Personally, I’m not very happy with this new forum?

I realize that things change and this new format is going to take some time to grow on me, but… This is the most God=Awful layout and format I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. To be honest, I’ve never seen this format used anywhere else, and I think I know why.

@Easto- not sure why we need another thread ? - merging with the existing one

That’s fine.
I realize there is going to be an initial “getting used to” period, but I have to say that this format takes up too much screen real estate. Why do the dates scroll up and down in the right-hand pane of a thread? Why not just put the posted date where it belongs?

In the top right corner of a post there’s a time indicating how old it is.

The right hand scroll thing is like a zoomed-out version of the window scrolling function and allows you to navigate far longer threads faster I suppose. Imagine someone responding to a post of yours in a long thread with “I wrote a review about this in this thread back in November last year”. Now scrolling is easier as opposed to in the old format.

@Easto I think everyone agrees that it’s not perfect , nothing ever is- and yes I think there is too much wasted space - the tagging system isn’t quite right yet and I hated it at first.

BUT

I do think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and there are LOTS of advantages - why not stick around for a bit and see how you feel about it in a month or so.

I have yet to see any advantages.

Seriously, can someone please tell me what is better about this format? I’m not trying to be an ass here. I just don’t get it …

off the top of my head-

  • Pasting images directly into a post
  • Notifications work
  • Real time indication when someone is typing into a post you’re reading
  • Search works
  • Possibility to view responses to individual posts within the larger thread

Easy formatting using Markdown, html or bbcode. Markdown is amazing

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Neither am I but sometimes it just happens!! :crazy_face:

Yeah, I guess those could be considered “pros”. They just don’t outweigh the “cons” for me. Oh, well. Not like I can do anything about it. It’s probably just going to take more of an adjustment phase for me than I was expecting. It’s just so hard to revisit and easily see what is new since my last visit since there is no “mark all forums read” type action.

By the way, I love you steve (in Chicago still?). You are my all time Steinberg forum hero. Ass or not.

Well that made my freaking day! Thanks buddy! Yeah, still here, but I removed my location from my name for safety.

I actually was not a fan of spacious page styling and hidden elements, and I agree that less blank space here would be better. But I’ve observed some interesting social effects - the design- I think it has a mellowing effect- well sometimes - and the forum is designed from the ground up to encourage civility.

While it could seem condescending at first, (like the bot that congratulates you upon earning a badge) it does seem to work.

Also, from a moderation standpoint the tools are fantastic. We have been able to go from requiring 1st posts from new users to be manually approved by hand, to it being completely automated- this means no one waits more than a few seconds for their post to appear. On phpBB it could take days and days if a couple people were out sick or busy. Now, there are a bunch of different ways to communicate directly with members about their posts, a way to slow down posting if a topic is turns into a flame war, and other functions that appear to be designed by people with a lot of experience in running forums. The whole thing is more friendly.

Finally, Steinberg IT is not responsible for every little detail of the implementation and maintenance, which previously they were, so if something breaks, it will get fixed sooner, by the Discourse people.

This post got longer than I meant it to when I started it. I guess being loved makes me loquacious!

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Well, I might not be the smartest man in the world. Anyway, thanks for teaching me a new word! Always nice to add to the vocabulary. And thanks for the forum insight. You are truly a realistic and understanding kind of guy and I appreciate that greatly. I wish you nothing but the best! :frog:

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I will sit here quietly and then one day I will hopefully come back and I will eat my words.

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@Easto - I hope you will too :slight_smile:

Personally, I’m not happy at all…

  1. Where is the forum help for users ? I finally found a ‘newbie’ one in an indirect way (unable to make a link to it, actually, see 3.) which only answers to basic questions. At least, I now know how to reply with quote, which seems a rather basic feature to me and is not directly available.

  2. What are the requirements (pixel dimensions, file format) for a custom avatar image ? And does this one needs to be round ? :face_with_monocle:

  3. How to make a link to a precise post in a thread ? I only see a ‘Share a link’ option, obviously made for ‘social’ networks…

  4. How to define ALL threads as Normal instead of seeing messages piling up in the ‘Notifications’ section of my profile ? In it, there is no ‘Normal’ setting, whether in Categories or Tags

  5. What are ‘Profile headers’ and ‘User card background’ made for ? And how to eventually set them correctly ?

  6. How to change the posts font ? It’s a challenge to read posts with the more or less ‘Times new Roman’ like one used, with a dark background…

  7. Where has my signature gone ? I have seen countless posts asking to make our own setup visible in our signature as a requirement, and for legitimate reasons… I understand that it might not be necessary in all contexts, but mine simply vanished - it’s not even visible in my profile .

  8. How comes that the posts and threads total don’t match the ones which were displayed in the former phpBB forum ?

  9. What is the ‘Vote’ number displayed under some topic titles for (not all of them, strangely…), and how to eventually use it ?

  10. How comes that the ‘Computer and studio setup’ subforum is buried in the lounge ? :flushed:

  11. in the Preferences, what on earth Enable defer to mark topics unread and Show counts on browser icon options are actually doing ?

  12. I suddenly have seen a lot of new user names, since the transition : obviously, a lot of them have been changed during the platform migration process. So, at the end, who is who ? :crazy_face:

I could add in my gripes the endless scrolling when a topic has several hundred of posts, or the tags too limited (how to combine ‘Cubase 11’ and ‘Feature requests’ ?). Actually, the only true improvement, in my view, is the ability to upload directly images to use them in a post. Sadly, it doesn’t compensate for the overall narrow, messy and unintuitive UI of the whole thing…

Click on the time in the upper right corner of the post you want to link to. The “Share a link” option is highlighted so you just copy that text. Then in your response box you paste it and simply embed the pasted text with the link by clicking on the link icon. It then appears as follows:

Personally, I’m not very happy with this new forum? - #10 by MattiasNYC

I guess your sig got nuked. Just redo it and it’ll appear when I click on your name. It’s fine.

For rhetorical (?) questions why don’t you just make a feature request to move it outside of that sub-section?

Noted, thanks… I’ll try this next time I’ll need it.

OK (more work to do, though…). Actually, I still would have liked any forum reader to have access to immediate data concerning who is posting, among them, the joined date and the number of posts done. It is debatable, of course, but I think it was one of the old phpBB forum strenghts that the new Discourse doesn’t have. Less clicks is better, especially when you have to do so, several times in the same thread… sorry, “topic”.

OK, but where ? there is no dedicated tag for this in the ‘Lounge’ subforum…

Beside this, there are still a lot of things that remain unanswered. Any Steiny crew member or moderator, here ? The main and first one being able to have an access to a FULL user help…

It is by far not be a solution for all the complaints in here, but I found the design of the forum to be much too huge with too much spacing everywhere for me to read. I like more content on the screen. As a result, I have created a (quick and dirty) stylesheet modification that can be used with the Chrome Addon “Stylebot” to modify the theme through the addon when viewing. It’s not perfect, but it works for me. Maybe it helps someone else as well. Here it is:

https://github.com/bzeiss/sf-mod

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I checked this out, and after a bit of putzing around I came up with this–

For people who like to use browser extensions like Stylebot, all that is needed is to change the padding value of the css td (table) tag. The result is less space between entries in the topics lists throughout the forum. (very neatly coded css in Discourse btw)

Copy the css below into the code tab of Stylebot.

td {
  padding-top: 2px;
  padding-bottom: 2px;
}