Doesn't seem worse to me. I poked at it with a stick a bit and it didn't bite me, so it's all green from my end. (Well, it's actually beige, but whatever.)

Good job, ファブリス! I had to do something like this 15 years or so ago with phpBB, and it was a royal pain in the butt. (And soon after, I handed the whole thing over to someone else and ran fleeing into the night.) So I admire your ability to not run fleeing into the night and instead turn out a very good design.

Your hairstyle is more modern on the test forum, also the layout style probably is supposed to be more modern. When you are trying to improve (yes, it could need a bit more contrast) try to shift the focus back from the avatar, stars, etc. on the left to the posts themselves. Especially on short posts the area on the left just looks too big.

I like the layout of the existing forum (calm and pleasant) and I am quite confident that the new forum's layout will turn out good again.

Did you already consider to bring in stuff like links (RtK, Wiki, ...) and adds?

I was surprised to see a rating button and a reputation field for the user, although you were clearly not in favour of this some time ago. Is my understanding correct that you do not rate the post but you increase the reputation of the posting user? Initially I thought that these were separate issues (different words - different issues).

What I like very much is that the test forum opens a new window when you follow a link. Especially when you are searching for specific content in the current forum it is tedious to alway having to go back. On top in the search result area it is even not always possible as your search results do vanish in certain cases (so you have to repeat the search).

Matthias Wrote:What I like very much is that the test forum opens a new window when you follow a link. Especially when you are searching for specific content in the current forum it is tedious to alway having to go back. On top in the search result area it is even not always possible as your search results do vanish in certain cases (so you have to repeat the search).

Huh? I'm not seeing this (and I'd hate it if anything other than middle-clicking opened a new tab).

It certainly does NOT suck and, like others, I am very thankful for your efforts to provide RevTK users with the best possible learning experience. I just provided some feedback as requested in case it might help.
From my point of view, I can as happily use the new design of the forum as I did the previous one. Same functionalities, as a whole. Just need to get used to the different layout, I guess.

[ファブリス]

I was a bit cranky yesterday

Matthias Wrote:try to shift the focus back from the avatar, stars, etc. on the left to the posts themselves.

I have removed the stars today as it didn't seem to have much of a purpose. The number of stars is fairly arbitrary, and we can tell the important roles (mods, super mods, admin) by the title, and name colour. As for post count we'll see that later but we can also add ranks if we want to. So that's one small thing that reduces clutter.

Another thing I could do is just keep the max avatar dimensions to 60x60.

Not sure what else I can do right now. Keep in mind this is the desktop view. Responsive style will probably use "horizontal" view for the avatar & author info (ie. stacked vertically with the posts). You can preview this by going in Profile > Edit Options and un-check "Display posts in classic mode" (classic being, authors on the left side).

Matthias Wrote:I was surprised to see a rating button and a reputation field for the user, although you were clearly not in favour of this some time ago

I think this is popular and I am in favor of it now I think it makes sense on this forum to be able to show appreciation for some great resources as well as general helpfulness from our members. However I'm not sure we need something very complex for it, particularly getting notified for upvotes and the like.

So right now I like the basic MyBB "rate" feature. A rate is a show of appreciation right? And each user has a kind of guestbook, if you go in profile and click Details. Example. So you can rate a post, and yes it counts towards reputation. The receiver can also see what posts are rated.

I guess we will see how it pans out and I can always install a more complex plugin if necessary. I like the basic rate system because it's out of the way, but the reputation makes the forum a bit more dynamic, and gives a little more status besides post count.

...

The styles have been updated a little bit if you hit F5 / Refresh.

"User CP" has been renamed to "Profile".

I increased the topic list font size. Problem there is the font in Windows appears much lighter than on Ubuntu (different fotn smoothing).. and I'l trying to avoid making it all bold by default.

The header bars have been reverted to a strong dark colour for contrast.

[ファブリス]

ps: something I'd really like to do is to give more personality to the forum.

I feel like it's generic looking and doesn't suggest it's about Japanese... at the risk of being cheesy.. maybe it would be good to make the theme more japanese related?

Pretty much the only think that says "Japanese" is the kanji logo.. maybe the header needs an image.

Any ideas welcome.

(maybe a nice Japanese motif in the background, something not too dense)

Thanks for trying! And yes, it is an improvement.

Restricting the avatar size seems a good idea. Currently some are big (e.g. gdaxeman), some are small (e.g. your) and some have none. The various boxe sizes do not make it more beautiful.

"horizontal" makes the post range even wider and I think it is already a bit too wide. My personal preference would be narrower. There was a short time here when the post width was wide, and when you reduced it again (to the current status) the increased reader friendlyness was very well noticeable.

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"Japanese": Do you have to go from "Reviewing the Kanji" to Koohii? That is a loss (also for searching outsiders) which you can not compensate with an image. If RtK is lost, what about alternative titels with some relation to Japan/Japanese (Kanji Koohii, ...)

Often even nice images overload a website, and more often the image itself is a question of personal taste. E.g. some like the japaneselevelup image, others don't

ファブリス Wrote:(maybe a nice Japanese motif in the background, something not too dense)

http://subtlepatterns.com/?s=Japan
One of those could work if you blend them with the yellow background color. I kind of like the Arches one.

Anyone know of other good, subtle Japanese-style patterns?

[ファブリス]

@Matthias You think the current layout (here) is too wide? The thing about the last update is that it is much simplified. you can pretty much make the site elastic with one or two css rules with an extension like Stylish, or likewise you can reduce the "max-width" if you like (specifically: #container { max-width: 1000px; } ). Problem is on desktop everybody wants something different. I do agree with you though the lines of text are a bit long but since nobody complained it was left as it is.

editNote that this forum doesn't resize down very well. The new one will resize down.. therefore it will be smaller in a smaller window.

The container is 1100px... Tell you what I'll design the layout to fit in 1024px, coupled with the larger font size I hink it's more comfortable to read.

According to Awstats on the server the top search terms are japanese , japan , kanji , koohii . I don't see "reviewing" anywhere in there. The URL also is forum.koohii.com.. and since I changed the identity of RevTK for the same reason to "Kanji Koohii"... it seems logical to simply call this forum "koohii forum".

Japaneselevelup header is a bit much.

I think a subtle Japanese paper pattern such as Bokunesou linked (thanks!) will work great!

No, the test one is too wide - here it is fine or even optimal. It was just temporarily too wide here and that illustrated very well the importance of the width.

I would not search for koohii. That asks for some pre-knowledge. But I would also look for Japanese, (Japan), Kanji - that is why I suggest to have one of them in the name. Kanji would be my preference. [I liked Reviewing the Kanji as it shows the ties to Remembering the Kanji]

There is a logo in front of koohii and together they are Kanji Koohii. For dumb people like me, outsiders or newcomers it might help to write in romaji kanji in front of koohii.


Japanese atmosphere could be brought in also by adds (e.g. Mirai with Mt Fuji). Also the click on RtK book picture could help to show the forum's "personality" (and history).

Decided to reply as I really appreciate the existence of this forum! I appreciate the amount of work you do here.

I like the new forum don't have that much to complain. Besides reading the most recent posts I'd be interested in a more personalized kind of search. Be able to have more criteria I mean. To be honest right now when I search something in the forum I do this in google. mysearch site:forum.koohii.com. Not a core feature that would be important right now but maybe you can consider it someday.

Is it possible to search for the highest rated posts? I think it might be useful for new people joining in. It would give a filter in their initial browse

[ファブリス]

Matthias Wrote:I would not search for koohii.

True, those are people who don't use the url auto complete and search a website name. However my implicit point was that forums are basically great fodder for search engines through the post content, and the site name is of barely any influence besides having some keywords in the title, and pages. As far as I know!

I don't know what you mean by the content width because the post width here is 840px and it's like 841px on the preview forum. Are you talking about line spacing, font size? Something else? Everything is a little bigger on the new forum, I think it makes sense to accomodate higher desktop resolution. And it will scale down with the responsive styles (todo). That said I have very few input atm about the main font size (14px Verdana vs 13px here). This can change.

@kassia

Thank you. The search should work better now, and I have succesfully searched for Japanese keywords. That said, Google will always be better.. But what do you mean by criteria? Keep in mind MyBB has a advanced search .. it's not super obvious the way they designed the header. Click the search link let me know if something is missing , you can test search for any threads/posts from a month ago or so (it's an old database backup so it only lacks the last 3 weeks or so of posts).

I wonder if I should perhaps just remove the "easy" search bar to make that more obvious?

You gave me an idea.. you're right.. a way to show the latest "most rated" posts or something along those lines would make the forum more dynamic, perhaps a small list in the index sidebar. I will look for a plugin. Atm there are simple forum stats, but those will be fairly rigid since they are "since forum birth".

ファブリス Wrote:However my implicit point was that forums are basically great fodder for search engines through the post content, and the site name is of barely any influence besides having some keywords in the title, and pages. As far as I know!

I was always under the impression that the title was kinda important? If you google for example "kanji forum" it lists koohii first, but it probably wouldn't without having "kanji" in the title and/or description.

ファブリス Wrote:I don't know what you mean by the content width because the post width here is 840px and it's like 841px on the preview forum. Are you talking about line spacing, font size? Something else? Everything is a little bigger on the new forum, I think it makes sense to accomodate higher desktop resolution. And it will scale down with the responsive styles (todo). That said I have very few input atm about the main font size (14px Verdana vs 13px here). This can change.

The font size is good, it matches other well-designed websites. I think he's talking about this:

http://imgur.com/40xzlN9

Above is this forum, below is the new one. Notice how much wider the new one is, even with the same font size (with zoom in this one since the default is too small.)

ファブリス Wrote:the post width here is 840px and it's like 841px on the preview forum

So technically this is equal.

I think gdaxeman ilustrated it well. Let me write in cm, what I see on IE without changing anything on my settings:
Here I see 14,5 cm text and on the preview forum 21 [both classic].
And on Firefox it is 18,5 vs. 22. (Too big letter display anyway. Perhaps if I would scale this down it would get similar to IE.)

The screen width is 34,5cm.

Think this is independent of the font size (although again I prefer the smaller one)

The problem with the font size is that it depends on your screen size, how far you are from it, the size of the majority of the other websites you visit, your sight, and some other stuff. Since that varies too much it can be a good rule of thumb to use the same font size as the most visited text-based websites in the world, such as Facebook (which uses 14px, Arial on Windows for the main posts).

[ファブリス]

Update Hit F5 / Refresh and let me know if the content centers now? max-width set to 1024px (not definitive, just debugging this). I think the MyBB stylesheet using a % width on the main content wrapper is wonky in IE...

Yes - on both IE and Firefox. Thanks!

ファブリス Wrote:@kassia

Thank you. The search should work better now, and I have succesfully searched for Japanese keywords. That said, Google will always be better.. But what do you mean by criteria? Keep in mind MyBB has a advanced search .. it's not super obvious the way they designed the header. Click the search link let me know if something is missing , you can test search for any threads/posts from a month ago or so (it's an old database backup so it only lacks the last 3 weeks or so of posts).

I wonder if I should perhaps just remove the "easy" search bar to make that more obvious?

You gave me an idea.. you're right.. a way to show the latest "most rated" posts or something along those lines would make the forum more dynamic, perhaps a small list in the index sidebar. I will look for a plugin. Atm there are simple forum stats, but those will be fairly rigid since they are "since forum birth".

Didn't realize that this kind of search existed, sorry about that! Missed the icon The easy search bar is always useful and people don't actually have to search much to do a search. If they want to do a more advanced search they just use the other functionality. That's my opinion at least.

edit: To make it more obvious I think it might be a good idea to have a text along the lines: Didn't find what you're looking for? Add more criteria/Go to search screen. Something like that. Don't exactly know how difficult is to do and is more a enhancement than a needed functionality. Long gone my days playing around with phpBB

I think the current stats+most rated posts are more than enough. The most rated posts theorically would be the ones that people found more useful.

[ファブリス]

The re-re-design (sigh) is 80% done.

Please try out the preview forum on your mobile device and let me know if these pages work well:

- index page
- forum page / categories
- topic pages
- new reply

You should be able to browse all the discussions on a mobile device width down to 480px !

The fonts size probably need to be reduced? It's hard for me to test with the emulator. Let me know what elements are too large or small on mobile, and if you can make a screenshot all the better

PS: refresh / reload the page fully with f5 / ctrl-R if everything looks broken.

On desktop the post non-quote content font is a little large, it makes long posts take up more unnecessary space.

Rendering looks OK to me on chrome.

I'm not a fan of style of the new-new top page though. It feels off kilter to me. The titles being so far to the left with icons all the way on the right seems backwards. But that could just be because nobody likes change and everybody hates every redesign. I could grow to love it.

[ファブリス]

@wareya
Post content font size is just one pixel higher I think, from 13px to 14px. It looks dense enough to me on desktop. Could you post a screenshot?

@kerosan41
Do you mean the index page with the Recent topics? Or do you find the sidebar to the right less familiar? I'm not set on the column order. I have to admit I like the sidebar first.. however I felt like the topic list was off center.. I'm sure people can get used to it, but maybe it would be better to have Categories first to the left, on desktop.

Guess I'll need more opinions on this.. either way we can change this easily. I have gotten used to it but I do feel like it's less obvious that the categories are there. Come to think of it you could argue it is more "usable" to have the sidebar and its links before the main content...

[ファブリス]

Here is a quick mockup of the reversed column order... I think it feels better?

http://imgur.com/lJSYhLL

http://i.imgur.com/3LfCqJB.png

Have: left (14px)
Want: right (13px) or even one pixel further smaller (12px)