Testers needed over at test.lfgss.com

Hmm - finding the serif text in the posts rather odd - I presume there is some reason for it being serif but it just seems a bit out of place compared to all the other text..

Improved readability.

It takes a while to get used to, but it really does make it a nicer experience.

As a side point, I wonder whether the perceived authority of text in a good font actually will affect the quality of the posts that people make.

The "trending" button does nothing, not enough going on?

It does nothing yet. But is being written now, will do something early next week.

Iphone islington cc microcosm and old lfgss I can make larger fonds on touchscreen bur not test lfgss.

Strange words.

iPhone 4? 5? ios7?

And are you able to take a screenshot and show me how small the fonts are on the test site and how large you wish to make them (a screenshot of islington would be good).

And you can take screenshots by pressing the Home and Power/Sleep buttons at the same time... the screenshots go into your Photos.

the layout feels very disjointed, is it because it's optimized for small screens?

You'll have to help me understand by pointing out the bits that feel disjointed.

It's not optimized for small screens at the expense of other sizes. Mobile use is rising but isn't just the majority of forum use (it's about 25%), so no.

But... what we're aiming for is a simpler, more natural experience. And that means we're trying to get to how things should be, and we're not necessarily bringing over baggage by retaining how things are today if they don't make sense.

And there's lots of little things in there.

For example:

Why is the username above the comment rather than to the left (as LFGSS does it today)?

And it's because on LFGSS we saw that some people had longer length usernames and this caused the comments to be indented at differing points which made it harder to read quickly.

Additionally we saw that recognition of who made a post was primarily driven by the avatar shape, size, colour, animation... and less by the actual text of the username. The image was the more familiar part and should be more prominent.

So we moved the username to the right of the avatar, and that means comments are aligned at the same point, recognition of the person who posted it is faster, and the usernames can be longer.

Yes it helps fit in on a smaller screen, but that would just be a design issue for us to solve and wouldn't dictate making a change like this.

So yes... it looks better on mobile, but mobile didn't dictate the changes.

And bear in mind that I really do want to learn what isn't right and fix it... but to do that I need to understand what you mean by disjointed, as that doesn't help me identify where to focus my attention.

Go in for UX testing... :)

It doesn't look right.

It's broken.

I'm getting an error.

Am I doing this right? #fuckingusers

Worse tester ever

here is an example:

On the left you have a clear structure of the different elements and a border around it.

On the right all elements are stuck at the edge and make it look like I haven't scaled my window enough.
The centre of the frame is empty and that's where you look first.
Because everything is now so big and far apart the secondary information looks almost as
dominant as the secondary (thread topic vs. poster/date etc)

That is interesting.

Our UX tests led us to believe that this is cleaner, crisper, easier to read, easier to find items, easier to see when things have been updated or are popular.

People found the table layout slower to parse.

I wondered at the time whether this was a difference between people who are used to old usenet software that was very grid oriented and from which the early web forums were basically derived... and those people who are more accustomed to the social network style of web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

You'll probably notice that quite a few things feel inspired by Twitter, as that kind of layout is basically where a lot of user expectation is.

I personally, and one other UX test subjects, felt the same as you... that there was a chasm of white space down the middle that felt like it pulled the content apart. But we came back to LFGSS and looked at the average lengths of thread titles and concluded that the data in the sample sites is shorter than real sites and so the gap will be less prominent.

Additionally, you'll note that the event has a "pill" showing the event info within that central space... as we add types like classifieds, those will also present meta data down the middle space which closes the gap.

I do agree with you, but we are in a very small minority as all of our testing has shown the less table-like structure was preferred.

maybe there should be a senior citizen version for us...

Or we should grow fast and hire more people and create a usenet gateway so we can crack out all the old software we loved.

Is the right side of the last S in LFGSS cut off slightly from the blue logo at the top?

• Hit "sign-in/register" and entered my e-mail address.
  
• "LastPass detected a login form that is insecure. Would you like to continue?"
  
• Hit "yes" and was taken to my e-mail login page.
  
  

I was expecting my LFGSS login to be carried over and do not want to login via my e-mail account (or any other account).

Is the right side of the last S in LFGSS cut off slightly from the blue logo at the top?

Not that I can see.

What browser, OS and screen size?

• Hit "sign-in/register" and entered my e-mail address.
  
• "LastPass detected a login form that is insecure. Would you like to continue?"
  
• Hit "yes" and was taken to my e-mail login page.
  
  

I was expecting my LFGSS login to be carried over and do not want to login via my e-mail account (or any other account).

Two things:
1) Even if we were migrating user passwords over we wouldn't have imported anything yet, this is a test site.

2) LFGSS, or rather vBulletin, doesn't store the existing passwords in a secure enough format. We would have to force you to effectively signup again to reset your password and make it secure.

So we cannot migrate your password, and we haven't yet migrated your user profile.

We will be migrating your user profile, just not your password. And when we do that it will change the login method to email.

Why? Because people change their email extremely rarely, whereas they change their username very often.

Further, people remember what email addresses they have had in the past. But seldom remember usernames.

So your profile will be migrated, your password won't be, and login will switch to email address.

Before such a thing happens I will email everyone to let them know this and to make sure they've set their email on LFGSS to whatever you want to use to sign in with later.

I was on my wife's machine, Firefox and windows 8. Not sure on screen size at the moment.

Can you spell it out for a layman: will the "live" login link my e-mail account to LFGSS?

I get an error page when I try and change my username from user6247

the font's too big

When using the 'updates' page

I get this for example: http://cl.ly/image/2H2d000r0v3n

Whereas I have already read the message there, even if i click to follow through to the message, then return to updates, the alert is still there

People page looks a bit messy round the right hand bar and pagination:

http://cl.ly/image/0J143f3g011m

(will submit these to github too)