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Ladies and Gentlemen...

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Tom Coates

23:18 / 28.03.04

Welcome to the Barbelith Rainbow! A whole new look for 2004 and a bit, and something that has occupied pretty much every single moment of my weekend life for the last month. As you will probably notice, it is a pretty enormous shift, and there are bugs around the place. In fact not only are there bugs, there are stinkingly enormous ones, and they're bloody roaming the halls looking for someone to chow down on. All I can say is that if I didn't at least try and launch the damn thing, then I was never ever going to finish it. I'm going to stay up for fifteen minutes to try and fiddle with anything obvious that's borked, and then I'm off to bed. Good luck. Don't break it!

rising and revolving

23:53 / 28.03.04

As a relative newbie, let me throw a vote in for the new look. I like it a lot.

That, and much appreciation for what you've done here - I've been doing the 'net thang for many years now, and I've been a member of lots of fora, discussion groups, newsgroups, and so forth. Barbelith has some of the best discussion and most intelligent community I've come across, ever. Nice work!

PatrickMM

01:46 / 29.03.04

It looks great, completely unique from any other message boards out there. The only thing I don't like is the absence of the top three topics in each forum, but that's not a biggie. All the pretty colors make up for it.

Keith, like a scientist

02:21 / 29.03.04

oooh, purty design, tom. nice one! i love the new minimalism. i would have to agree with the missing of the top three topics, though...that always was nice...but, no biggie! change is good!

Mazarine

03:20 / 29.03.04

This is not a bug, per se, but would it be possible to get the drop-down menu back for forum hopping? If not, I'll cope, and do so quietly.

The Strobe

04:12 / 29.03.04

At the top of the index page, the number of members is displayed in white. On a white background. Is this intentional?

Ariadne

04:59 / 29.03.04

One plea - can you make moderation tasks, or 'jobs', stand out in bold when I log on? (PMs too - if they don't already, I haven't had one yet).

I'm just worried because when I first arrived it took me a moment to see there were mod tasks to do.

Lionheart

05:50 / 29.03.04

Can you make the time and date appear on a background other than white? Or, better yet, replace the white with grey. Just a suggestion.

Jub

06:16 / 29.03.04

Looks good Tom. It's first thing, so maybe I am being dense but how're people going to flick between formuns directly - ie without going back to the main menu each time?

Is the drop down menu (like Mazarine said) such a bad thing?

Grey Area

06:35 / 29.03.04

Lookin' funky. I like.

Can I just try to make the case for the top three threads indicator thing-a-ma-bob though? In the past, I've gone and read threads in fora that I wouldn't normally venture into, based on the thread title being displayed on the front page. This might be true for others as well, I don't know.

Also, can the same colour separation scheme that's used in-thread to help differentiate between the individual posts also be used in the forum index? The way threads are listed in one solid block of colour doesn't make reading the list, or finding one particular thread, any easier.

But apart from these two niggles, I like this new look a lot, although I will miss the old design's intellectual, gentlemen's club feel.

Jack The Bodiless

07:03 / 29.03.04

Christ, that scared the shit out of me. I thought my eyes were broken.

I don't like it. But this is no reflection of the worth of the new design, merely another indicator that I'm an old man who hates and fears change.

I'll be fine in a few hours/days. Bloody kids...

Smoothly

07:12 / 29.03.04

I'd echo the plea for the top three topics on the frontpage, for the reasons outlined by...um...I can't see who now..... So it seems I also miss being able to see the end of the thread on the reply page.
Also, the text area is now left-aligned on my browser (both IE and Firefox) instead of centred. Not that this is a problem, but just seems to highlight the impression that there could be 30% more Barbelith. Which in turn makes me wonder: Why is it as narrow as it is?

C.Elseware

07:17 / 29.03.04

Maybe if you got more sleep jack...

The new design is pretty good. I miss the HTML anchors with the message ID in (that clicking on added #2345798435 to the end of the URL, so when I hit reload 6 hours later I can find where I was in the thread.

Better still a set bookmark option in each thread, so that you can hit a link by the last message you read, and next time you open that thread it jumps to the message you left the mark by.

Although that may be a bit of a pipe dream if you're sick of working on it (for a while) then it ain't a high priority. Also 4000 users having up to 16000 marks (one per thread) means 64000000 units of storage required...

C.Elseware

07:44 / 29.03.04

CORRECTION: The date/time text on the left now serves that purpose.

40%

07:51 / 29.03.04

maybe I am being dense but how're people going to flick between formuns directly - ie without going back to the main menu each time?

Well clearly I've been dense, because I wasn't aware you could do that previously. So I won't miss it

I like the new reply screen generally (looks very professional), but having the preview in its own separate box as before would be good.

Olulabelle

08:35 / 29.03.04

This isn't a bug, but it's a relevant issue for this thread I think.

Human Being said, in the conversation thread about the re-design: Actually not sure about the two grey bars at the top and the bottom. Kinda suggests, these are the boring, functional ones, the colourful ones in the middle are where the interesting stuff happens. Which makes sense for policy & help and maybe gathering, but having creation in grey seems kinda inappropriate.

I totally agree about Creation being grey, it isn't a functional section of the site, and people already don't seem to post there much. Having it grey won't encourage people to get more involved with the Forum, it's likely they'll get less involved.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:39 / 29.03.04

Only tried it on IE and Mozilla so far... seems (to the limited play I've had with it) to work the same on both. Amyone with more tech fu than me know if there's any issues browserwise? Is that a sensible question to ask? (It just occurred to me, but I know fuck all about computers, so if it's really dumb, everyone ignore me.)

I'm kind of liking it. (Bear in mind I fucking hated the yellow/grey design when it first happened... then when it vanished a few hours ago I was like WHAT THE FUCK???)

Betcha in a fortnight I won't remember the yellow.

Olulabelle

10:56 / 29.03.04

Stoatie, it's all cool so far on Safari too.

Grey Area

10:58 / 29.03.04

Opera 7 is working fine...the front page especially looks very nice in fullscreen mode.

Spatula Clarke

11:04 / 29.03.04

The 'click to return' link that appears once you've edited a post takes you back to the thread's first page, even if the post you've edited was on the second or third.

There's a similar issue with PMs - 'click to return' there always takes you to your inbox.

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

11:24 / 29.03.04

On the front page "barbelith has...." and "the newest member...." appear to be largely invisible to me, after said text.

at the scarwash

11:24 / 29.03.04

Wow, Mr. Coates. Way suave, sir. One of the most beautifully functional websites I've ever seen. Thank you for the hard work, as usual.

Tom Coates

11:48 / 29.03.04

If you're having trouble with text-colours and layouts, can I ask you to go to http://www.barbelith.com/main.css and refresh the page before coming back to the main site. You should find that the whole thing looks a little better.

Seth

11:58 / 29.03.04

Heh. Instead of having Moderation Actions I now have Jobs to do.

It said *job.*

Reminds me of all those Bible classes when I was a kid, turning to Job and giggling for ages.

sleazenation

12:01 / 29.03.04

Outside of bug-busting, today certainly seems like its had less posting...

A fall of geckos

12:11 / 29.03.04

Hi there -
It works fine viewed through Firefox. Great design - almost hypnotically colourful. The newest member area at the top of the main screen was showing a blank space till I repeatedly refreshed, but everything seems to be working and shiny now.

FinderWolf

15:34 / 29.03.04

My only concern/complaint is: I want to see the top 3 thread things under each topic again!

Otherwise, unique & lovely!

Spatula Clarke

15:59 / 29.03.04

Guys, I don't want to sound like an arse and stamp all over the enthusiasm, but could we try and keep this thread for reporting bugs and broken functionality/display problems? There a thread with requests for additional functionality here and ones for general discussion of likes/dislikes in Conversation and Art, Fashion & Design.

Spatula Clarke

23:42 / 29.03.04

Just noticed one. I relpied to the Random Q&A thread in Conversation and when the board tried to take me back to the thread, it actually gave me a blank thread page - all the headers were present, but the rest of the contents (posts, user names, etc.) were missing. That was happening on the previous board, too, so I'm guessing it might be a problem with the thread's size. One thing that is new is that it gave the thread's page links twice, one set of links directly under the other.

Baz Auckland

03:21 / 30.03.04

Not much of a bug, but in the preview topic screen, the word 'User:' appears at the end of the last line, with no user name, and not as a seperate section as in the preview post screen...

Baz Auckland

00:50 / 31.03.04

The HTML italic and bold tags don't seem to work in the Film forum... at least in the preview screen. I didn't leave them in when I posted...

grant

19:36 / 31.03.04

Both E. Randy and I have noticed triplicate topics in the Music Forum. I was running a search before starting a topic on Bonnie Prince Billy, and I think I found four or five triplicate topics, then approved a deletion request from Mr. Dupre for another, unrelated one. The ones I looked at all *seemed* to have been started in 2001 (maybe 2002).

I don't often do searches in Music, and not often for terms as broad as Will Oldham's career makes necessary (he's recorded under at least five different band names).

But still -- it's a new thing to me, and I just noticed it now, and was wondering if the new design might have "unfixed" things that got fixed when we first switched over to Cal's software and got lots of duplicate topics.

Spatula Clarke

19:56 / 31.03.04

Just to add to grant's post, we cleaned Music of all clone threads just after we made the last software move, and at the time we thought they were a consequence of that move.

I just got a pile of MySQL errors when trying to go to FTV&T and noticed a typo on the board error message - 'The fourm you requested could not be found.'

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:35 / 03.04.04

I'm really liking the new look board. The thing I've noticed however is that if you preview a post then at the bottom it does rather run into the top of where you write the post. Some space needed there perhaps?

deja_vroom

21:22 / 03.04.04

Unfortunately, some fora's color schemes make my eyes bleed.

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