Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

When I load the comment pane at the left of a post, the element which contains "comment: user name" is transparent in FF-Nightly on W7 and Android browser on my Touchpad.

It has.
Just force refresh, clear cache, and if it's still ugly stop using Comic Sans as the default font in your browser.

It's still farkin ugly.

What was the old forum font?

Would you post more often if it was more attractive?
My goodness me.

Would you like me to post more often?

I've been too busy of late to give this place the attention merging it deserves but this refresh is hurting my eyes.

BikeRadar >>>>>>>>>>

hippy uses Colossus Fat Extra Bold 24hr.

That's my deodorant.

Do you use deodorant for your most intimate part?

My left ear is au naturale.

Seriously though.. this place is fucking hideous. You've forced me to login to bikeradar for the first time in about 4 years. Don't make me start talking about commuter racing and scalps.

No, thats way I'm gonna let you win.

I've got a transparent comment box bit on Chrome beta linux too

Seriously though.. this place is fucking hideous. You've forced me to sit on to bikeradar for the first time in about 4 years.

Poor Bike Radar.

...this refresh is hurting my eyes.

The type could use tracking out a little bit.
I think it's called Letter Spacing in CSS?

The search tool doesn't work when on the 'live updates' page. It's fine on homepage and subscribed threads. Not tried it on any other pages.

Also the font in the reply box has grown huge compared to the thread font size.

Win 7 / Firefox

Seriously though.. this place is fucking hideous. You've forced me to login to bikeradar for the first time in about 4 years. Don't make me start talking about commuter racing and scalps.

Aside from the logo and navigation, the place is pretty much as it was. The only difference is font size, and the default font is now dictated by your browser.

What browser + OS are you using? And do you have a screenshot of the hideousness?

Oh, and I know 2 days is too small a sample to trust, but thus far:

• Page speed increased over the whole site
  
• Increased time spent on site
  
• Increased engagement (number of posts made and number of user registrations)
  
• Increased traffic from Google (it detects we're faster)
  
• Increased mobile device usage (more overall, not a drop in desktop usage)
  
• Increased page views
  
  

And more importantly for me, and I'm really hoping these are sustained:

• Increase in click throughs and conversions on the affiliate links
  
  

Not a single metric has declined in the past two days, and the bottom line affiliate scheme earnings for Monday and Tuesday were double the figure from last week

All the dumb numbers say that change is a wild success. Though I won't know this for sure until this performance has been sustained for at least 2 weeks.

• Increased time spent on site
  
  
  

Yea I've been playing with font size (AAAA) reading everything 4 times deciding the best font. Then when I played around with the browser font (Symbol was fun), then I broke my forum view and too to ages to discover what I'd done. So lots more time here.
But really it IS much more accessible

All the increased traffic is me writing about how my brain now hurts looking at the post list.

You should see mine... I've discovered Linotype fonts and am using a different one each day.

Today: Optima nova

http://www.linotype.com/54211/OptimanovaProRegular-product.html

But seriously... this looks really bad for you? Or just jarring because other sites have such small text so this feels enormous?

Okay so the thread titles are huge, but the (1, 2, 3..) pages count is small. This makes it hard to ID familiar threads.

Also, the post content is large but the admin text (edit, quick reply, quote, etc) is tiny. The page counts are tiny too.

That's with the whole thing sized down a bit to make it bareable. FF

So you're using Firefox on Windows and... you have your zoom settings to what?

A screenshot would be easier you know.

Too much bold going on.

So I'm thinking of removing a lot of the bold... and instead of emphasising links with bold, I'll de-emphasise the secondary navigation.

But then... there's a problem: On the thread lists I've been indicating new items by bolding them, and old items by leaving them unbolded. If I remove bold then you can't tell what's new.

So aside from proposing to remove bold items, I propose to use background colours to indicate what you're read on the thread listings.

Close to white = unread
Close to grey = read

I'll knock up an example and see what you think.

Here's the example attached.

Subtle changes here:
1) Remove vertical colour bands
2) Introduced white background for unread rows
3) Introduced light gray background for read rows
4) Reduced the size of the post count value
5) Reduced the size of the thread view value
6) Removed all underlines from links

What do you all think?

Should I do it?

1 Attachment

Think the read\unread distinction is now quite hard to distinguish...

Actually... got the old (current) and the new (image attached above) side by side... and seriously, I can't think of a reason to keep the bolded titles and vertical banding, nor the selective link underlines.

If no-one has serious objections before 1pm, I'll do it.

Noticed that if I'm on "Today's posts" and click on the new font re-size AAAA's, it punts me to the search page.

Still does this.