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Noel Carboni
Noel Carboni
Legend
May 10, 2012
Question

Is The New Forum Design In Transition?

  • May 10, 2012
  • 3 replies
  • 3554 views

I've got to say, the forum just feels broken as it is.

And I'm not just talking about little formatting glitches needing cleaning up.  I'm talking about the fairly significant number of features that have gone missing, such as listing who a reply is to, listing the post and points counts, etc.

More broken than it did.

My question is this: 

Is what we see what we're going to get, or are we in transition to something better?

-Noel

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    B
    Bob_Peters
    Inspiring
    May 11, 2012

    This whole forum complex has been in a state of transition since it was first inflicted on users.  For every improvement we get at least one step backwards.

    And now we have light blud on light gray, light gray on slightly darker gray, etc, etc.  I an't see that any real thought has been put into this New and Improved "design".

    Yes, I'm complaining!

    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Jacob BuggeCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 10, 2012

    A new meaning of WYSIWYG.

    D
    Dave Merchant
    Legend
    May 10, 2012

    Yes, and yes!

    The skin you're looking at now is the overall design that Adobe have decided to keep, but the team developing it are still releasing updates to fix issues and alter the feature set available.

    Noel Carboni
    Noel CarboniAuthor
    Legend
    May 10, 2012

    Dave Merchant wrote:

    Yes, and yes!

    Thanks, Dave - I guess.  It's the terminology that bothers me I think...  This is not just a "re-skin".

    "Skin" implies colors, shapes, sizes - but not functionality.

    This recent change is therefore more than a "re-skin" of the old forum.  I have to say, I don't mind the colors and layout - it's usable.  And I understand the need for modernization, though I didn't see a real need to change the look before getting the functionality working better.

    We seem to have entered the era of UI simplification.  Not long ago someone somewhere came up with the term "cognitive overload", which always seemed like a backhanded way of saying "most folks are too stupid to deal with a lot of stuff on the screen at once", and so everyone began simplifying their user interfaces.  Hell, Microsoft even stopped making their Windows OS actually do windows.  Kind of a slap in the face to people who yearn for more and bigger monitors just so they can get more stuff up there for use "at a glance".

    I urge everyone to think of the derivation of Albert Einstein's immortal comment:

    "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler."

    -Noel

    D
    Dave Merchant
    Legend
    May 11, 2012

    It's not the best term, I agree - to be technical what you're seeing is a 'theme'. Jive is a template-driven CMS just like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc. so there are two aspects to a theme - the CSS controls the visual layout of the pages, and the template files control what the underlying HTML says. Adobe have re-written both parts. For example there's a Jive variable  for the Report button, and in the page template it results in a plain hyperlink immediately after your avatar and before the text of your message; which the CSS then hoofs over to the right and colors gray. If something is removed from the template (such as the variable for the reply number) all the CSS in the world won't bring it back.

    In theory the template could send everything and the CSS could just hide the bits Adobe don't want, but aside from security issues the goal is to reduce the amount of data sent to the browser.

    Noel Carboni wrote:

    "Skin" implies colors, shapes, sizes - but not functionality.

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