Things I Miss About The Old Forum Design

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edited May 2015 in MPQ Suggestions and Feedback
  1. Being able to see most of the screen. On the old forum, I didn't have a huge amount of screen real estate taken up by a bar at the top which is several times larger than it needs to be and has absolutely no reason to scroll along with the website. Why do websites keep doing this? It works with a sidebar because you can't really effectively resize a division once the sidebar is over, but with the header bar, it's at best unobtrusive and useless (we have the "Home" key for a reason, guys) and at worst huge, annoying, and useless. This one is huge, annoying, and phenomenally useless, as when I am browsing the forum, I am probably there to browse the forum, and if I wanted to go somewhere else, I would just scroll to the top of the screen (or press the "Home" key) and do that. It takes up a massive amount of screen space, which is already at a premium because...
  2. Everything is padded to hell and back. There is not a single element of the forum which is as compact as it could be (correction: the list function is scrunched together for no good reason). The forum listings are massive compared to what they used to be. The postbit has a huge chunk of white space at the bottom for no adequate reason. This wouldn't bother me so much, but so much of the screen is already clogged by that header banner that it's really hard to see more than one post at once, if you're lucky, and if you're skimming through the thread, finding specific posts or posters on the fly (a task already made harder by the lack of avatars) becomes a nightmare, particularly because of another thing I miss about the old forum:
  3. Contrast. This skin's bounding elements are almost entirely bright white on bright white-gray. This is design 101 (literally; this was something we learned in the ergonomics 101 class at TU Munich): make elements have enough contrast to be visible. I have to squint and focus my eyes to see the line between two posts now, as well as the line between the signature and the post. And of course, you forget that most gamers tend to like white on black, rather than this black on white color scheme. This skin is just atrocious and ugly. I mean, what even is the report button? A target? "Click here if you want to shoot this post down?"

Seriously guys, what the hell? The old forum, while basic, was thoroughly serviceable. This one's ugly, hard to use, and filled with basic design flaws. And if you were doing changes and upgrades, can I recommend this one? Super useful for writing long-**** posts like this.

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