To start, the Coderanch new look and feel is still changing. And a ton of new features are still being added... but that doesn't mean that we are not taking suggestions. For example, like this topic... https://coderanch.com/t/660510/Ranch-Office/awful.
Anyway, let's make it official... Here is the official suggestion topic. We can't make any promises at this point, as changes are still coming. However, we can say this... we can look at this thread for feedback, especially as more features are being added, from time to time. Perhaps a suggestion will be implemented from this topic. Perhaps a suggestion will indirectly affect an upcoming feature. Regardless, you won't know until you make a suggestion.
And please, let's make the suggestions constructive...
One of my primary suggestions for improving the visuals is to remove or vastly minimize the drop shadows, especially in the main viewport. I feel that they muddy up the visuals and serve no purpose except to be distracting.
Henry Wong... you beat me to it was just about to post this in a new thred but ill just add it here
Hello fellow Coderanchers! All this talk about the new look and people not being quite satisfied with it has got me inspired to do a full redesign of this site.
But i would like to have your input to help guide the design process
So please could you reply with cool website links, screenshots, pictures and inspirational thoughts about what the new coderanch might look and feel like
im going to start off by creating a new brand/style then create a design for a home page. i might even do a couple of different options to choose form to get your opinions.
Looking forward to seeing your replies and hearing your ideas.
I've been using the beta pages since I discovered the site. I liked the darker, 'paneled' look, the bits and bobs and buttons. But I am not a fan of the new forum layout. I'm more of a minimalist, and the current layout is so overcrowded and crunched for space, it makes the page very difficult (for me) to find any information. From a readability aspect, it is much more difficult to glance at the list and see what is new, what I want to read, what I should read, what I can safely ignore.
1) I would like an option (since I wouldn't presume to demand or expect anyone to like my style) to hide the best of .. columns. Again, for me, they just clutter up the page, and offer very little in the way of substance.
2) The forum list would make more sense if it were on the left side of the page, instead of the right. The site is English-centric, and we read left to right.
3) Perhaps a list of Forum areas on the left (Java, Books, Certs, Database, etc) with a drop down, pop up list of sub forums on click?
4) The Most Recent column could use some stream lining. Being spread over multiple lines and different font types and sizes just succeeds in making it clunky.
5) The best of year and best of month columns far exceed the recent posts column in length (yeah, I know -- nit picky but the OCD in me wouldn't let it go).
I am a new user of coderanch. And I have found it very difficult to look for questions. Make it simple. Remove all the distractions . When I answer I get so many options, do i really need to see them. Give a preview directly rather than clicking a button.
Outside the previous thread, where i expressed my UX comments, I would challenge you to think out of the box reinventing worldwide the forums paradigms. The success of "stack up-vote" famous sites is due IMO to the limitation of the traditional forums to not making immediately readable precious information. So that in a 3-6 pages thread, a lot of mediocre information, small talk, redundant and even unfortunately good faith misleading suggestions, are mixed with usually few gems that make ( informatively speaking) a post pragmatically oriented toward the resolution of the problem.Of course humor and the more or less colored nuances in the character of the senior members in the forum are a really pleasant and entertaining variations to sterile and synthetic problem solving oriented solutions, so I suggest a quick win.
The Sherifs and up, WHEN THEY LIKE AND ARE PLEASED to do it, should have the possibility to highlight in yellow what they think is the relevant information, the juice. And more highlighted words, +votes and cows are redistributed more this post should go up to the ranking when a new research query is written in the search function and in the best of the month/year posts. Outside that, ranchers and occasional Intenet surfers that are looking for a fast solution can scroll a page forum in 3 seconds instead to read it in 5 minutes, and depending by their interest on the specific topic, and the people that participated on the specific post, can decide the level they want to go deep.
If this will work could put our saloon as worldwide flag, to have invented a new standard, although we won't make millions from that, but only who will copy us:(
@Henry, I agree with your closing comments on the "awful" thread, thank you to have considered my reply.
Giovanni Montano wrote:... should have the possibility to highlight in yellow what they think is the relevant information, the juice. And more highlighted words, +votes and cows are redistributed more this post should go up to the ranking when a new research query is written in the search function and in the best of the month/year posts. Outside that, ranchers and occasional Intenet surfers that are looking for a fast solution can scroll a page forum in 3 seconds instead to read it in 5 minutes, and depending by their interest on the specific topic, and the people that participated on the specific post, can decide the level they want to go deep...
I mostly like the new design but I could live without these two things
1) The forum buttons on the side
2) Best of the ... columns
As someone said in the "awful" post, It can have sub menus within it. A normal user wouldn't take the pain of going iniside a forum and then selecting sub menu.
Best of ... columns are a good idea but the length of the posts vary, so it looks very scrambled in front page and IMO not all will be viewing this column unless you force them to. So this can be link and if you want it to be highlighted, you can design the url differently to attract visitors to that link. You will be able to use the remaining real estate for something else.
Giovanni Montano wrote:... should have the possibility to highlight in yellow what they think is the relevant information, the juice. And more highlighted words, +votes and cows are redistributed more this post should go up to the ranking when a new research query is written in the search function and in the best of the month/year posts. Outside that, ranchers and occasional Intenet surfers that are looking for a fast solution can scroll a page forum in 3 seconds instead to read it in 5 minutes, and depending by their interest on the specific topic, and the people that participated on the specific post, can decide the level they want to go deep...
I already posted about this in the other thread, but I'd like to state it again for this "official" one:
I really don't like the way the FAQ pages I wrote have been rendered in the new system. None of the points below is terrible on it's own, but I spent quite a long time putting them together originally, so it's rather annoying to find that I have another "cleanup" exercise ahead of me, particularly as nobody warned me about it.
1. They now look simply like posts to a "thread" (which, I assume, is exactly what they are) rather than standalone pages.
2. The author of those posts is "friki data migration", which looks hokey. It'd be nice if it could be me but, failing that, why not "JavaRanch" or "JavaRanch Staff"?
3. The translation loses context, specifically in it's interpretation of "indented code", which is rendered as disjointed code blocks if you put space lines in it (as I did).
4. Back-references to labels IN indented code are lost, and the label now appears inside the resulting code block as plain text.
And a couple of other annoyances (maybe already listed):
I can't click on the latest post for a thread.
The font on the text entry screens is very small, so I find myself constantly zooming in and out.
That said, I DO like some things about the new look:
Alerts are much easier to spot.
Code blocks now work they way they should have all along - especially when they include really long lines.
I like being able to see ALL the latest posts on the "forums" page.
I like seeing the "cow count" for a thread - though I'm sometimes a bit mystified how it gets calculated.
I hope not to offend anyone, but I find that the page where the threads of each forum are listed is very chaotic. It wastes a lot of space to show the best threads of the month and year, and the list of forums, but gives very little room to the most important information, which are the own threads (title, total replies, etc.)
I also think that the navigation through the pages is more complicated now. You've to scroll down to watch the available pages.
I would move the columns of the best threads and the list of forums to a dedicated front-page. I would leave the page of threads like it was before: threads only. But with a more modern look.
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