Feedback

[ben_allison]

There are so many **bleep** here.

Most people **bleep**, I assume, don't know the first thing about web design and development.

My recommendation: a design competition. Mockup a forum view and thread view, winner gets an Apollo or something.

[ben_allison]

35 views and not a single kudo.

[Urinate Forever]

YEAH GOOD IDEA!

[TomVanDeven]

Just make it exactly like before and I'll kiss your mother hard.

[GraphicFuzz]

They need to hire a designer. In some respects, this probably is an improvement (back-end stuff we don't see). But visually... something's not right.

Gotta lose the stock photo 'Rock Concert' background. Seriously lame.

[Shine-ei]

I do have background in it, a lot of background and this design isn't right for this forum, or any really it strains the eyes. 

And why the f.u.c.k should a user have to have a background in something to have an opinion on it??!!? If I did my f.u.c.king job with that mentality I'd be fired. Developers are supposed to create user interfaces that are pleasing to look at and are intuitive so that anyone, even a child could use it ( given that there must be lots of children expected to use this site given all the **bleep** **bleep** **bleep** balls **bleep** **bleep** **bleep** **bleep**)

 You're telling me the only way I have the the right to tell you if a guitar's ugly or not, is if I build guitars?? F.u.ck off man, I don't have time to be making designs for someone else who is getting paid to do so. 

-from someone who has experience in this field  

That came off harsh, but I'm sorry people have a right to **bleep** imo

[macadood]

i dont give a **bleep**'in koodo!

[eti313]

Apollo, huh?

[ben_allison]

Being a designer for 13+ years, and a HC community member for quite a while, I'd love the chance to design the skin for this place, in exchange for some gear... why not? It's win win!

[lefort]

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ben_allison wrote:

... winner gets an Apollo or something.

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..bet it's a DN100, you cheap, old SOBleep

:happy winking smiley face:

[robert 225]

i think Design compition is about the design the billboards , paintings and other things which is manufacturers by most of the companies, designing is a art.

signwriting melbourne

[LaXu]

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Shine-ei wrote:

I do have background in it, a lot of background and this design isn't right for this forum, or any really it strains the eyes. 

And why the f.u.c.k should a user have to have a background in something to have an opinion on it??!!? If I did my f.u.c.king job with that mentality I'd be fired. Developers are supposed to create user interfaces that are pleasing to look at and are intuitive so that anyone, even a child could use it ( given that there must be lots of children expected to use this site given all the **bleep** **bleep** **bleep** balls **bleep** **bleep** **bleep** **bleep**)

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The unfortunate thing is that web development is still a relatively new field. I work as a web developer and see people fail at it for number of reasons:

• Their experience is in print - they may be able to churn out great print material but make them design a website and they are completely lost.
• They aren't keeping their skills up to date. The underlying technology is constantly shifting.
• They have no real experience about user interface design or user experience design.
• They are programmers who can make great code but that translates to "here's the features you requested, implementation crappy but it does everything you asked".
• They are not good programmers or good designers. They just don't have the knowledge to write great code or the visual eye combined with good knowledge of what makes a good user interface. 

Unfortunately I feel that whoever made this forum software is in the last category. The HTML markup on the site is absolutely awful. It is nested really deep for no valid reason, has no common rules for class and id names, the CSS is again super nested. But the worst is that the user interface is a clear case of cramming in the features but not thinking how it could be done in a way that makes it easy to use. The underlying system just doesn't work the way the user would expect and when this was released it was pretty obviously that like the Jive site, this was intended for customer support (remember all that stuff about "solutions"?), not discussion. The visuals are terrible, amateur hour stuff. I'm truly amazed that HC fell into this trap after the same shit happening with the previous Jive site.

Honestly a design competition won't help what is a broken, poorly designed system underneath. The previous VBulletin might be rather old school, have a crappy admin but for the users it worked quite decently and is used on a big majority of boards on the 'net along with phpBB. But nowadays there's lost of forum software that is really nice. Discourse for example is a nice example of a modern forum software.

[baob]

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LaXu wrote:

The unfortunate thing is that web development is still a relatively new field. I work as a web developer and see people fail at it for number of reasons:

• They have no real experience about user interface design or user experience design.
• They are programmers who can make great code but that translates to "here's the features you requested, implementation crappy but it does everything you asked".
• They are not good programmers or good designers. They just don't have the knowledge to write great code or the visual eye combined with good knowledge of what makes a good user interface. 

Unfortunately I feel that whoever made this forum software is in the last category. The HTML markup on the site is absolutely awful. It is nested really deep for no valid reason, has no common rules for class and id names, the CSS is again super nested. But the worst is that the user interface is a clear case of cramming in the features but not thinking how it could be done in a way that makes it easy to use. The underlying system just doesn't work the way the user would expect and when this was released it was pretty obviously that like the Jive site, this was intended for customer support (remember all that stuff about "solutions"?), not discussion.

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+1 !  

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LaXu wrote:

Honestly a design competition won't help what is a broken, poorly designed system underneath.

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 +1 !

[lefort_1]

LaXu,

Thankyou so much for looking under the hood a bit. While I have quite a bit of software experience, none of it is with web-devel related.

Based on your observations, I continue to believe that each Lithium site is little more than a re-skinning of features that were designed for the customer-service field. We've all seen the functionality quirks that lead to that casually-obvious conclusion. That style of coding (a handful of senior developers wrote core classes and functionality, lesser/satellite development groups implement the actual customer sites) tends to create unnecessary layers....we used to see it all the time when we studied our companywide derivation hierarchies at Mentor.

The UI is abominable. Non-intuitive, incredibly inconsistant, and it runs counter to so many of the past UI guidelines. Even Motif, for all it's issues, would be vastly preferrable to this hodgepodge.

Anyway, thanks for giving this mess a look.

Would you recommend a cosmetic makeover, plastic surgery, a new trophy wife, or simply cremate the remains and be done with it?

[LaXu]

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lefort_1 wrote:

LaXu,

Thankyou so much for looking under the hood a bit. While I have quite a bit of software experience, none of it is with web-devel related.

Based on your observations, I continue to believe that each Lithium site is little more than a re-skinning of features that were designed for the customer-service field. We've all seen the functionality quirks that lead to that casually-obvious conclusion. That style of coding (a handful of senior developers wrote core classes and functionality, lesser/satellite development groups implement the actual customer sites) tends to create unnecessary layers....we used to see it all the time when we studied our companywide derivation hierarchies at Mentor.

The UI is abominable. Non-intuitive, incredibly inconsistant, and it runs counter to so many of the past UI guidelines. Even Motif, for all it's issues, would be vastly preferrable to this hodgepodge.

Anyway, thanks for giving this mess a look.

Would you recommend a cosmetic makeover, plastic surgery, a new trophy wife, or simply cremate the remains and be done with it?

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Believe me, I've been where the developers of the forum are right now - a product intended for another purpose released too quickly and bent to fit another client's needs. It's a rough road and hopefully their next version will be much improved.

I tried my hand a bit at CSS improvements, check out this thread: http://www.harmonycentral.com/t5/Feedback/Stylebot-Chrome-stylesheet-to-fix-HC-visuals/m-p/34697775#...

It's not pretty, but at least it's a bit more consistent.

To be honest what I'd like to see HC do is just throw out the forum software - again - and just install a modern forum software. Obviously they weren't happy with VBulletin performance so maybe try something else. Otherwise were left in a situation where significant code changes are needed to get this thing even close to VB, phpBB etc in functionality. That could take a lot of time considering HC hasn't exactly been historically quick to fix things.

[lefort_1]

I agree with you, but I seriously think GC's 'grand vision; of what they want this website to be makes a simple transition back to a vB or php-driven system unfeasible.

They (GC corp) wants

1. all the data-gathering bells and whistles that systems like Lithium claims to have, as well as
2. the 'spammer-stopper' stuff.
3. "Pro-author'd" areas
4. (eventual) Linkage to sales opportunities at GC.
5. hardware/IT resources outsourced (currently to Lithium)

I do not know of a batch of forum software that will give them those items.

Also, as long as the long-term resources dedicated to HC are primarily unpaid volunteers (the Mods) and/or piecework-paid part-timers (Craig and Phil), the under-served nature of HC will persist....a site such as this want simply cannot be run on that thin of a shoestring. Or if they (GC) try, the site will not be responsive to the users' needs. I mean, can you imagine the (eventual) process for getting an enhancement around here? It'll have go from us whiners, to the Mods who will have to sell it to the GC/IT guy who liasons to the Lithium IT guy who will have to re-describe it to a Lithium developer... = disaster, in my experience. Too many people with too little pull in between the Users and the person who can cut a Developer loose on any given issue. It's bad enough right now, when the development isn't finished.

:shoves a finger down his own throat:

:composes self:

In the long run, I predict the look/feel will be some slight modification of what we have here. The mods for GC-targeted functionality will be rolled in, the userbase will see another 50% rollover....then GC will re-purpose the whole thing as their 'dedicated to our customers' website and basically start over. After all the years of promises of 'committment to the users', I think they'll just till us all under and try to get a new crop of user's to grow, using a 'free-account' to everyone who buys anything at GC.

my 2 scent

[lefort_1]

Hey, here's an idea:

Can GC subscribe to a banned-URL listing-service from Lithium? Like, get an update-list of the banned sites once a day, then add their own during the day to keep the site as clean as possible? Then RUN THAT THING in any old forum software they wanted?

Sure, you'd have to 'read a foreigh banned-URL list' but talk about a dead-simple/easy way to get their biggest bang-for-buck.

....nah, makes too much sense... otherwise places like AVG, Avast, etc would be doing the same.

[baob]

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lefort_1 wrote:

 I mean, can you imagine the (eventual) process for getting an enhancement around here? It'll have go from us whiners, to the Mods who will have to sell it to the GC/IT guy who liasons to the Lithium IT guy who will have to re-describe it to a Lithium developer... = disaster, in my experience. Too many people with too little pull in between the Users and the person who can cut a Developer loose on any given issue. It's bad enough right now, when the development isn't finished.

 That's what we're seeing already isn't it ?

Much too long a feedback chain ... recipe for disaster.

[baob]

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lefort_1 wrote:

They (GC corp) wants

1. hardware/IT resources outsourced (currently to Lithium)

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A couple of thought occur to me here.

1) Outsourcing core elements of your business is generally acknowledged to be not a good idea. I know of examples where it's turned out to cost more to get the same as what you had before. You need to get everything covered by contract or you finish up snookered. ("You want a user-friendly site ? 70% surcharge" "Oh you want TESTED software ? Another 90% please")

2) It's generally considered okay to outsource parts of your business that are a commodity, or are peripheral to your business.

Seems to me it's likely that HC is not considered core, it's periperal, which doesn't bode well for it's future. It also seems likely that the contract issue has bitten already. I've seen this quoted as the reason that HC 1.0 reviews are unlikely to surface in the near future, if at all. 

[lefort_1]

This makes me feel like I'm talking to my health insurance company, who has recently outsourced the Health Advice line to ... well ... where everyone sounds like Apu. I am serious. And why should they be concerned about my scrotum-itch when their neice just died from disease-laden bad water?

Well, why should GC be concerned about our bad experience when their bottomline is bathed neck-deep in red-ink?