dokomo
Ex-Bluelighter
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2008
- Messages
- 5,591
Glad BL is back - aside from the errors last night, it seems to be performing a lot better than it was.
I'm not very happy with the new theme, as a lot of others have said. I have a 1080p screen, and I still feel like I can't get enough on the screen, because there's so much padding between messages in a thread. This trend towards wasted screenspace (which almost every software company is guilty of) is getting really frustrating. It's as if developers think that screen size has grown like CPU speed (until this winter, I had fewer pixels on my screen than I did in 2001), when available screenspace is static in the horizontal and shrinking in the vertical (back in the early 2000's, everyone I knew ran 1200x1024, now 1376x768 and 1440x900 is more common - and yet, vertical screen space is wasted, everywhere).
There 15-20 pixels of deadspace between posts, then a 20-30 pixel tab that only has 1 button on the far right to minimize the post, then another 20-30 pixels with just a number and a tiny icon on the left, then another 10 pixels or so on the bottom just to give a curve. That's like 80 pixels. The three elements of content could fit in a 20 pixel bar, or even on the same line as the date/time of the post, with 5-10 px of padding between posts. Zooming out helps, but it makes the text too small to read before it fits as much content as used to fit on the screen.
I'm imagining something like this - we don't need full on graphic design, we just need the padding hacked off.
Also, why is there no word wrap in the quick reply box? Before, if a word went off the edge of the quick reply text area, the whole word would appear on the next line. Now, only the letters that would go past the end of the line do. This makes editing/proofreading posts kinda hard... Is this just me? I'm running Chrome - but chrome rarely has browser-specific bugs.
The post editor was ENTIRELY replaced in this version of vBulletin (one of its most controversial and bemoaned changes) and the word-wrapping issue is a result of this change. The new editor is different, still sort of buggy, and not at all within our control. I also run chrome and it also does not word wrap for me. Annoying? Yes. Something we can do much about right at this minute? No.
Likewise, this theme is just a theme. Its a package deal. The old one was not available, this was the closest one we could find that was still blue. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but much of it is outside our control unless we have a better theme. Feel free to track some down for us that are blue and closer to the old one that are vB4 compatible (and keep in mind, each one of these skins come at a licensing price and we're entirely supported by donations.)
