EDIT: when initially editing this post the text was all run together in the text entry box. After posting it's all spread out?
I appreciate all site/forum improvements made.
Thank You.
Please excuse any editing issues with this post as strange things are happening on my end.
Firefox 115.20.0esr (64-bit) -- Win 7 Pro_x64 -- Desktop -- logged IN. Plugins all disabled/paused.
While typing in the "Quick Reply box" the {enter} key does not drop cursor down to next line? Also {backspace} and {spacebar} keys are sometimes lagged or just don't work on first press. If I copy the above text and paste it into Notepad I see all the spaces and {enter} presses. It seems like message editing/entry is completely "server side" and any server lag effects message entry?
Sorry can't explain things better or if it's all issues on my end.
Also: I haven't logged in for a while and had to reset PW. No problem, understandable.
The email address is not displayed, just "". I understand not displaying the whole address for security/SPAM reasons but just looks like something went wrong. Perhaps H*****@Y****.com (or whatever) instead of just "". Thanks.
I definitely understand needing to update the site for SEO. Here are a few suggestions (putting on my software developer hat):
1) Shrink the verticle height of the sticky header or make it vertically smaller on scroll, like the header on Google Search. It takes up a good amount of space on smaller screens/windows.
2) Use a neutral gray (RGB are the same value) to match the other gray colors on the site Instead of the current yellowish gray.
3) Use a CSS backdrop filter blur to make content behind the sticky header less distracting
4) Use a darker background on the new hover menus. It's fairly jarring to be on a darkish theme website and suddenly on hover a white dialog appears.
5) Clicking the What's New header brings you to an error page if you are not logged in.
Fred, if you find these types of suggestions helpful, feel free to DM me. I can dive in deeper if I know the direction you are trying to go in. This site has taught me so much over the years. I don't mind providing some free suggestions in return.
I could immediately tell there were beneath-the-hood changes beyond the new Header: everything is so snappy now! Great work!
It's gonna take a minute to get used to FM no longer being one of the last bastions of the old "information dense, drop shadows and rounded edges" era of web design that I prefer to the modern "everything is big and flat" era, but time marches on.
I agree with what @DWOfPaul said, and I have one nitpick of my own to add: I think it feels a bit off-balance or "unfinished" that the pull-down for Buy & Sell doesn't have a sub-header (with the red underscore) like the Forum and What's New ones. Even though there's only one category on that one, so the sub-header would just be the words "Buy & Sell" repeated, I think that'd make visual sense.
Also, I know you haven't made many changes to the styling of the forums themselves with this update, but I'm gonna use this thread to bring up again the one I really want to see: Search Results page has a too-narrow fixed width that, particularly on Buy & Sell with the mandatory prefixes, can show too few characters of the thread titles. Just letting that stretch like the main forum pages would be a really nice QoL improvement.
Oh, also, what if the black bar got a good bit skinnier but the aperture logo hung down below it, so that the aperture logo wouldn't have to shrink as much (which, I presume, is the reason the bar has so much neutral space currently)? I'm pretty sure I've seen sites use transparency to pull that off.
In the "latest posts" lists on the right side, I used to be able to tell which items I had visited in the past. IIRC, visited items were a different shade of yellow/orange than unvisited items. Now all the items in those lists are white, and there doesn't seem to be any way for me to see which ones I have visited in the past.
This might not be a big deal, but the button was more pronounced and not flat looking like on this new version. Also there was a countdown on the previous version:
This might not be a big deal, but the button was more pronounced and not flat looking like on this new version. Also there was a countdown on the previous version:
This problem occurs in the Mobile version on my Android phone but not on my Windows laptop, don't recall seeing this problem yesterday.
When I'm in Buy & Sell Photo Gear I cannot change the search filters. When I enter Buy & Sell it remembers the last search filter criteria I used (good!!) but when I change the search filter from WTB to FS and click "Apply Filter" I still get WTB search results.
The redesigns are helpful, and I appreciate that they are subtle. But why they don't seem to have addressed a small annoyance that has persisted over the past several years - I am asked to log in almost every time when returning to the FM website. Is that intentional? Why not use a persistent cookie to save the hassle?
