How-To Geek

And I was wondering why I lost a long posting because "the website was not available".

Feel free to post any thoughts on the changes in here.

I'm trying to make things more friendly and readable, but I'm also preparing for some of the additional features that will be added in the future.

Still have a lot of tweaking to do, and I'm going to tackle the front/forum list pages... going to add original poster to the thread list, per your suggestion.

I also changed the logo at the top of the screen to link to the forums homepage, instead of the site homepage.

I think that's more consistent, it's been annoying me for a while.

Hi Geek, two more suggestions:
1. On the page "Latest Discussion on all Forums" it is not easy to navigate to the next page like i.e. on the Vista forum with 1 2 3 ....45 on the bottom of the page
2. On the same latest discussion page a lot of space is taken on the bottom by "Forums - Main Theme". Maybe that should have it's own page especially as more themes will probably be added. would make the Discussion page longer.

One more: the grey area on the top of the page where it says "Started by, Latest reply from" : if the name of the poster was in a different color like e.g. green (especially for treehugger Taybay), it would be more readable. Some of these people have names like product keys. The black and blue is too monotonous. But that is a nit.

I really don't like the whole bar above each post. I feel like it makes it harder to distinguish between who is saying what. There was a flow in the original style, one post after another. Now you have to look at a post, look at the member bar, then see the next post. It's distracting. I'm a big fan of phpbb forums, where there's a sidebar with all the member info, and the post is directly to the right or left of it. What I might suggest is keep the blue/white theme, but use it to alternate the colors of each post to differentiate. I realize you can't switch to phpbb, but you could emulate it, I'm sure.

I'm going to make a few more changes tonight to the theme... then we can put it up to a vote... if everybody hates it, we can roll back to the old theme.

I wouldn't want to roll back necessarily. I like the idea of changing it around, I just think it could be improved. Also, I know this probably isn't next on your priority list, but Lighthouse was talking about changing page colors. If it's possible, could we maybe have a personal option of changing the colors in our personal settings? Just throwing the idea out there, I don't want to throw too much at you at once =P

Honestly, there are two priorities I've got with the changes:

1) Move things around to support the new features coming.
2) Make the forum more easy to use for everybody.

On the second item, I'm trying to improve the navigation... the latest discussion page is definitely a sore spot, in fact the whole forums homepage needs improvement in a bunch of areas.

I definitely want your input on how the forum should look/navigate.

As far as making the design look similar to other forums, here's an example of a PHPBB3 topic:
http://www.phpbb.com/community.....8;t=685705

Here's an example of Ubuntu Forums, which is where I got the idea for styling:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35033

I don't think either one of them are perfect... I want to reduce clutter as much as possible while keeping things functional. I think the phpbb theme is really cluttered, and it has the user information in more than one spot.

Here's an example of a Google Groups thread, which I think is extremely functional and fairly clean looking:
http://groups.google.com/group.....ad4e1201bd

I especially love how you can "Star" topics in Google Groups, similar to gmail... it's just an excellent way to keep track of which threads you are on. That's one of the features I wanted to add to our forum.

Thoughts?