see one page at a time, as was possible on the previous version. (found the setting for infinite scroll).

Any way to shut off the top bar from floating when I scroll? Seems like it, along with the bottom reply crap take up a lot of real estate on my screen.

Secondly, and again, perhaps there is some sort of setting I can change, but I feel as though the Reply button is too far down on the screen. I dislike websites which try to move stuff all over the page, rather than have it in a convenient spot. Only other thing I would change is the color- not a fan of the light blue.

Some people don't log in and just browse, I do that and only log in to post.

The new forum is like something out of the 90s or early 2000s at the latest. It's ugly.

+100

This is the reason I avoided using FT for nearly a week. This really must be changed to a toggled option.

It is indeed. The over-use of white space is truly awful - the wikiposts especially are very uncomfortable to read now. It's hard to imagine even one person looking at the redesign and thinking it's an improvement, much less the multiple people that I assume must be involved in approving and deploying this. Thus far user feedback seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Once logged in, wouldn't it be easier to just stay logged in rather than logging out?

Someone who has no account is impacted, but for those with accounts, just remaining logged in would solve the issue

Is there a benefit to logging out?

I suppose not, but if you clear the browser's cache, it logs you out automatically

The site is messed up after recent changes
 

The site has too many flashing adds, loads very slowly and not giving the same pleasurable experience as before. Always go to mobile setting even if I disabled going to mobile in profile settings.

Agreed - the floating menu at the top of the page never works correctly on my laptop or my phone.

I suggest an ad blocker for that, some work better than others, but it makes sites more usable.

What was the reason for downgrade? Upgrade should be to improve things.

We can change it whatever. It was a black box and people hated that, so we changed to yellow, which is in the FT design palette.

All you have to do to get it switched to something else is... get consensus :)

MyFlyerTalk
Edit Options
Check DISABLE INFINITE SCROLL
SAVE

How about removing the background colour altogether until there is some consensus on whether there should be a background colour

Exactly what consensus was gotten for any of the other design changes in the last few weeks? @:-)

For gawd's sake, instead of making everyone miserable, just turn off infinite scroll for everyone. Has there been a single report of any FTer liking infinite scroll & saying oh thank you IB, thank you. Quick answer: no. Instead there are a multiple of complaints. And we all know customer service 101. For those who complain there are a hundred more (or in this case thousands) who hate it & just go elsewhere. Geesh. You (generic IB you, not you specifically; none of my comments are ever specific to you personally) have it within your control to eliminate one of the biggest complaints, yet you choose not to do so. Instead you prefer people to be unhappy. Please, please explain the rationale of that to me & others. We truly don't get it.

Cheers.

Really? With a quick search I find 13 posts referencing "Thread Starter" in the other main thread.

A few of those were after the yellow change. Of the pre-yellow-change posts, precisely one post seems to dislike the white-text-on black color scheme specifically. One other post noted that it used to be white-text-on-blue without stating any particular opinion on the new black scheme. The remainder of posts focus on disliking the change from the common term "Original Poster" to "Thread Starter" without mentioning the black color scheme in particular.

The posts in this thread referencing the Thread Starter feature all seem to be after the yellow change.

So if anything, it is the change in terminology that folks dislike in particular. I'd venture to guess that no one would be opposed to returning the color scheme to the old blue one - along with returning to OP, but just my two cents.

But there is one feature that seems to have a lot of negative feedback, that being infinite scroll set as a default.

Thank you. Infinite scroll is something that really bothered me and I would never have found this without you mentioning it,