I have gotten soooo many mixed opinions lately, and I was wondering what you guys thought of the current style. Please be brutally honest. I'm not talking about "It's missing a link in a convenient place" or little functional things that can easily be changed/added/removed. I'm talking about the color scheme, the main navigation, the aesthetics, if it's pleasing to the eye to look at for a long time, etc.

First off, kudos for asking for input. The world would be a better place if everyone did.

I think the Navigation and Layout are as good as any others I have seen on other sites.

I have done some user selectable theming on another forum, and after letting the community chose the most popular test themes to go live, 2 years later we notice only a small percentage of users using anything other than the default. LOL a lot of work for very little payoff.

At this point in internet evolution, where most sites have made the www2 jump years ago, and many sites have made the www3 jump already, I would recommend to anyone considering theming to skip the idea of just moving web elements around and changing some colors and devote the time to produce a www3 theme that basically allows the member to design their own theme/layout easily.

As far as aesthetics, I am a fan of dark themes, so the current white and light grays isn't my favorite

I think it's fine and very easy to navigate. I also just saw that you made threads with 0 posts red, that will make life ever so slightly easier for me

The yellow orange and purple isn't quite my favourite either, but it doesn't really annoy me in any way.

What's with the one grey block?

Sorry to be a dark cloud in all this but...

The new voting thing is terrible. As others have said it adds so much clutter to the design, its more information than anyone needs to know, its confusing for people who aren't regulars.

Why did you implement it in the first place? Was traffic lagging? Did members express interest in the idea?

It needs to go.

Also, I too noticed everyone has a gray block for rep now.

Yes, its a helpful feature for people like AD who want to comment on a posts worthiness without instantly sending a member into the red in terms of rep points.

Its virtually identical to the (previous) system of rating threads by a star system.

p.s.

One thing, can we please give the button with the little man on a text label.

And i LOVE the new profile page with the statistics.

Also, a bar along the bottom with IM chat and notifications (e.g of replies to subscribed threads) like on facebook would be AWESOME.

P.S a way to see only the reported posts which were a) unsolved and b) in forums I moderate would be a great addition for staff. Its hard to go through the reported posts board and manually pick out the ones that need attention.

Things are pretty crazy with reputation at the moment, just in case you haven't yet noticed this.

Reputation is straightened out. Sorry about that everyone!

> Did members express interest in the idea?
Yes, a good number of members were looking for an easy way to vote a post up or down without it affecting the user's reputation. I took that idea and combined it with a Digg-esque feel.

What stops them from making a "comment on a posts worthiness" in the thread itself?

No it isn't. It's integrated into the rep system, and it takes up twice as much screen space.

So was there more than one thread on it besides the one AD started? On that thread I counted about 6 people who liked it.