Welcome To The New Forum

[magicfan4life05]

sooo how about we just go back to the old layout and act like this never happened?

[whysoserious]

Can someone direct me to the right place. I can't seem to find some of the forumns I used to frequent like the Media Lounge and the OT Canada Board.

Nevermind, found them once I signed in.

[Posey H8er]

I actually dig this new look. The topics look different and seem to be harder to read because I'm not used to it yet. Other than that the only problems/suggestions I have are putting in the "quick reply," and fixing the quoted messages.

And also the post review. "At least one new post has been made to this topic. You may wish to review your post in light of this."
That may get annoying in game threads.

[evilRyu]

We went from 1 click to submit a post (via quick reply), to potentially 3 clicks (Post New Thread --> Submit --> Submit again if another poster has posted a message). This is way too much clicking for the user.

[NDaATL]

The quotes have to be fixed, as everyone has said. I can't tell where certain quotes end and where the actual post begins.

[Buck You]

Where's the College Admissions thread? Can I create another one?

[dockingsched]

+ i like that the jump to menu at the bottom right now includes all the 4 sports leagues, with the nba at the top. sometimes i forget that the other forums exist or simply don't feel like clicking through several pages.

+ once the quoting feature and the quick reply box are fixed i'm good to go.


post review edit: i just had to post review this post, is there is way to make it optional? during game threads, annoying. at other times, probably a lot more useful.

post review edit: had to review it again.

post review edit 3: review again. its going to be impossible to get a post through.

[Billy]

Major problem: The 79-page "Doctor Who + Torchwood" thread (I don't remember the exact name) has disappeared from the OT Canada board. Where did it go?

The Blazer board is experiencing similar problems. Namely our "Random Ha Picture Thread" and "Hold onto your shorts thread" are missing. It would stink to lose those. We also had a "Anything goes" thread that is AWOL as well. Must be something to do with size? All of those were at least 100+ pages.

[evilRyu]

Yikes, the Raptor boards post count went from well over 1,000,000 to around 200,000. I guess that was inevitable as the database was probably getting a little too big.

[JRG]

PLEASE GO BACK

there is way to much clicking ot get from forums to forums. Used to be on 1 page now you need like 3 clicks to get anywhere. Just inconvenient.

[mini]

I'm sure these points have been mentioned...

I don't like how you can't tell if something is quoted i.e. the bacdground colour is the same for every post.

I also feel like the colour scheme is too 'whitewashed'. It is very bland looking and makes it difficult to differentiate from the various types of posts, stickies and threads.

That's all I've noticed so far. I can't say I like the changes but few people do like change in general. I'm sure it'll grown on me.

Also, why am I a "senior". What a lame title. Couldn't I be a 'gritty vet' or something?

Oh, and I wish we had the quick reply feature back as well as having to click 'submit' twice is really cutting into my valuable time.

[mojomarc]

Major problem: The 79-page "Doctor Who + Torchwood" thread (I don't remember the exact name) has disappeared from the OT Canada board. Where did it go?

The Blazer board is experiencing similar problems. Namely our "Random Ha Picture Thread" and "Hold onto your shorts thread" are missing. It would stink to lose those. We also had a "Anything goes" thread that is AWOL as well. Must be something to do with size? All of those were at least 100+ pages.

Yeah, Billy, but I noticed those were gone when the forum became read-only yesterday morning. I tried searching for them, but alas....

I'm sure this is being worked on (or I'm a complete idiot and can't see them at all), but did we lose the PM buttons and the user comments below the avatars? Is this permanent or are they coming back?

[hard49]

Just horrible and will definitely decrease daily post counts almost immediately.

It is not user friendly and it is kind of ugly...bad combo.

[D'Lo]

I dont like this change. Hopefully you can add more to this, but the way it is right now, (sigh), the only thing I can say is EPIC FAIL!

[magicfan4life05]

Just horrible and will definitely decrease daily post counts almost immediately.

It is not user friendly and it is kind of ugly...bad combo.

ya i kinda agree just look at the general board....very few posts today

[dockingsched]

i also like how announcements are in their own little box, separate from the rest of the topics. usually i skipped over announcements a few times before even noticing them.

[reck0n3r]

Blah. Me no likey.

[Red Vines]

Hate it.

[Windmill]

Besides all the problems already listed there's another thing that bothers me. In the older version, any links (e.g. youtube links, newspaper articles) would open up in a new tab. Now, every link opens up in the same tab which makes it even more annoying. So I can't read the forum and the corresponding article/youtube links at the same time anymore.

[CPops57]

I hate to criticize somebody's hard work, but realgm has earned some ire. This short-sighted redesign feels a lot like a farmer eating his own seed corn —ad impressions seem to be cardinal, not user-experience.

* There's a certain ethos on the web — people agree to view and click on ads in exchange for having a place to check out neat content. When your redesign subjects a visitor to 5 ads above the fold and you have to scroll down to see any content of interest, that's an epic failure, sorry.

Count them. 1,2,3,4,5 ads before you see anything you actually want to. It's off-putting, to say the least.

http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/7532/picture2oc7.png






* Another thing to note in that picture? I realize realgm wants to promote their other sites as well, but when you have THREE separate sets of links to these sites, it's really annoying. Why not just one set of links to these extra sites, but you use that extra bit of whitespace by removing those extra links to highlight that one set of links a bit more?

* That slideshow thing is useless and distracting and much too big, sorry.

* On the forums themselves, there are some animated links that are distracting. The lesson to be learned here is that moving stuff on the web is bad unless you're on youtube or playing a flash game.

* One place I'm surprised you don't have ads is at the bottom of the screen, after the content. It's not the highest clicking zone, but it's someplace people accept ads with almost no ire.

* The general aesthetic itself (the light blue) isn't a major issue. You can get used to that over time.

* My advice about ads? Realgm is big enough to build their own ad system. Reduce the number of ads shown on the screen, increase the price per impression. Market it as a premium ad place. When you don't have inventory, use google ads as a fallback. Relatively easy and everybody wins.

* To find something to give praise about — there seems to be a few neat new things with the new control panel and hopefully the new search works. (I haven't tested it yet to be fair).


PS: Realgm needs an information architect & serious reorganization in the worst way. You have hundreds of thousands of pages of content that isn't organized very well. I'd seriously like to offer my services to perform a full usability analysis & redesign. Regardless of whether you'd hire me or not, please try and have somebody outside of your organization take a crack at reorganizing your site. You're too close to what you've been been doing to effectively work on this.


***** As I tried to post this post I noticed another usability flaw. (more than one actually but this one really made me mad. It won't post with images larger than 400 pixels. There is a css property max-width and hacks to get it working in IE6 that is a much better solution to ensuring layout consistency. *****