It's been a very long running debate in behind the scenes forums for a very long time.

You probably already know what my opinion is going to be, but here it is one final time.

The old flat 2006 DaniWeb looked way nicer.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/attach...1&d=1177976833

It was designed much more around actual functionality; it didn't have these silly "share this", "syndicate that", tags, votes, even reputation kind of took a back seat. Everything was much more focused around what I came to see in the first place: the posts.

Now, when I view DaniWeb I see a confusing array of features which, although have (some) relevance to the whole forum aspect, are hindering my ability to read and write content here. And if I find it confusing, I can only imagine how newbies must feel.

Aww, that was a nice design, brings back memories for me I always HATE the current design, and then I come up with something new and I love it for awhile. And then I always tend to like the old one better, even though back then I hated it and loved the new one.

Another link:
http://web.archive.org/web/200610092...echtalkforums/

I liked the convenience of jumping right to a subforum by checking the color of the miniature arrow. But then you took out the subforums:
http://web.archive.org/web/200602020...echtalkforums/

i think your changes are inspired by a lot of good ideas

but like some other i also think it has added the perception of too much clutter.

i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons... I think they're ugly and extremely distracting/annoying. i would get rid of all that, because i never use any of that stuff. i think it would go a long way to cleaning up the clutter.

also, the arrow design for the up/down voting... the voting concept is cool, and i think will improve the site, but the arrow buttons are just ugly and stick out like a sore thumb. perhaps something more discrete, like small unobtrusive thumbs-up thumbs-down icons ... and also perhaps making the numeric for the up/down vote count a bit less prominent.

finally, I'm not happy that my rep power went to only +5. Maybe i would like it better if i could understand how the new rep-altering formula is calculated.

that's my $0.02

>>I'm not happy that my rep power went to only +5.
Ohhh. I see mine went from 60 to 24, and negative from -30 to -12. I'm happy about the negative rep because afterall that's what I asked for in the other thread I started here. I can live with 24 positive rep too because I thought 60 was a bit excessive too.

>>i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons.
Agree. I don't know what those buttons do and don't want to press one so that I can find out. I'm on twitter, but I don't know what the twitter button will do.
[edit]Oh! Well I just clicked it and found out what it does. Not sure how useful it is except in places such as blogs.[/edit]

I disagree with you two. The buttons are quite essential to get the newsstories (blogs) shown on slashdot and digg. I'm a frequent visitor/user of both sites and these buttons help me submitting (or digging) articles So they can stay!

Why was rep power changed?

My guess would be because of this problem. [link]

The 'share' buttons are useful for forum posts beyond just news and tutorials, for the following very good reason: they can help get good threads in front of more people, beyond those who are already visitors here.

That's not only a good thing, but an essential thing. The more people that are exposed to high quality DaniWeb content, the more people will visit us and the more members we will end up with - which means it is more likely that the DaniWeb you know and love will still be here, in the same free to use format, in five or ten years time.

If you don't want to share content, that's also fine - but the buttons are hardly that intrusive in the overall scheme of things, so just ignore them if they are not your thing