Dani: Hi. This isn't permanent. The permanent solution of only allowing members with more than 50 (??) posts to give negative rep will be implemented as soon as I get our new design out (figuring within the day).
For those of you not privy to Area 51 ... yes, there's a new site design on its way. And I'm not saying anymore (you'll have to beg for more info from Area 51 people).
I'm sure this change is what she was referring to.. What do yal think of the change?
I'm pretty sure as well that this was what she was talking about. I'm not particularly pleased with it so far. The navigation is huge (the drop down menus don't even all fit on my screen), and the header content is as well (I had to scroll nearly a screen full just to see the thread). Also, the text in the quick reply is a lot smaller. And for some reason, page loads have become quite CPU intensive...
The places in both screenshots where you say whitespace (and could be used for advertising) is actually where the page navigation links go on long threads.
Still working on changes: I think I may have kinda sorta released wayyyy toooo early.
Some of the changes are good. Some of the changes are bad. I'm not sure if I like this new design; what mostly annoys me is that the forum regulars now have a new site design to get used to.
And by the way, making the text smaller in the quick reply box is NOT a solution to having the box too small in the first place. In my opinion, there's too much contrast between font sizes. (Wasn't the reason you made the fonts bigger to make reading it easier? Great, now those same people won't be able to read what they're typing.)
The text is much smaller both in the quick reply and in the advanced reply boxes.. I like the new way it looks though.. just a few bugs need to be worked out
Also, the 'reply w/ quote' 'multi-quote' and 'quick reply' boxes don't appear to be working unless you point the mouse like directly at the top of these buttons..
The advanced reply box too ... no change in font size at all. In fact, the font color was made one shade darker!
DaniWeb does use slightly more resources ... some of the style elements (such as curving the corners of boxes) is now done client-side via JavaScript instead of via CSS. In other words, whereas before there were dozens of little images that needed to be downloaded with each page to give the curved corners effect, now no images are necessary and JavaScript just does the work.
What I found, however, is that once your browser caches the JavaScript file, things get faster quite quickly. Also note that there are all new images throughout the site. Therefore, all of the images you have cached (which you're accustomed to the time it takes to use) will need to be redownloaded. You should definitely give it at least a day or so of use before you start comparing speed differences due to browser caching.
I did put effort into reducing the amount of JavaScript there is. If it is still a problem for a large number of users, I will consider adding an option in the control panel to forfeit curved corners for users with slow CPUs. I really don't think this will be necessary though.
Just to add ... did comparisons on like five different PCs and, upon clearing browser cache, curving corners with JS was faster than curving corners with CSS (because of all the small files that needed to be downloaded one at a time in addition to CSS rendering time). So I'm confident this is the better option. I even tested it out on my five year old mac to make sure that it's not too JS intensive for older computers.
oic. Does the text size not appear different to anyone, though? It really does seem much smaller. It appears like an 8 or 9 text size in Microsoft Word.
Also, why do old 'quotes' not appear in that gray shaded region anymore?
hmm.. I think the admins know what they are doing when they design the web layout. Most of what you are 'suggesting' hadn't even been changed by the updated site layout anyway..
