I am not too impressed with how the forum looks and behave:
Lots of wasted space due to the left pane (categories, Tags,…) but can be disabled with the 3 horizontal line icon.
Number of character per line in the post went from about 153 on old forum to 103 or so. Which means more scrolling up or down.
I have already made mention of the blue background color which phase off within seconds causing the post to loose its focus.
Spanning through the post is more of a headache. At the time of writing, this post already has 67 comments, and my main grievance is trying to keep track of the comment I am focusing on.
When trying to go to the end of the post, I may not see the last comment (depending on zoom level) as the page has the “New & Unread Topics”.
Scrolling up and down the post is really tedious.
Page Up/Down keys kind of work, same with the mouse wheel. It just takes a lots of scrolling and it is not pin point accurate.
I wish it was possible to have the post updating as soon has the right slider is moved up or down. Right now, I must select the slider and randomly pick a post number or date, then release it in hope I will find what I need.
It would be more efficient and user friendly to get the post update in realtime to match the reply/comment indicated by the slider as it is being slid.
actually, if I zoom in to 310 % and up, then the slider is replaced with a post count, and if I click on it, a page extension (banner, overlay or whatever it is…) brings up the slider, which I can then slide with a lot of diligence, but the post can be updated to track the reply/comment indicated by the slider. Still user experience isn’t great.
I agree with Apollo that there are some significant growing pains re: navigation here. It seems far less intuitive to dive into a particular topic of interest. Instead, we are offered a fire-hose of topics, which is much more reminiscent of the “whats new” in the Xenoforum. I imagine with time, Tags will help settle this a bit.
…which might be why it doesn’t bother me, as that’s been my default view on the old forum for some time now. But the now-default Categories view should be closer to “list the various subforums and let you pick which one you want to browse.”
I don’t seem to be able to edit the Tags of one of my topics… For example
I’d like to add “Guide” as a tag to it, now that the tag exists… but I can’t… when I edit the post, it seems like I should be able to click the + sign next to the tags… but it doesn’t do anything
I am able to edit my topic’s tags as I want… maybe you aren’t because the topic has been moved to Resources which is a moderated cathegory?
Also, apparently we can only have up to 5 tags per topic.
I would like to also know what’s the approach we should have about tagging and resources… should we put in CORE and SCALE both if it applies to the two of them (ie because it’s hardware or ZFS related)?
Also… why is there a Resource when we have a Resources section? Is the former to be intended as resource candidate?
Finally, I might sound like a broken disk but I am concerned about the International section being the only “filter” for posts in other languages: it will quickly become a big pot of posts writte in different languages, actually making it hard for users (who might not have the best english skills) to find comprehensive content. Also, it’s a considerable step back from the old forum since we could track the relevant cathegory, but this way now we can’t even make use of discourse allegedly improved tracking.
@dan hinted at sub cathegories, could we have those? I’m mainly concerned by Italian since I know for a fact a few users leveraged that category on the XenForo.
This post keeps growing… @kris, in the end was the signatures plugin enabled or is it on stand by for now?
Thanks you two. I realize this has caused a bit of churn for our long time forum users. I apologize for that and ask that folks be patient while we dial things in over the coming weeks. Much like TrueNAS is open source, this can be a collaborative effort on how we setup the forums for long-term usability. I’m happy to listen to any suggestions and implement where they make sense for the wider group.
One recurrent complaint is the wasted space, and I think one reason for that is the change to use larger-than-default avatars in the topic lists, like this:
Compare that to the default:
Returning to the default sizes, or limiting the number shown, would help with this.
