Quark Forums

On the new forum - good, bad or just plain ugly?

I'm 50/50 at the moment. It's wider on my screen, so that's good. But so far, it seems, the only way I can do line returns and paragraph breaks is to actually type the tags myself! That's not good. Having to type a less-than symbol then br then a greater-than symbol for every return, and twice for a para break) is a pain. Where's the WYSIWYG editor?

Then the latest posts lists is a little less user friendly - but I suspect I'll get used to that.

Found a few bits that either don't work or simply upset the place a bit too.

However it's still much better than Adobe's! I still can't figure why 'they' didn't embed a phpBB forum though - in my opinion that's a superb freebie forum option!

Good luck all ... enjoy typing those tags! Unless I'm missing something ...

Greg

Ah ... look ... in Firefox (Mac) I've got a 'proper' WYSIWYG text editor. No manual tags required!

In Safari (Mac) I haven't got the editor. That'll be a bug then guys. Looks to me like the editor is the TinyMCE job - I've had mixed results with that and Safari. There are lots of other editors available, whenever I've run a board I've popped several editor options in and allowed the user to choose which one they use.

Good luck!

Greg 

and the votes from the Scottish jury are - a bit cheesy

Have I missed something, or has the 'posts since you last visited' feature gone? I can read 'posts you have not read' but that isn't what I want. Also this view doesn't tell me which forum the post is from.

For instance, I don't use Interactive Designer or Dynamic Publishing (whatever that is....) so I don't want to bother clicking on threads in those forums. Now, I can't tell where a post is.

Perhaps I can change a setting somewhere....

And yes, I'm going to have to use Firefox, which is a pain as I usually just have the one browser running.

Being the old fart I am, I'm not a fan of change. But this is an improvement over the old forums.

It's ok. The text is too small. How do I enlarge It? 

I'm not getting email updates!

And I'm sure I had a lot more posts than that to my credit!

Well, for my part being an "old farth" does not mean I do not welcome changes. It is only fair to say that we will all prefer certain thing better with this forum and wish that all thta we liked about the last one would be present here as well. But thta would only be possible if we were living in Utopia.

Her is my list of "faults" I transmitted to the forum administrator:

1. I wish for a way to mark very posts in a forum as read.
2. Would like to see the board take the whole width of my web browser. I paid good money for a wide screen display and hate having all that real-estate go to waste.
   
3. The new server speed is not consistent.
4. Too much "vertical" real-estate is wasted when we browse the content of a forum. Rows are too high.
5.  Even more "horizontal" is wasted when browsing a forum since the right side is not getting used.
6. Isn't there anything that could be done to re-link all those "board-to-board" redirection. I mean, you took the stuff from 1 database to pour it into another. Those link are specified by using what, post ID? There is got to be a way to relink those. If that was a Filemaker Db I'd be able to do this in an hour.
7. Private Message notification. Could we we a popup warning us of these?
8. Changing the sort order returns a "Page Not Found" error. (Was not able to reproduce this)
9. Threaded view produces "Page Not Found" error.
10. Links to oher website should open in a new tab or a new window.
11. Any reason why polls are no longer accepted/supported?
12. Any way we can get the "Bread Crumbs" further down th page, like just below the "Rating", "Email Subscription", "Change View" button. This would tie in much more with the last version of the forum.
13. "Previous" and "Next" button points to a "Page Not Found" error.

That said I do like some of the new features al well:

1. Forum subscriptions
2. Having the ability to hide forum that bears no interest to me
3. The WYSIWYG editor makes poting a lot easier.
4. We can now see form reading each other's posts who is currently online without having to go the Forums home.

I say we give them a bit of time to iron the bugs out and/or maybe implement new feature...

 

Until then, happy posting !

 I have email subscription enabled but haven't received any emails today. And I am on the correct work account, email address is correct.

 

Anyone else? 

Scripting_Ace:

1. I wish for a way to mark very posts in a forum as read.

 

Guess I was wrong, there is a way but it is hidden way deep into theis new UI.

1. Browse any given forum and move to the bottom of the page
   
2. Click on the "More Option" button.
3. There is the "Mark All Read" button.

It had to be somewhere, this was just unheard of

Humm... But I do get noticed of my own posts... Not sure I am that senile yet!  

New smiley's thats a plus but how do you get them in the text? and now i see what you mean about the return with safari

 You need to set your content editor (Edit profile -> Site Options) to either "Standard" or "Enhenced". After this you will see the smiley face in the editor buttons. Clicking on it will open the smiley window from which you can select the one you want.

Easy enough?

 

Hope this helps! 

 But not on Safari - no editor at all there. Annoys me when things like this aren't tested on all browsers.

 Generally not impressed by this remake - preferred the old board. Though to be fair some things on this one are better, more are changes for the sake of them, to my mind, and some are horrible (the unread posts link rather than the posts since last visit one). And why steal so much screen area with the avatar and user name column? That could be half the width! Hey ho.

I read all the comments here about being able to use the width of your browser view? My forums allow that, and i guess there may be some people who like that? BUT, this is a graphic arts and publishing technology venue. Thus many may know... The laws of typography are that shorter lines are easier to read. That ragged right margins read better than justified, smaller type is harder to read, etc. Thus, most should actually have a better reading experience with shorter lines horizontally, not longer. This small text is quite small for a forum for sure, it's a bit painful. I would have stayed with phpBB and upgraded to 3.01 myself. I think the forum looks OK, I'm sure that Quark admins had reasons to change it.