Did the Forums get a make over?

[Vulpoid]

I want to make sure it is not my machine.
Was there a recent change to layout, bullet points..etc...?
I used to be able to see if there were new posts in topics I had contributed to by a graphic difference in the bullet to the left of the topic.
They are different now.
Is this a real thing or did I change some setting client side?
Thank you for any corroboration!
 

[AboveTheChemist]

Yep, there was a forum overhaul yesterday, so it's not just you.

[TheZag]

Just as i figure out how those chat bubbles mean if there are new posts and if i have replied to a topic.  Now there are blue dots and stars and blank spaces.......

[Marshal_General]

It looks different on my phone.

[Outrider_01]

Not a fan of the upgrade, but you can change the settings on your phone to be similar to the old style.  Upper right corner, left of the tripple stacked verticle lines, there is a slide button.  Tap it, a screen pop ups with two options, top is for the mobile format.  Hit save, you are done.

[KauaiJim]

Is there any way to turn off the silly large pop up menu at the bottom of the screen on mobile (iPhone)?  The one that shows ("Forums, Unread, Notifications, Messages, More").  The slider button Outrider_01 refers too brings up a 'customize layout' menu with only a save option already check marked and green - nothing to choose.  

 

I'm finding this pop-up menu at the bottom taking up 1/5 of my screen is a bit much.  It makes reading actual forum content feel like I'm trying to read from a teleprompter.  Screen space on mobile is already very limited by the encroachment of Safari menus at the top and bottom.  This additional space taker is like having a perma-advertisement on the screen.

 

Thanks.

 

(Guess I should have gotten the bigger phone after all...)

 

[srmalloy]

I'm finding that the revamp feels like a significant hindrance compared to the previous version. Outrider's suggestion to turn on the mobile format just puts the space-wasting pop-up menu at the bottom that KauaiJim complains about. Going up to the 'hamburger' icon in the browser's header and selecting the 'desktop site' option changes it, though. Although I noticed that the 'mark forum read' button, now conveniently located at the extreme bottom of the page, so you have to scroll all the way down even if you decided from the threads you can see at the top that you don't want to read any of the new messages, disappears completely if you switch from the mobile to desktop view,leaving you with no way to mark the forum read without switching back to the mobile view...and then scrolling all the way to the bottom where it's been moved to.

 

The quote boxes, if the quote is only a line or two, show six lines of wasted empty space above an 'expand' button that does nothing except (for the one-line quote boxes) cause the 'expand' button to disappear, leaving blank space in the quote box, although if you switch from the mobile to desktop view, this issue disappears, and does not come back if you then return to the mobile view (but it's inconvenient to have to do this on every page just to fix the formatting).

 

The change to the 'jump to new content' icon makes it smaller and harder to tap with my finger -- and I'm using a 10" tablet; I can only imagine how much harder it is for someone using a smartphone with a quarter of the screen area.

 

The big grey boxes heading each post in the mobile view are both visually discordant against the rest of the page and perceptually feel as if they're taking up more space than the left-side user frame in the desktop view they replace, and at least to me creates the feeling of a full stop between posts -- the individual posts feel like they're completely separate entities, not part of a single message thread.

 

The server also makes its own decision as to which page to serve you -- if you're using a mobile browser, load a subforum page, and tell your browser that you want the desktop site instead, the server will give you the desktop site for the subforum topic list -- but it knows you're using a mobile browser, and, by God, every single page you load from the links on that subforum page will be the mobile version.

 

On the positive side, the inter-posting bars indicating the size of a significant gap between postings creates a visible indicator that a thread has been necro'd, and the 'unread content begins here' bar is more visible.

 

Update: The mobile view of a subforum list, when you scroll all the way down to the 'mark forum read' button and tap it, no longer asks for confirmation; it just marks the forum read.

Edited March 15, 2021 by srmalloy

[TemporalVileTerror]

PHP Boards this ain't, it seems.  I'm not sure how much freedom and control the Homecoming Team have over the Invision Community forum package deal.  The developers of the forum software may have bundled important security or efficiency upgrades with this new UI/UX, leaving the Homecoming Team to decide between the two.

Of course, if there's no significant improvement in the back-end of this version, then I'd recommend an immediate rollback to the previous version.  Otherwise it's just pointlessly infuriating users.

[Clave Dark 5]

I don't really see any appreciable diff, but I don't use it on my phone.

[KauaiJim]

I'm not sure what counts as appreciable but this is what I have now:

 

 

The top and bottom gray Safari bars will retract but the dark blue forum menu bar never goes away.  No setting removes it (that I can find), including setting Safari to request full websites instead of mobile.  Not a big deal - I only use mobile when I'm at work or out and about.  What TemporalVileTerror said makes sense and did not occur to me at the time of my prior post.  I'll just live with it.

 

I do think whomever is doing coding for the Invision Community should try to keep in mind that not everyone has a tablet-sized mobile phone -and- that menu is both unnecessary and much larger than it needs to be even if it were necessary (imo).  😁