Hmm. Clicking the link on the front page will jump to one of two spots on the topic. It'll either go to your first unread post, or it'll jump to the actual post you requested. I'll setup mudbytes.net/forum's side bar to do the same thing. It'll either jump to the bottom or your first unread.

Thanks for the feed back! I take no offense. I'm not a professional UI developer ;). I, in fact, made a plea for help to the community to get one done. No one bit. I'm going to try to refine a bunch of it, but right now my main task is making sure everything functions correctly. The old site was bringing down the server quite a bit, and downloaded files couldn't be opened with anything but winrar. The next step is to turn the core of the site into a public release and hopefully make it more of a community effort.

As for the tags replacing the hierarchy, here's my reasoning. The categories on mudbytes were essentially never used. Almost everyone used the quickjump feature or search box. The 'hierarchy' is still very much there. All I did was bring the deeper folders one click away. I do agree there's some work to be done. For instance, there's a lot of noise with the lower tiers (ie, diku, merc). I'm thinking about implementing a way to specify a primary tag for files and using those for organization. It should reduce the noise and give a more hierarchical view without the cumbersome mechanics.

As for infiniscroll on the front page, I'm not so sure disabling it is a good idea. Right now, all we're seeing is comments, the site feed shows a lot more. For instance, when things are uploaded to the file repository, and linked to a bitbucket/git account, new commits will be announced on the front page. The site feed also accumulates public posts from the individual MUD forums. So it'll get quite busy, not being able to scroll quickly through it, will essentially make it useless. For the front page, I more care about the top 10 getting their time in the spot light, those 3 at the bottom are additional filler so the infiniscroll doesn't kick in too quickly ;)

Please keep the old site alive as long as possible. This new design is terrible.

I second the feedback from khyldes. I like that the new site is responsive. But there are quite a few rough edges still, and I hope you won't ignore those.



I think it's less important to port every functionality from the old site, which may take a while, than it is to make sure the new site forum flows. It's the feature people use 99% of the time. The rest can wait.



I recall offering to help and being asked to provide a sample template, with no guarantees that it will be actually used. I responded that I already have an online portfolio of sites and I don't have the time to "apply" for a volunteering job :)



Speaking of, I've been wondering for quite a while now why you haven't put this site under one of the more popular open source CMS platforms like Drupal, Joomla, or even WordPress. It seems that it would save you from at least 90% of the work. Each of these has a tremendous community, so you will never have to worry about templates, common forum and file management components, dozens of other small things as well. You seem to be pretty competent on the server side, so you will have no trouble bringing the content and your custom code inside one of these.

I will ignore nothing! I just have to prioritize things. The site launched earlier than I would have wanted it too, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I got a bunch of work to do, but it's all really focused now. I've been making tweaks here and there to the responsiveness, but to what khyldes said, I wasn't just fighting the bootstrap, I was fighting the entire UI design bah.


I've got the site feature-complete for now. By function, I mean that all current links do not break and appropriate warning messages are given. I'm dealing with querks from moving from development -> production, as well as some just not being finished.



Truth is, only certain people are allowed full access to MB a the DB. We asked for templates from everyone. But, regardless, this will be moot as the entire thing should be available for download soon. I think I have most of the kinks worked out thus far.



Well, unfortunately for you guys, my hobby isn't running a MUD site, it's the actual development of. I've used a few CMS's and ported MB to them, I just didn't like them, or I end up writing a whole bunch of custom code anyways. This way, I have everything the way I want it from the ground up, with no compromise. The other UI was refined over the course of almost 10 years I think, this one is brand new. I've been updating it daily tho, many, many times ;). I should probably work on the post-comment section tho, as it's probably what you're looking at when writing this post!

When it comes to the files section, it's a bit nicer now, but being able to click on something like the title header or date header and have it sort A-Z or Z-A would be nice.

I think that's great. It's also great news that you appear to have a thicker skin than most of us.

That said, nowadays a site can be many things, and a site also has to do a whole bunch of things just to be considered a normal modern site. Do you find all of those things equally interesting?

For example, do you want to become a world-renowned expert in template design, or do you want to take advantage of such experts while staying focused on the parts of this site that are actually unique? Even if you answered A, you should start by learning from the best. There are folks who live and breathe template design, for example: http://yootheme.com/



In the open source realm, you only really have to compromise if you get lazy. I'm not sure what your issues were with the CMS's you used; I do know each of them comes with its own learning curve but beyond that curve lies incredible efficiency. And yes, any self-respecting site will write custom code, but it doesn't have to start by reinventing the wheel (or, in this case, hundreds of wheels).

Tbh, MudBytes strikes me as a very good fit for a CMS. Most of the site's functionality is very typical stuff. Rather than think of it as an all or nothing proposition, why not think of it as the "community effort" you mentioned earlier. A CMS can actually free you from *having* to write tons of tedious code so you can write code you actually find interesting. When I put together the foundation of the MUD Portal, for example, I knew I wasn't interested in spending a year or more writing site registration, forums, MUD listings, designing a template, etc. I wanted to get to the part that interested me the most. So, in a day, I had all that other stuff up and running, made by people who, face it, were better at it than I would ever be.

In addition, somewhat counter-intuitively, I think using a CMS will teach you more about modern design patterns than if you elect to write everything from scratch. I've learned a lot from following the development of a CMS, modularizing my custom code to fit a larger MVC paradigm, etc.



That's another thing. I hope you don't take this the wrong way b/c I love coming to this site, but I did not find the other UI refined at all. Even worse, it seemed unstable. The reality is that no single person, or even a small team of hobbyists, can keep up with any of the big site frameworks out there. So yes, you can made a conscious choice to go at it alone again, but do that knowing that in another 10 years of work, the site may still appear less refined than something someone put together over a weekend using other people's code.

On a final note, you also gotta admit that you're not really writing from the ground up. It's just you've chosen certain technologies and ignored more technologies than other people would :)

It's a hobby. I do it for fun. It's not to become an expert at anything. It's to keep my mind off they day to day, and decompress. I dabble in a bit of everything and enjoy most thing involved with tinkering with a website. I find it, at the very least, interesting. Like reading a book you don't particularly like just to see the outcome. That being said, I am aware of just how much is required to run a website in the modern day. Doing so alone with just templates is not going to cut it.



This might give you some perspective. Spending a year (or two) writing forums, mudlistings, etc is the part I find most interesting. Trying to get every last millisecond out of a query, serving up 120k items in less then a second, it makes me quiver . I can convert the old MB DB, to the new MB database in under 10 minutes without exceeding 15megs of ram.

It's nothing revolutionary, but it is built on top of a MVC framework. Only, it's not built with single-use plugins. The old CMS (and with many others), if you want to start a forum, you often only get to reuse the utility functions and have to mock up db structs, html and a lot of behaviour, this one is a lot easier. It's basically adding a line to the model and a few links. That's using forums as an example. Virtually every object in the system is designed that way. This is kind of what I mean. Often times CMS's are very disjointed.

It's also already on it's way to a community effort. Couldn't have got to where we are without Kelvin, he helped out quite a bit with the backend.



I admit. The site isn't entirely "from scratch", it's built on top of a framework that lets me skip a lot of steps and really focus on what I find interesting. I like to think I haven't ignored technologies. I like to think I keep "modern", and "hip". I felt "cool" the other day playing with angular.js and firebase. I hear all the kids are doing it. My company website is being redone with wordpress! Moving on from QSF wasn't done quickly. This certainly wasn't my first attempt at migrating away from it.

Testing something, and I'll elaborate by editing in a moment. :)

[EDIT] Interesting, I'll elaborate further once the time shifts from "x seconds ago" to a timestamp. :)

[EDIT] Ah, there we go. So, the forum displays the post time as 6:32PM, which is likely GMT as I posted it around 2:30PM and it's currently only 4:24PM for me. My suggestion is to have the user's timezone info in their profile and a bit of javascript to adjust timestamps to that user's timezone (if they're logged in, of course).

Did notice that the timezone thing you can set in profile didnt make any difference!

Also PLEASE make it so that when you go to a thread it goes to the last place you viewed instead of the root post… VERY annoying when reading a thread such as this one which has a lot of posts!

Where are you clicking? From the front page, or mudbytes.net/forum the link should take you to either the first unread post, or the very last post of the thread.

Bah. The middleware should be handling it. I'll play with it some tonight.

I know it might have got lost in there, but being able to have the headers of the file sections allow for sorting would be very nice.

I didn't miss it. The feature exists, just not linked yet. I will get to it.

Well i was clicking from mudbytes.net/forum, but it turns out i was clicking on the wrong part of the link :) so disregard that.. :)

Huge change is an understatement. My first reaction was "ugly as sin". I didn't see any reason for any change to be perfectly honest. It worked quite nicely before and now it works like shit. This design wastes screen space. You can't see but one or two forum blocks at a time in the main forum screen (as opposed to 7) and the number of topics and replies is given too much priority over the actual topic information. And why the HELL do I have to see the activity feed while I'm looking at the forum?!

You've switched modalities, to a degree, and it flat out SUCKS! Mobile design does not a good desktop interface make.

—

In any case, it would be really nice if the scale of things could be adjusted either totally or per-user. Additionally, if you can manage it, a different tag browsing method would be nice. Having them all visible is a very unpleasant aesthetic and, again, a waste of screen space. Perhaps a type (plus auto guess) and add approach could be useful (with only subcategories/supplemental(i.e. secondary) tags shown after selecting a primary tag). Or perhaps make that mess into five or six rows (at most) such as: Language, Parent/Root Codebase (i.e. the thing from which the later ones are derived), features, and perhaps a misc/accessory/addon/client category for the other stuff.

For the main page, I'd suggest moving the right side block with links/buttons to the center and reducing the vertical space of them (perhaps by removing unnecessary text) to half it's current space. the top contributers and statistics could be be moved to the center and each be given half the width of that column. If the whole new center column shrank just a bit you could split the top ten across two vertical columns (left side and right side). Like this: http://imgur.com/OBHg6we Perhaps that last bit could different for mobile vs desktop. It's also annoying that the date of the last reply isn't present.

The old site logo looked better and more distinctive. Why the change?


P.S.
The home 'button' is broken (at least to me) and does not have any effect at all when clicked (FF 39). By that I mean that I expect it to take me back to the main page from wherever I'm at.

How do I logout?

I think it's a good start. And I can turn already turn off the enormous avatar pictures and inscrutable emoticons (I can't work out what half them mean). That's fantastic. Some more customization requests since writing this sort of thing is your hobby, I can get down with that, rewriting the wheel gives you a tighter better wheel.

Add theming with standard light background and black text, so I can read the comments better. I understand a lot of people like it, but it makes it painful for me to read.

The old site had a theme with compact display, so you just got tight posts on the same page. This new site has a theme where there are giant spaces between comments and giant spaces between lines in the header. I use a laptop and generally only one comment fits on the screen. The fixed title bar removes space, between that and the chrome address bar and tabs, that's 1/7th of the screen that obscures the actual content. I already look at that title bar and know I'll never use it. Make it an option to have it appear when you scroll up like other sites that do something like that?

The comment header uses space on things I'll never use and would go to the profile page for, like pastes and uploads.

And also I have no idea how I am supposed to readily reply to a thread. I see a giant row of buttons at the bottom of every post, but I assume they're contextual to that post. So I have to scroll right up to the top and hit the reply.

Also, when I see a site with an activity stream, I see a giant list of harder to read things half of which I don't care about which makes me spend lots more time to find the things I do care about. So I look around and there's a newly active threads list which is much more concise focusing on the titles and easily allows finding threads of interest skipping over the ones I don't like.

I forget what it's called now, but there's an addon for chrome (and likely firefox) that intercepts CSS and allows you to modify it on the fly for particular web sites or pages.

I used to use it for a live chatbox on one site that used the annoying black on blindingly bright white text, but then also let people use colors, so you'd always end up with yellow-on-white or other unreadable colors. Using that, it just remaps the CSS classes after the page loads, but before the browser renders it.

This won't work in Internet Exploder, because IE doesn't allow addons to run before rendering happens. No idea if they even have addons for "Edge" yet.

Don't look at my css!

I'm thinking there's a way to add some config options to a single post. It's pretty centralized so user-based options shouldn't be a stretch. I've tweaked some things here and there. Front page should drop the top text if you're logged in. The main activity feed will have a kind of rudimentary unread tracking. It wont be perfect but it should be somewhat close. You can now logout from your profile page.

The header of each message is too large and includes information that really belongs in a profile view.
IMO, It'd be better to place a smaller version to the left side of posts.