Waste of space

[prowla]

Great work in getting the new site up!

However, there seems to be an awful lot of wasted space on the pages; this seems to be the fashion at the moment, but the net effect is that the amount of real content which is displayed is reduced.

It'd be good if the next revision could have the requirement to efficiently display the content itself as the overriding mantra.

(Thanks again for runnign the site and please treat this as feedback)

[ped]

Got an example?

With search results for example you can switch to ‘condensed’ which is what I do. 

FWIW we can’t do anything about much of the formatting and style, it’s just how the new software is, and we have to use it. 

Youll get used to it in no time. 

[prowla]

Well - it's a matter of how much scrolling over how much empty space you have to do to get to where you want to be, for example on the main forum index page.

And then when you get into a thread (eg. this one); if you zoom out in your browser, so the text is tiny, you can see maybe 3 posts (and I've !).

Other sites have gone through this and the result has been to make them almost unusable (eg. HUKD, and MSE); I guess the web toolkits/frameworks define it.

 

 

 

[prowla]

If I go into a forum or a thread, the top 1/3rd - 1/2 of the window is taken up by layout.

[charic]

Once the announcement expires the top will take up a little less space

[discreet]

1 hour ago, charic said:

Once the announcement expires the top will take up a little less space

Maybe a different layout could be incorporated in a theme option? It certainly does have a lot of white space through it from a typographer's point of view.

 

[prowla]

By way of illustration; here's a shot from this forum, having scrolled down past the header suff, which shows 13 items (and that's zoomed out to make it slightly smaller!):

And here's one from another forum, again scrolled down past the header stuff, which shows 17 (ie. 30% more) in the same screen area (without zoom); it contains the same details and also has a bar of links down the left-hand side.

I would say that the 2nd one lets me see more and get to where I want to be more efficiently, but is still a logical & uncluttered display.

 

 

 

[charic]

I would say the second one looks like a mess!

[ped]

Ditto!

@prowla what you must understand is that we don’t design the actual software. Moving from an old version to this one made by the same people caused enough issues - can you imagine if we tried to import it all to a totally different system? We looked at a few and all agreed this was the best anyway. 

[Muppet]

I get on much better with the new layout - the display is cleaner and the fonts seems to be much easier on the eye, though that could be my age! I'm happy with less clutter meaning fewer threads per page but everyone is different I guess.

[Rikki_Sixx]

Personally I think that spacing things out a bit to make things more readable is a very fair trade. The other example is cramped and messy - much harder to find interesting content. The new-look Basschat may show a little less on the screen at once, but I can find things of interest very easily. 

The new theme looks great, good job Ped & co!

[nightsun]

The age old problem is that these things are subjective.  Also change is hard, change management is even harder.  My subjective opinion is that the design is cleaner, clearer and easier to read

[prowla]

Yes, it is subjective; that's for sure.

I wasn't trying to suggest this site should look exactly like the other one or should be torn up and re-implemented into a different system, no-siree!, but rather I was trying to illustrate that the excessive padding and oversizing of decorations is reducing the actual information being presented.

And I'm on a 1920x1080 display. (Maybe that's sooo last year and the developers of these tools/frameworks have graduated up to 4k ones?)

I really do appreciate the work done and I get the freshness of the style; I'd just like to see it tweaked to focus on the content, which should be doable without compromising the overall style.

[clivem]

11 hours ago, ped said:

We looked at a few and all agreed this was the best anyway. 

@ped, would you mind me asking what you felt were the advantages with Invision, compared to vBulletin?

Had a quick look back at the forum tonight to see if things have settled down.... I'm seeing errors that I've never seen in any web browser before.... I've no idea what Railgun is, maybe your techs know?

 

[charic]

Railgun is something designed to make the site quicker. It's apparently got a glitch in the config which will be on my radar tomorrow!

[SpondonBassed]

22 hours ago, prowla said:

By way of illustration; here's a shot from this forum, having scrolled down past the header suff, which shows 13 items (and that's zoomed out to make it slightly smaller!):

And here's one from another forum, again scrolled down past the header stuff, which shows 17 (ie. 30% more) in the same screen area (without zoom); it contains the same details and also has a bar of links down the left-hand side.

I would say that the 2nd one lets me see more and get to where I want to be more efficiently, but is still a logical & uncluttered display.

 

 

 

The first view is less cluttered.  Just from where I am looking you understand.  You expect logic in BC?  No wonder you're uncomfortable.

[SpondonBassed]

I had to do four separate captcha tests to post the above!  After the first two I was bounced back to find no reply as I had submitted.  I hit Submit Reply a second time, did the second two and the reply got published.

I don't like that at all.

Edit; This posted with no impediment.

Edited November 14, 2017 by SpondonBassed
Clarification

[charic]

18 minutes ago, SpondonBassed said:

I had to do four separate captcha tests to post the above!  After the first two I was bounced back to find no reply as I had submitted.  I hit Submit Reply a second time, did the second two and the reply got published.

I don't like that at all.

Edit; This posted with no impediment.

For some reason our new security system thought you we're acting maliciously, taken care of

[SpondonBassed]

37 minutes ago, charic said:

For some reason our new security system thought you we're acting maliciously, taken care of

But you can see how furry and cuddly I am just by looking over there <<<

Heeheehee.  You got a giggle because your system recognised how bad an actor I am.

[clivem]

Guys, this is getting silly.... More times than not, this new site doesn't even load.... Even when it does, it's so SLOW....

 

[Grangur]

FWIW SBL Academy has been running on this new site software since I joined it about 2 years back. Yes, IMHO there does seem to be a lot of wasted space compared the the older version we were running. This is more apparent when you're viewing it on a phone and you feel there are fewer items on the screen and there is more scrolling needed.

That said, software updates are less about look and more about site security and compatibility with new OS software, so like it or not, the old version will stop being supported by the suppliers and will come to a stage of not working at all on some OSs.

Regrettably we have to move with the times.

...And I STILL can't "Like" anything!  (I used all my allocation up by going silly on a thread yesterday) 

[ped]

The old software stopped being supported in 2014

[chris_b]

My preference would be to display more lines of content per page and space everything out less.

[prowla]

6 hours ago, chris_b said:

My preference would be to display more lines of content per page and space everything out less.

Yep - that's the gist of it!

[barkin]

6 hours ago, chris_b said:

My preference would be to display more lines of content per page and space everything out less.

Yup...me too. I see lots of wasted space and tiny text (viewing almost exclusively on mobile devices)

[Grangur]

6 minutes ago, barkin said:

Yup...me too. I see lots of wasted space and tiny text (viewing almost exclusively on mobile devices)

Don't forget with iOS being on both phones and computers the site is now the same site on mobile and computer. So if you use a bigger font to suit the mobile interface it would probably be massive on the computer screen. 

Besides, this is probably fixed in the software and the BC mods won't have a lot of control on this. If they did then changing the font would cause creators of some sites to fall into having issues of spacing of fonts causing graphics problems. I'm sure it's all a fine balance to get it all looking right.