also, there is no faint line delineating the signatures, it will now be really difficult to spot the fake sigs…
I see one.
Chrome 13 for Win XP is what I’m presently checking with. (And Chrome reports no updates). And to clarify - word-wrap in the published post is fine. I’m talking about word-wrap in the quick reply (textarea) box. 
@Rudy - I do see the signature delineating line. Login also works fine for me.
Just a couple of minor issues:
Can we have underlines back on links please?
And “mark this forum read” working?
And some clear differentiation between threads with new replies, and those without?
Are you using your browser’s zoom function? They are not huge with the browser zoom set to it’s default setting.
Links in posts have an icon next to them.
The way that unread posts are signified has changed, it now uses envelope icons to denote if you have read a thread or not. If you scroll down to the bottom you’ll find the legend.
The “Mark Forum Read” feature works for me, what browser are you using?
Really? I don’t see an icon. Also, why abandon the standard underlines? Related to my next comment, it’s easier to scan blocks of text for established conventions than looking for a little icon.
Would it hurt to also have the bold/normal text combo reapplied? My mind blocks out the icons in the left column when I’m looking at the thread titles.
Nothing happens when I click it. Using Chrome on both Windows and Ubuntu. The “Mark forums read” link works (but annoyingly redirects to the forum list page).
Unread posts - I’m not getting any ‘red’ icons for posts I’ve not read, they are all the grey ‘Contains no unread posts’.
Having bold links for unread stuff seems more logical IMO.
I don’t see any icons either, but relying on images to give users usability information is a bad idea, has always been a bad idea. Go ahead and augment with an icon, if you don’t think users mind more HTTP requests, but never ever rely on it.
Similarly, links are relying on colour to denote a link.
This is like, Nielsen 101 here. And icons I’ve only turned back on (meaning all the little images) in this browser because the silly alt text is long and there’s no room for it, so it just stacks on top of other text.
For the status button, why not “now online”? And “offline” and “invisible” and whatnot? The username comes right before. The verbosity is just horrid.
On the old forums I’ve spent about half my time with images disabled partially because it seemed to increase loading speed and the servers were having problems, but the alt text there was an issue too. Some of the icons I had no idea what they meant (various colours of envelopes really don’t intuitively tell me anything) but they had pretty good alt text so I like those (there have been new replies to this thread and the such). For some reason the orange-red envelope icon on reddit has always been very clear in its meaning (and images off it’s “messages” though that text doesn’t seem to highlight in any way when there are new ones?), but that may be because there are only two states, while these forums have many different states.
I’m not too desperate on all this though. I am expecting most of these usability/accessibility issues to get fixed over time, since so far the developers haven’t done anything except add SitePoint style to the default vBull4 stuff.
So I expect text to stop overlapping, links to be underlined, hover/focus styles to be more obvious than they are now, and icons to be nothing more than the decoration they should be. If it takes some time, that’s fine. I can wait.
First though - it looks good. Sure, it will take a little while to learn where everything is and have it become automatic like it was before, but that’s just a case of getting used to the new design.
Second thought - it’s too wide. It doesn’t fit on a 1024px screen (IE8). Sorry for being negative, but that isn’t acceptable, we’re supposed to be the good guys in web design, and if we’re trying to advocate good practice on a site that doesn’t fit onto such a common screen size, we’re setting ourselves up for a whole lot of trouble. Not to mention that we’re making it hard for people to use the site, and I’m finding it a pain already.
Third thought - agree with Salathe that links show up as blue with no underline and no icon (again, in IE8), and that is unhelpful.
I just checked in Chrome just to see if it was a browser thing, the icons on links. Nothing.
SpacePhoenix, what browser and settings are you using??
Second question, is there a mobile version of the forums?
Yes! I agree with this.
Can we go back to width: 100%; for the forums, please?
EDIT: Also, can the bold style be removed from the thread link after it is read? Relying on images for this is, well as those above have said, not very usable.
Question: does vBull4 have some kind of default class or something that’s put on threads who’ve had an update since you last visited? Or was that a plugin that has to be built-in? The thing that made unread new threads bold and “read” stuff normal font-weight?
My bad. The icon was being added by a GreaseMonkey script. I’ve had the script installed for so long that I’d forgot that the icon was not the standard for vBulletin:blush:
To all who is struggleing with width and font size
Add this to your user-define style sheet. What the code does should be fairly self-explanatory. I didn’t want to change much of the design itself, so I only changed font size and line height on the post contents. The commented section is if you prefer a maximum width for your text. Sorry for using another fixed font size, but this is hopefully just a quick fix until SitePoint improves the design. This will make it easier for staff to spot fake signatures, too
#vbulletin_html {
width: 100% ! important;
}
/*
#vbulletin_html ol.posts {
max-width: 800px ! important;
margin: 0 auto ! important;
}
*/
#vbulletin_html .postrow .title, #vbulletin_html .postrow .content {
font-size: 16px ! important;
line-height: 150% ! important;
}
SitePoint
First of all, I really like the feel of the new design. It’s really slick and attractive, and I do think the visual feel is better than on the old design. Some of the features are also nice, such as the autosave (to me, at least, but then again, my computer runs Crysis on ‘very high’, so performance shouldn’t be an issue). I have a few gripes, though:
[list][]First of all, the really bad one: html {width:1079px}. I mean, seriously? Use fixed width if you must, but did you really have to set the width to a seemingly arbitrary number, with the only apparent reason being to mock 1024x768 users?
[]Text size. I don’t know if it’s just the design, but it does seem smaller than before. As my CSS above shows, it wouldn’t be that hard to fix this, at least for post contents.
[*]The side bar and list of topics I’d written in with replies. I know this is a plug-in which isn’t available yet, but I really, really miss it![/list]
I hope at least the two first issues is something you’ll work out quickly. Thank you!
I know this will get resolved with time, but currently all incoming links from Google searches are presented with a crappy error page.
It’s actually not too bad if I crank the page zoom down to shrink the fonts around 30%. Looking forward to see what the devs do with this skin.
forget i mentioned anything
i was using ie6 and obviously no one cares about that any more
The forum home page for me shows the SitePoint Courses forum first… with all the sub forums under it, it seems to be a waste of space… can this be removed, moved to the bottom, hide subforums, etc.?
If you click on the carat (^) to the right of the last post text, it will shrink that and will keep it that way.