I miss the "professional" look to the site, more than anything else. The new one looks like it came out of Frontpage; the borders around the posts have a big impact on that.
Lets compare curtousy of Google's cache.
Old Site - Index
This is bright, clean, and easy on the eyes. The forum actually joins together as a single entity, but the big (yet smooth and clean) headers over each section help split it up.
The icons to the left of each section are large, smooth and professional looking, and the Orange color of the page on those icons stood out well when there were new posts in a section to read.
New Site - Index
Here we have a similar layout, but everything is split up. The sections look almost like separate forums. And my god, the Frontpage borders! The darker blue seems to strip the board of a lot of it's "clean" and "professional" feeling.
There also appears to be less vertical padding between each board in a section. Easier to spot on the Quest/Mission board. It looks jammed in there between Screenshots and Art. Speaking of it, the boards are also not quite as wide, reducing the space you have for text. And the background has turned from a pleasant blue, to a pretty bleh kind of gray.
The Icons for a post being read are well, I mean look at it, its a big square block with a black border around it. And the color for "New Posts" is dark and almost the same as the icon itself, making it kinda hard to distinguish.
Old Site - Thread
Here in one of our old threads (very old threads) we get a lot of that professional look again. The color scheme is clean, and the buttons are of a decent size and pleasing to the eyes, complete with icons to distinguish them.
Having the avatar on the left means that you don't have to look "through" the avatars to get to each post. Useless information like their tags, location and number of posts are kept out of the way unless you actually care for it. You can still tell who wrote something just by glacing to the left slightly to read the name or see the avatar.
You can see that the posts are "joined", or are they? There's a slightly faded border between each one if you look. It's not a lot but the whole thing doesn't look squished into separate boxes anymore. It just "flows" through the whole way.
New Site - Thread
Ugh, ugly ugly ugly. What's with the Frontpage borders? It looks like each post was shoved into it's own <table> tag. I don't understand why anyone would prefer the posts so split up like that.
The dark blue makes the tag and posts etc hard to read. And you're kinda forced to go past them to even get at people's posts. And jesus the buttons, they're so small you can't read what half of them say on that screenshot.
Is it just me or is the post body font maybe 1 or 2 points bigger? It looks wrong somehow. I might be imaginging it but if the font has gone up then I don't like that either. I don't particularly like big fonts for non-heading text, reminds me of little kids doing their essays in size 18 fonts to make it look like "more" instead of a size 10 font which looks much much more professional.
Speaking of large fonts why does everyone's name need to be so damn big anyhow. Not to mention the name seems to be "attached" to the right side of the avatar, no padding in there. It was much better with a dark font/light background, and above the avatar itself. In fact the whole top bar should be moved back onto the left!
Give me my forum back irl.
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oh well, w/e everyone knows im important to these boards anyway, i dont need a sticker to prove it.
