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New Contributor
Surfinguitar69
Posts: 3
Registered: ‎01-19-2013

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

What happened to the gear reviews? Every time this site gets changed it becomes much worse to use.  

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Valued Contributor
Lou Speed's Alt
Posts: 794
Registered: ‎01-17-2013

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design


skr3ddy wrote:

Okay; here's the deal...

 

The biggest problems with this forum are down to the fact that it shares the same CSS as the rest of the HC site.

 

So we get the dead, empty 1.3" VU meter graphic at the top, then the 1.25" header under that featuring an unnecessarily large "Harmony Central/make better music" logo and a long, vertical blue LED graphic.


Edit: plenty of other forums have big logos up top.  I guess that empty extra VU meter border is just bugging the **bleep** out of me.

 

Then we get 20% of the screen on the left and 20% on the right wasted space.

Here's the thing: with a FORUM, space is precious; you don't want dead-space borders, ESPECIALLY on the sides.  Every proper forum has zero wasted space with maybe 1/4" borders on the sides.  Because you want the thread titles to be long as they need to be without wrapping.


Simple, simple solution, so simple it's stupid that it hasn't already been done:

HAVE SOMEBODY MAKE A NEW CSS FOR THE FORUM.  And make a shrunken version of the HC logo that only takes 1/4" vertical space.  Lose all the dead space on top and sides, and let the forum take up the whole screen. 

 

And BTW, nobody wants message tags; this seems to be a blatant attempt at creating a search-engine honeypot but is useless to the actual users of the forum. 


Yes, yes, a million times yes!  It's ridiculous to have everything squeezed into the middle with all this empty space.  It doesn't look cool.  It doesn't look hip or modern or trendy.  It looks stupid and it interferes with the site.

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New Contributor
Surfinguitar69
Posts: 3
Registered: ‎01-19-2013

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

Also; since the latest change I somehow lost my old screen name that I had before the turn of the century!  

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Community Manager
Phil O'Keefe
Posts: 51,367
Registered: ‎07-13-2005

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

FOR ANYONE WHO HAS LOST THEIR SCREEN NAME and / or CAN'T LOG IN:

Please PM either Craig or myself with:

 

The user name you want to recover

Your current user name

The email you want to use for verification

The original email you used to sign up (if you can't provide it, mention that in the PM)

 

 

**********

"It shouldn't be expected that people are necessarily doing what they appear to be doing on records."

- Sir George Martin, All You Need Is Ears

"The music business will be revitalized by musicians, not the labels or Live Nation. When the musicians decide to put music first, instead of money, the public will flock to the fruits and the scene will be healthy again."

- Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter
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Community Manager
Phil O'Keefe
Posts: 51,367
Registered: ‎07-13-2005

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design


Surfinguitar69 wrote:

What happened to the gear reviews? Every time this site gets changed it becomes much worse to use.  


 

We knew that wasn't going to be in place the way we want it at launch, but it should be up within a couple of weeks, and I suspect it's going to be significantly changed from the way it was on HC 2.0. In fact, if I have any say in how it turns out (and I'm not really sure if I do or not to be honest, since most of my recommendations seem to have been ignored or discounted), it will be essentially the way it was in all respects before the HC 2.0 switchover. It's one of the best parts about HC IMHO, and damnit, I want it back too!

 

**********

"It shouldn't be expected that people are necessarily doing what they appear to be doing on records."

- Sir George Martin, All You Need Is Ears

"The music business will be revitalized by musicians, not the labels or Live Nation. When the musicians decide to put music first, instead of money, the public will flock to the fruits and the scene will be healthy again."

- Bob Lefsetz, The Lefsetz Letter
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Super Contributor
skibob
Posts: 1,499
Registered: ‎04-06-2004

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

Clicking on links in posts should open a new window or tab.

My Rig
Geek Rig 1-14-13 photo geekrigXI_zpsd13b22e1.jpgMy avatar- photo rig_zps5506af2a.jpg

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Super Contributor
Posts: 351
Registered: ‎03-17-2011

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

What do those little balloons on the side of the topic list mean. One is red, one is grey but which one means I have not read the topic since last update? Just confusing.

Plus, why is each topic title crammed into this little narroe colomn and then split over several rows when I have a bloody wide screen here.

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Respected Contributor
lefort_1
Posts: 3,983
Registered: ‎08-25-2001

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

[ Edited ]

skibob wrote:

Clicking on links in posts should open a new window or tab.



+1

 

Blind Doc Jones' Pickles....Cures What Ails Ya'
Good Deals with: Catalinbread, BR4D/MojoHand (via his retailers), sh333 (teh debbil)


Not around much any more
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Respected Contributor
lefort_1
Posts: 3,983
Registered: ‎08-25-2001

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

[ Edited ]

the_big_e wrote:

What do those little balloons on the side of the topic list mean. One is red, one is grey but which one means I have not read the topic since last update? Just confusing.



Those are the topic balloons...I have yet to see a "key" where they are all displayed and there meanings are explained. You can cursor-hover over them and they will tell you kinda what they mean.

there IS some redundancy between the (grey balloon w/white "reflection") and the (bolding of title text). Both indicate there are new comments to a topic.

To my eyes, there is little difference btwn the solid grey balloon and the grey balloon w/white reflection.

In fact, until you mentioned the balloons, I really hadn't considered them worth looking into.

!!! One hopeful aspect to the hovering thing is, they can display text. Maybe this is a good sign for getting hover-over-title-reveals-content functionality? plz?

 

 

Blind Doc Jones' Pickles....Cures What Ails Ya'
Good Deals with: Catalinbread, BR4D/MojoHand (via his retailers), sh333 (teh debbil)


Not around much any more
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Super Contributor
peskypesky
Posts: 1,804
Registered: ‎08-20-2009

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

The new design

**bleep** SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But if this

is the best you

can manage well

then what can 

we do but

try to live with

this godawful

abortion of a forum?

 

The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.
Lou Reed
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Super Contributor
Pine Apple Slim
Posts: 8,318
Registered: ‎01-07-2008

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

31 pages of feedback.
And it still sucks.
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New Contributor
MudFlaps
Posts: 2
Registered: ‎01-17-2013

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

Thanks Phil. With Winter NAMM 2013 coming up this week, it will be great if we could all find the NAMM stuff right from the front home page, instead of having to search and hunt and peck. And like I've said in the past, I like your photos and Jon's photos and Craig's coverage, but just give me the official press releases and the official photos from the companies. I don't even watch the videos, as I simply prefer to read the PRs. Thanks!
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Contributor
caustic69
Posts: 56
Registered: ‎02-05-2010

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

[ Edited ]

I am disappointed once again. When did happen last? Like a year or so ago that HC was revamped and everyone hated it and many left.

Well, then I discovered the HC forums and I enjoyed that. I virtually never went to the regular HC site. Only the HC forums and most often the "for Sale" section.

 

Now it is all jacked up again, I don't like this new format at all. It is not as user friendly at all. The old search function was much better because you set it up for what i think was called "single search" or soemthing like that and specify where you wanted to search.

 

For instance I would often go and do a search in the electric guitar section of the "for sale" section to see if a particular brand and/or model was for sale by any of the forum members.

I just tried to do that now and there seemed to be no way to set up a specific search. Like say if I wanted to look for a Peavey Wolfgang for sale or trade, there is no way to look just in the "for sale" section and bypass the rest of the site. If I do a search for that guitar, it pulls in reviews and other kinds of stuff I am not interested in. This is incredibly frustrating.

 

Why has the site been changed once again for the worse?

You can never have enough gear!



Good deals with: Vidiot72, michaellambson, tdepaul1313, ju5t1n20
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Super Contributor
GCDEF
Posts: 29,193
Registered: ‎05-31-2001

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

Where is robot girl?  She started the thread, assumed a secret identity and went into hiding.  I'm doubting her sincerity.

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Valued Contributor
RoadRanger
Posts: 9,726
Registered: ‎02-12-2009

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

[ Edited ]

GCDEF wrote:

Where is robot girl?  She started the thread, assumed a secret identity and went into hiding.  I'm doubting her sincerity.


Yah, having a "one post and screw" community manager start this thread is just not confidence inspiring - what were they smoking? :facepalm:

"We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us" - Walt Kelly

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Super Contributor
McCain
Posts: 1,142
Registered: ‎12-18-2009

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

How long has it been since the change-over..a week?..seems like a week.., and they stll haven't darkened the text to where it's halfway readable.  If You can't at least do THAT then forget about it and shut the place down please because this is worse than death. :smileyhappy: 

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Super Contributor
tape
Posts: 10,786
Registered: ‎07-29-2008

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

As much as I *don't* want to be "one of those people", the new format feels like it was designed for people with bottle end glasses and 800x600 monitors. the width is fixed at 660 pixels, black on white, with few seperators both in threads and outside. The width of the subject collumn is atrocious, and it's straining to to and read a subject who's line jumps every 3 or 4 words on a 21" monitor or larger.

Inside the threads, it's a bit better, but the contrast is still straining. At least it's much wider.Code/image embedds in the quick reply doesn't work, and the text box is also eye-strainingly small (made for people with 1990s monitors again) . It can be scaled down and uselessly to the right, but not to the left where there's all that unused space. Normal reply doesn't work behind a lot of proxies, whereas the last one did.

I used to be in graphic design and web design, and my employers would not have allowed me to design fixed tables as narrow as the thread subject column. I woudl have been asked to make them liquid, and scale as the user scaled the width of their browser. At present, it's too narrow, the truncation too aggressive and the white background makes things doubly hard to read. Adjusting font size doesn't fix the problem. Hopefully the table sizes can be fixed.
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Super Contributor
Danhedonia
Posts: 1,569
Registered: ‎05-30-2005

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

I'm sure robot.girl is a bucket account for some developers.  Odd that the login hasn't been used in 48 hours during a very intensive launch.

a

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Valued Contributor
RoadRanger
Posts: 9,726
Registered: ‎02-12-2009

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design


Danhedonia wrote:

I'm sure robot.girl is a bucket account for some developers.  Odd that the login hasn't been used in 48 hours during a very intensive launch.


A dummy account I'm sure where the PM's are never read - set up so they don't have to be subjected to our whining. Guess they think we are kinda stoopid :evilgrin:.

"We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us" - Walt Kelly

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Super Contributor
Danhedonia
Posts: 1,569
Registered: ‎05-30-2005

Re: We Want to Hear What You Think About the New Design

Dear Robot.Girl, I was going to forward you this message, but thought maybe the whole dev team might want to read it.  I received it this morning (excite! I am to hook up SOON .... ) after nearly a decade on the old site where I was never once hit on, even by famous hoyden DeviEver.  THANK YOU FOR HELPING TO IMPROVE MY SOCIAL LIFE!

"

Hello, my name is precious,i am a young beautiful girl with a lovely heart . i saw your profile today and like to be your friend,You can write to me direct in my email( preciousibrahima51@hotmail.com ) so that i will send more of my photo to you and tell you more about me.( preciousibrahima51@hotmail.com ) :heart:

a

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