Forum Upgraded 15th April, Please report any problems here

[Joachim_L]

Yes, everything is looking good. Is it just me, that the font looks much better on a smartphone than on a monitor? I cannot remember whether the font used before looked so "rough" on a monitor.

[AlanPickup]

I have astigmatism and find the new font difficult to read as it is too lightweight on my monitor, if it is on my second monitor which is a TV/monitor - no chance, a medium bodied or heavier font would be better, the the hopes for a spell checker seems to have faded, anyway gives some amusement for mispslet words and malloprpisms

[bor]

Holly molly, first thoughts was that's counterfeit forums - so much different :D

But my eyes hurts with all this whites is there possibilities switch to dark mode?

[Pšenda]

I understand that this is a general trend (unfortunately), but the ratio of information value vs. occupied space is unfortunately still declining.
Unnecessarily small font (especially on tablet/mobile) and at the same time free/white space everywhere, unnecessarily large margins,...

P.S. Line spacing is still not respected depending on the font size (in the topic text and the signature).
Line spacing is still not respected depending on the font size.
Line spacing is still not respected depending on the font size.
Line spacing is still not respected depending on the font size.

Which may correspond to what I've said - the ubiquitous preference for unnecessary white space.

Edit: The forum looks surprisingly good on a mobile phone, thanks to the condensed layout. It's a pity, that a similar mode cannot be selected on the desktop.

[bor]

 

IMO tags according to specific software should be color coded as software icons to better visibility. Only blue badge looks blend and its hard to navigate.

Ex.

[William Overington]

I have just accessed the thread

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/

again so as to add a post, but find that the posts are all squashed to the left and there is a column over to the right with some details about the thread.

Maybe I have unwittingly selected an option, maybe it is a feature, maybe a bug.

Can I get back to the unsquashed version please?

Something else I noticed was that the views count has gone to 2.5k rather than a specific number, which means that I cannot note interest easily anymore.

William

 

[Patrick Connor]

7 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Can I get back to the unsquashed version please?

nope I do not think it is configurable, what screen width (pixels) are you running that this panel is in the way

[big smile]

I like the new clean look, but what's up with the Affinity Logo? It looks very low res. 

[William Overington]

4 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

nope I do not think it is configurable, what screen width (pixels) are you running that this panel is in the way

Well, I'm not sure. It is an 11 inch Hewlett Packard laptop that cost £199. Nothing exotic.

I am enclosing a print screen image.

 

William

[loukash]

8 minutes ago, big smile said:

what's up with the Affinity Logo? It looks very low res. 

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/uploads/monthly_2021_04/affinity-logo.png.b5202d2ddc933c03f314c76e0200257b.png

Looks good to me.

[Patrick Connor]

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Well, I'm not sure. It is an 11 inch Hewlett Packard laptop that cost £199. Nothing exotic.

I have changed it to only appear on threads 4 pages or longer (and not to appear on the mobile version at all)

[Alfred]

14 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

what screen width (pixels) are you running that this panel is in the way

Whenever the panel is present it gets in the way! On my iPad I used to browse (in Safari, if it matters) in landscape mode most of the time, but it’s better in portrait mode now. The sidebar is only displayed when the browser window is wide enough, so in landscape mode the sidebar display actually forces the main content to occupy a narrower space than it does in portrait mode.

[loukash]

@Patrick Connor, on the thread list pages (e.g. forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/53-feedback-for-affinity-designer-on-desktop) – is it possible to add some kind of a badge to every thread which already contains a reply by a staff member?

That's something I've seen already two decades ago on Apple forums (back then: a red Apple logo badge next to every thread title with a staff reply inside), and years ago it's been implemented on my request on discogs.com/forum/recent – clicking on the blue "Staff" badge takes you then directly to the first staff post in the thread. Very useful.

[William Overington]

6 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

I have changed it to only appear on threads 4 pages or longer (and not to appear on the mobile version at all)

Thank you.

Not wishing to appear (churlish?) and ungrateful, the thread to which I referred is already on its third page and so that means that if it is successful and goes into a fourth page then the whole of the thread is going to have a wrecked display for what appears to be no useful purpose.

So is there any reason to have such a (superb diplomat tries to be diplomatic in his choice of adjective) feature at all?

I appreciate that it is Serif's forum so Serif's choices, but I opine that there seems to be no good reason to have that feature enabled at all.

Could you possibly switch it off entirely please?

William

 

[Patrick Connor]

34 minutes ago, loukash said:

is it possible to add some kind of a badge to every thread which already contains a reply by a staff member?

No it is not possible or (in my opinion) desirable. These are not bespoke forums, they are off the shelf with some configuration.

Staff do not comment on those feature request threads normally and so any that happen to have a comment means nothing more or less about those threads than those that don't have a staff comment. Adding a badge would make it look like they had been acknowledged and not having a badge would look like it had not been seen. That is not true and so a badge is very unhelpful (and not possible). I can see how that would be useful in any other forum (bugs, questions, beta) but specifically unhelpful in feature requests.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Patrick Connor said:

Staff do not comment on those feature request threads normally

Ah, my bad: I have chosen a wrong forum example…

2 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

I can see how that would be useful in any other forum (bugs, questions, beta

… and my point was actually this ^

[Patrick Connor]

37 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Could you possibly switch it off entirely please?

I would like to give it more than 24 hours use and four person's feedback before changing our minds on this. I like it 

[thomaso]

8 minutes ago, William Overington said:

So is there any reason to have such a (superb diplomat tries to be diplomatic in his choice of adjective) feature at all?

In particular in your sample forum "Share your work" this feature might be useful to click easily through the image gallery (instead of scrolling through posts & pages). –

@Patrick Connor, unfortunately this feature doesn't work as gallery but displays only those 4 images which are shown already as thumbnails in the sidebar. This behavior feels odd, especially if compared to similar gallery views in other websites where usually all images of a current page get displayed.

For instance this forum's page 5 contains 22 uploaded images – none of them is shown the sidebar. Clicking one of the "Posted Images" does open the gallery view but doesn't display these 22 but only those 4 already previewed and apparently part of the last page of the entire thread.

If I am already within this thread what profit do I really get from this 4 recently posted image previews?
And if I have set my custom forums preference to jump to the first unread post I will see these images within the thread anyway.

[Patrick Connor]

Just now, loukash said:

… and my point was actually this ^

yeah, I do not think it is an option and we are not going to start changing the code ourselves, but if I find it as a configurable option I will turn it on.

[William Overington]

8 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

I would like to give it more than 24 hours use and four person's feedback before changing our minds on this. I like it 

Well, that seems fair. The more people who express a view one way or the other the better.

Could you possibly share our reasons for liking the feature please?

What options do you have over this feature please?

Is it just either on with a page number threshold or off?

Is there any way to make it a user choice please?

William

 

[Alfred]

14 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

I would like to give it more than 24 hours use and four person's feedback before changing our minds on this. I like it 

It would be good to have a choice, but presumably there isn’t a user-configurable option.

[Patrick Connor]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

presumably there isn’t a user-configurable option.

you presume correctly

56 minutes ago, loukash said:

some kind of a badge to every thread which already contains a reply by a staff member?

best I can do is that staff posts can be hilighted in the thread. This is now on as a trial, for example my replies have a grey shadow. 

[loukash]

57 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Could you possibly switch it off entirely please?

22 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

I would like to give it more than 24 hours use and four person's feedback before changing our minds on this. I like it 

I haven't "missed" it before, so I could do well without. But fair enough, let's use it for a week or so first… :)

2 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

staff posts can be hilighted in the thread

Looks good to me!
Definitely useful when quickly scrolling through a thread.

~~~

Another issue I just noticed:

On 4/15/2021 at 2:37 PM, Patrick Connor said:

I have turned OFF "Replace text with emoji"  :) 3 (of 8) these are DTP forums and (8) and :) are important

While I applaud to the riddance of smilies, there is now an issue if I type a "classic" ASCII smiley like the :) above:
At least in MacOS Firefox, it sometimes breaks the arrow keys to navigate here in this text while I'm typing, as well as the Enter key.
I've seen this bug before, probably on line6.com/support/forum/14-community-support which uses the same forum software, albeit an older version.

Eventually when typing more text, it may start to work again though, like now.

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

best I can do is that staff posts can be hilighted in the thread. This is now on as a trial, for example my replies have a grey shadow

We have had some marking within the thread for a long time now, of course. With a red Moderator tag and a staff badge when the window is wide enough, or a red user name when the window is narrow.

But that was a bit subtle for the mobile experience. I like the new gray Moderator tag. Thanks.

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

not an issue, it is now not replacing them, that is what I changed. it does not replace 8)or the option is all or nothing. currently it is nothing

Yeah, I know.

Possibly a Firefox quirk then.

Testing in Safari:  8)    
Huh? I'm still getting smilies!

Also in Safari (11.1.2 on El Capitan), I'm seeing a gray blob where the ♥ would be: