One of the biggest pieces missing in our new site is a nice, clean, intuitive forum design. I think the rest of the site has a nice coherent flow, but the forums are definitely lacking in this department. If you have any suggestions or links to forums that have particularly clean and intuitive designs; post it here. Once I get the rest of the issues knocked out, I plan on tackling a redesign of the forum software. Thanks.

For starters, I'd like something at the top of this thread that tells me I'm in Forums > General Discussion. And they should be click-able, so I can go back to those pages.

Second, I'd like to see the "new posts" option back. Just like the old MacScene had, where it showed all the threads with posts I haven't read yet.

I'm sure you'll get more ideas as people start using the forums more.

Yeah, if we could make the orange "New" notification on a forum's index page clickable, and it brings you to the newest posts in that topic, past the read posts, that would be great. Plus, there's no icon that indicates that a post is new or read already.

Also, change your name from "admin".

Sorry, had it set to use 'usernames' not 'real names'. Admin now equals Niemann.

Speaking as a CSS dork, is the main site done? Will that be the color scheme? We should stick to that if it is. I'd love to help with it -- you also might want to decide early if you want to have trendy web 2.0 stuff (rounded corners, shiny buttons, Lucida Sans) or a modern theme (CSS 3.0 stuff, lots of Helvetica) or do something TOTALLY OUT OF THE BOX.

And honestly, I haven't really come across any great forum designs out there, though granted I don't frequent that many of them. I noticed that the forum is table-based; is it just a matter of theming, like with the old phpBB system?

I would love to have something outside the box...as long as its intuitive. I agree that I've never seen forums done pleasantly and intuitively; it seems you can only have one and not the other. I have much more control over how these forums operate (as opposed to the old MacScene, phpBB-based forums); since it's based on Kunena and heavily modified by...well...myself.

I haven't heard any complaints about the overall color scheme of the site, which honestly surprises me...I am not a designer. I also haven't really heard from anyone who has been in charge of the site over the past few months (I held the MacScene.net domain and had done the coding two years ago, IUG was paying for the hosting, iBatman was doing the posting, erise, shiggy, and Em seemed to be doing a lot of posting). I hate to feel I'm highjacking the site from whoever has been most active.

If you're interested in putting together a static proof of any ideas you might have, I'm happy to code it myself and see how it works. There's actually only a few pages needed for the forums (forum index, category threads, individual threads, Post New Topic, Reply, and a couple others). I'm happy to use any javascript and any 'Web 2.0' technologies (I'm a coder in the 'screw IE 6.0' camp). Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

The colors should be something like what the macs look like now. I think you should use the metallic gray with white, like on the minis and new keyboards.

Is it currently possible to delete your own forum post?

It doesn't seem like you can delete a post.

But you can Edit your post and just put in something else like "Comment Deleted".

EDIT: Why does the forum mark my own posts as new? I don't need to re-read what I wrote; that's what the Preview button is for.

Just so you know Niemann, you cannot log in via PS3, because there is no button to click after typing your username or password.

IUG wrote:

Wow, that means I won't be able to logon to the site with the Lynx browser.

Yes, sometimes I do things like that.

It's a bit awkward that the QuickReply button pops a field within the post you click. I almost prefer all reply buttons at the top & bottom of the page rather than in each post.

Also, as far as color... what I realized a few days ago is the new site looks very like facebook, only with macscene stuff between the header and footer rather than fb stuff. Fwiw.

seanstar wrote:


That's not entirely by accident. I didn't really spend any time putting together a design for the new site, and facebook is a great example of extraordinarily simple design. So while I didn't copy facebook, this 'design' for MacScene was done with similar goals in mind.

I just uploaded a modified version of the default forums my company uses. This should include all the features you would expect, although I'm sure there's a number of additional 'MacScene-friendly' features we can still add. The design also isn't fully integrate into MacScene like I would like it, and I'll be doing that this weekend.

One thing I do need some assistance on is updating the ugly multi-colored buttons for 'Reply', 'Quick Reply', etc. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Update: Just made a lot of changes, I'm pretty happy with the way it looks for now. Still some tweaks here and there, and those multi-colored buttons need to be updated. But it's a start.

Here's an attempt.



Nice work on the new features!