Audiboy

This is my very first post on AW after the switch. I hope it wouldn’t be my last. I took a tour last night with and wow! It is quite a departure from what I am very used to for the last 10 years? I can’t stand it but I’m sure it will get better. Here are some suggestions which could improve user experience, subjective of course.

It’s too white – like working on a word document without any themes. It may be livable with LCD (to the eyes and to energy watchers), but it is quite a pain with CRT and older hardware – on the plus side, it lights up the room. Maybe break it down with the old white/gray background on each forum topic. Maybe add frames or grids of very light color.

Signature space takes over the forum. Specially for those posting one liners or less, it’s easy to miss this. On the old AW, I hid signatures for 2 reasons. Easy to see the discussion, and makes it work safe for the most part. How about limit the signature to 2-3 lines, but allow an image attachment of a certain size. Users can always stylize their sig with any known text or image software available and upload it. Or add the feature to hide sigs, or use a different font size and color.

There’s too much white space between the posted text. If not, I think most postings can fit within a page. Too bad for netbooks and Iphones. That’s a lot of resizing and scrolling just to read simple stuff.

Good luck. I hope I can still participate in AW for years to come

thomas1978

over 1700 people already left for http://www.quattroworld.com/

IB Adrian

First - thanks for your thoughts.We are still working with the color options to attempt to improve it.You can hide sigs if you wish (see the instructions in the user guide linked at the top of the main page)

Hope that helps,
Adrian

rovision

With all due respect, I beg to differ on some points here:
- in re. to "being too white": generally speaking, black text on white background provides maximum readability [think about books, license plates, etc.]; if you feel that the LCD's are dimmer than the CRT, you Sir are wrong: LCD's are much brighter than CRT's.
In your case, if you feel that the screen is too "white" you may want to check your brightness setting on your monitor. Secondly, the trend in the past 4-5 years is towards LCD's, and the majority of Internet users moved to this type of monitors.
- signatures can be disabled in your personal settings to the forum
- the old "mods" sigs, where people add their mods to the sigs, can be now included into the "garage" option.

Jon C

color options and sigs are the least of the problems, Adrian ....

if you haven't picked it up from the general atmosphere yet, IB has sucked the life & soul out of AW by going to VB with no threaded viewing, etc.

I'm busy ... I don't have time to wade through screen after screen of hidden who-knows-what to see if there may be something of use.

I don't know what your business plan, revenue model, etc., may be, but you're killing the goose by driving long time loyal & reliable readers off with this horrible system that has done nothing for me on other sites and will only lead me to avoid the "new" AW too.

If you notice, I have a 3-digit account ID, I've been here a LONG time but as of today it's not of much use.

Let us know when you fix it so that is has some use for folks like me... you just killed about 95-98% of its utility for many of us.

Audiboy

Thanks Adrian. That actually helped quite a bit. I also turned on the hybrid mode, which made it easier for me to navigate long threads.

Still would like to see the main forum page deviate to being too plain white - hmm smileys are good but can be abused

IB Adrian

I have updated the notice, we have been able to enable threaded viewing.
Adrian

thomas1978

too little to late, quattroworld.com is closing 2000 members most old timers are there already.

Audiboy

I never said LCD was dimmer. What I said had something to do with eyesight and power consumption.

I won’t claim majority unless you have facts to back that up. It’s the internet so I don’t generalize to a specific location. As for me, we have LCD’s at work. But at home, I have a multitude of portals. I can’t still part out with my 24” NEC CRT, although wifey has a cinema display on a dual G5, I have 2 laptops, 2 iphones, and a 1080 LCD TV hooked up to the internet via a laptop, mac cube, or my PS3. I still have my 650W Sony 36” XBR TV tube for analog viewing. Refresh rate and brightness will diminish your eyesight with a CRT. Heck, I’d like to keep my 20/20 vision as long as I can.

The sig option made it much better for me though.

rovision

I'm not sure about your monitor settings, but the pages in this forum are also fluid. Meaning that you can adjust the width of your browser window and see less white space. If you are looking at this forum, on your 24" at full window size, I can understand your problem.

In terms of usage and preferences regarding the LCD monitors there are numerous statistics out there. My experience tells me exactly what I've stated. Just look in a computer section at a local electronics store and check what types of monitors are on the shelves.