The 17S 4 Discussion Thread

[Haelbarde]

4 minutes ago, Mestiv said:

I'm still going to try and hack a table into my post...

This is a cell	This too
And another row! With longer text!	Yeah!!!

Oooh! Do tell!

[Delightful]

Okay I'm gonna be "that guy". 

This is not aimed at anyone in particular. 

Can we please not use the word 'hate' when discussing site design? It's rather strong language for such a labour of love as this overhaul. Even if you think it's the ugliest thing in the universe, some respect for our admins and their hard work please. 

[/telling everyone what to do]

Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Edit: Mestiv that table is seriously neat. How did you do it?

edit 2: haelbarde I just looked at your rep title and thought it was your username and I was like "that's Haelbarde, not The Honor Spren!  "

Edited June 14, 2016 by Delightful
What happens if I type here

[Haelbarde]

@Delightful Oooh, edit descriptions for all now? That's cool!

[Mestiv]

4 minutes ago, Haelbarde said:

Oooh! Do tell!

Only if admins won't cut my head off for spreading this knowledge

[Delightful]

@Haelbarde

Edited June 14, 2016 by Delightful
All of the trolling Master Ani!

[The Invested Beard]

54 minutes ago, Nyali said:

On the old site, I could click my avatar in the upper right corner and click on "My Content" to view every thread I've posted in and whether or not there are new posts in any of those threads. Does that feature still exist? I can't seem to find it anymore.

I really liked that feature, as it let me reply to people and follow content I was already interested in without getting distracted by new posts. Very good when I only have a few minutes to check the site between things. Also, it let me see those posts without having to check every single forum that I happened to post in. I know Notifications can do similar, but the My Content page was significantly more convenient than notifications. With notifications, I couldn't always tell if the notification was for something I had already checked or not, since they all were marked as read the second I saw them, even if I didn't follow the link to the post the notification was about. I'm not sure how notifications are on the new site, but I'd still really like a handy little list of posts like we had before =\

 

EDIT: ... and just after posting that, I managed to find it xD The new site equivalent is "Manage Followed Content" - I had thought that would just be a settings page, but if you go there and click on "topics" on the left, you get to a page very similar to what I was looking for. It's more clicks, but it also has better info about notifications and doesn't show topics you've Unfollowed, so I guess it works just as well. I'll have to make sure to autofollow topics now though.

 

My only problem with this is My Content would show anything you posted in, followed or not. I found that way more convenient.

 

Other than that, love the overhaul! Good work everyone involved!

[Haelbarde]

Just now, Mestiv said:

Only if admins won't cut my head off for spreading this knowledge

If you don't tell me, I shall only go experiment myself till I get it working too.

[Joe ST]

Just now, Mestiv said:

Only if admins won't cut my head off for spreading this knowledge

*annoyingly subversive admin* go ahead and share the sauce, don't worry I'll protect you from the spikes

[Magestar]

4 minutes ago, Mestiv said:

Only if admins won't cut my head off for spreading this knowledge

Just wear some coded Shardplate.  Tell! Tell! Tell!

Edited June 14, 2016 by Magestar
TELL! TELL! TELL!.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Tell!

[Ecthelion III]

1 minute ago, Joe ST said:

2 minutes ago, Mestiv said:

Only if admins won't cut my head off for spreading this knowledge

*annoyingly subversive admin* go ahead and share the sauce, don't worry I'll protect you from the spikes

Did someone mention spikes...?

Have some cookies!

[Mestiv]

All right, I'll make a topic about it once I get home. The site is easier to use on mobile now, but still not as comfortable as PC

[Delightful]

3 minutes ago, Joe ST said:

*annoyingly subversive admin* go ahead and share the sauce, don't worry I'll protect you from the spikes

You have a Larkin?

Edited June 14, 2016 by Delightful
Upvotes are now hearts! This is adorable.

[king of nowhere]

Oh, and I'm having some problems with the "my content" section. 

So, I used to just click on "my content", see all the threads I posted in, and see if there was anything new posted in them. Now, it does something similar under "see my activity", but it does only show my latest posts, not if somebody else replied to those threads. In the old forum I could with a quick glance see which threads had something new. And if I go to "manage followed content", it's empty. Maybe because I never actually set something on "follow", since the "my content" page was fine. So, what is the best option now? I put my settings on "automatically follow everything I post", which should fix the problem for the future (I hope), but it won't help if someone revives an old post. I'm never going to notice that if it happens. Any suggestion?

[Argent]

19 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

It's ... bright!!

It's so bright that I can feel the environment being destroied just by logging in this site, as a brighter screen means greater energy consumption. Probably one can calculate that for every minute one spend logged on, the pollution lowers the average life expectancy by a small, but meaningful amount.

Ok, joking here, but really, it is incredibly bright. It's hurting my eyes, and this time I'm not joking. Could the brightness be turned down a bit? Also increased contrast for some of the light gray or blue features wouldn't hurt.

P.S. I went to the oculist a few months ago and she told me that I am normal both for light sensitivity and contrast perception, so it's not a defect of my sight.

 

EDIT: To avoid looking like the guy who always complain at everything, I will point out that there are many improvements I like. But the brightness is too much.

The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid!

[Joe ST]

2 minutes ago, Delightful said:

You have a Larkin?

no I'm just the one that made the spikes in the first place 

[Delightful]

This is a web literacy question more than a site one....

so we have buttons to share to Twitter, Facebook, what the heck is digg? Instagram? Reddit and....snake drinking from a bowl?

[Nyali]

3 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

Oh, and I'm having some problems with the "my content" section. 

So, I used to just click on "my content", see all the threads I posted in, and see if there was anything new posted in them. Now, it does something similar under "see my activity", but it does only show my latest posts, not if somebody else replied to those threads. In the old forum I could with a quick glance see which threads had something new. And if I go to "manage followed content", it's empty. Maybe because I never actually set something on "follow", since the "my content" page was fine. So, what is the best option now? I put my settings on "automatically follow everything I post", which should fix the problem for the future (I hope), but it won't help if someone revives an old post. I'm never going to notice that if it happens. Any suggestion?

When you go to "Mange Followed Content," do you click down to the "Topics" section? Weirdly, it defaults to "Articles" instead of "Topics." I find Topics something I'd check constantly and Articles something I'd only check occasionally, so I kinda wish Topics were the default. But, other people likely use the site differently than me, so maybe it makes sense to others!

[Joe ST]

3 minutes ago, Delightful said:

This is a web literacy question more than a site one....

so we have buttons to share to Twitter, Facebook, what the heck is digg? Instagram? Reddit and....snake drinking from a bowl?

I mean, they each have hover-text ? it's stumbleupon, both that and digg are old less popular reddits

[Kurkistan]

Thanks for all the hard work Chaos & Co. I feel all shiny and chrome.

To pick at a very small nit:

Could we possibly make the email alerts less verbose? There's no functional loss, but it's making it a bit less easy to just glance at the first-line email preview and know what's what. In the good old days of yester-year (/-day), there was some unnecessary text, but little enough that right off the bat you'd be seeing the username of whoever replied. Now alerts are "from" "17th Shard, the Official." and all start out "17th Shard, the Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite Hi Kurkistan..." Emails used to be just from "17th Shard" and the body started out "Kurkistan, Bob (<url of profile>) has posted a reply..."

I like that the profile URL has been taken out (saves space), but otherwise that's a lot of repetitive content.

Edited June 14, 2016 by Kurkistan
Sp

[Argent]

Hmm, yeah, a little darker layout (or a full dark theme) wouldn't be bad. 

[Ecthelion III]

I don't mind the brightness.

[Haelbarde]

Re: Theming - I know it's something that takes a lot of work to do well, but is there some way that users could help get that worked out, rather it being left all to the admins?

[Delightful]

20 minutes ago, Joe ST said:

I mean, they each have hover-text ? it's stumbleupon, both that and digg are old less popular reddits

Ah. I don't think I can see hover text on mobile though?

Edited June 14, 2016 by Delightful
I don't know why this was worth a golden heart but ok. I love you too mysterious person!

[Mistrunner]

I think the new design looks great. It's going to take a lot of time to get used to, of course, just like any other kind of change. It is very bright- I don't have a specific problem with that, but if there was a darker theme, I think I'd use that one.

Dark like my soul

Pros:

• You can minimize quotes! I love that! (Could you do that before? I don't know. It's at least a more noticeable feature.)
• The 'show new replies' popup actually works (at least for me, it didn't work at all before the update)
• Bullets have nice line spacing! Yay!
• Love the new multiquote button.
• The navigation bar at the top- I'm loving the larger buttons. I've misclicked on the smaller ones there were before quite a lot.
• Text emoticons automatically turn into actual emoticons! It's so fabulous! I usually use the text shorthands because I'm too lazy to actually find the emoticon bar, so being able to see how they'll look in-text before I post is really nice.
• I like the new text editor. It's easier to find things, I think.

Cons (all to do with navigation, for some reason):

• Maybe it's just how my brain works, but I find it really difficult to detect where things are with so much whitespace. I can't compartmentalize them into sections, especially with the new sans-borders design; things just seem to bleed together.
• The extra space looks really good, but it makes the site take a lot longer to navigate, especially on mobile. It's much harder to easily scroll and select a subforum or topic quickly.
• Like a few others, I'm not too big on the simply bolded Allomantic symbols rather than golden ones for unread things. It makes it harder to see and recognize.

Question:

• When editing my sig to remove the extra space, I didn't see options for aligning and coloring text. I see those options for normal replies, but are they no longer available in signatures?

Mostly, I'm glad that the site is up again after all that time updating. It was terrible having it gone for so long! 

Edit: Oh, and I can't find the "go to first unread post" star or button that people are talking about. Can someone point it out to me?

Edited June 14, 2016 by Mistrunner

[BeskarKomrk]

This isn't specifically design related, but: what's the spoiler policy for the new Q&A board? The intent seems to be that new readers can browse pretty freely, which would imply tagging and hiding pretty much all spoilers. However, I think people are used to the Q&A thread which, by virtue of being on the Cosmere Theories board, did not need to have spoilers tagged. Either way, I didn't see it established anywhere.