I thought to collect some of my feedback to the site after a week of using it in a single post. Some of it probably deserves a github issue, most of it is dumb stuff that only I care about. A lot of it is old phpbb functionality I realized I was missing after it was gone. Also, I have some style-based nitpicks. I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this. Please move the post if it isn't.
First of all, the biggest complaint I have is that the site generally seems slower than before. While I can't measure the exact time difference to before, certain pages have a noticeable delay before clicking a link and the page actually materializing. This considerably affects browsing the site in my eyes, especially if you wanna click around. I particularly notice this with the forum overview and individual board overviews. Other pages, such as wiki pages, seem fine, so I assume it's because the site has to do a lot of work generating these pages. I wish I could offer some more concrete help about this. This is the only serious complaint I have.
(Edit: I should mention that I'm using Firefox. The site overall seems a lot more snappy on Chrome. If I disable CSS on Firefox, it also generally seems better. I can try getting some concrete numbers if desired.)
Edit 2: Recent updates made the site feel much more responsive. Good job! I no longer have complaints regarding the matter. I'll strike through points below that were addressed.
Other assorted nitpicks I want to moan about:
- I tend to access the submissions through the workbench. The autogenerated workbench thread has everything I tend to care about for a submission, except the judging status. That is missing compared to before.
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Banned Users should have some kind of indication on their profile and their posts that they're banned. Currently, it just says nothing, which is confusing.
- It took me a while when using the forum initially to realize that signatures are highlighted with darker background. That looked pretty odd to me at first. Now that I've gotten used to it, it's less strange but still.
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I'm not sure what the Reset button in the page select does that the "Back" button doesn't
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The previous posts being visible in the "create reply" page was immensely useful. Currently, I always find myself opening a second tab with the current topic to have the previous posts visible. Alternatively, the quick reply box could be reimplemented.
- It's kinda weird how when you preview a post, the preview shows up below the text box. If you edit your post, the old post shows up above the text box. It would probably be more intuitive if both show up in the same location, and clicking "Preview" on editing a post overwrites the previous view of the post. I would suggest to put it below the text box, since then you don't have to scroll to get to the text box when editing a post.
Move the Minor Edit checkbox to the "Post" button and make it checked by default.
Edit: BTW, the rating buttons are probably going to remain where they are. We'll talk about them after renovating the rating system.
