The forum and layout is confusing and convuluted

So my experience with this forum started when Win-Raid became part of Level1Techs, which is where the confusion begins as the two seem kinda similar, yet are kept apart with a different domains and use different accounts. When I came to the main forum, I tried to log on with my Win-Raid account a few times before realizing that I had to make another account for this forum. I’m not sure if it’s some sort of problem where the two can’t be merged or won’t be merged, but in this case, it should be more apparent that the two subdomains use different accounts.

Onto the layout, which might be useless to complain about as it could just be a Discourse thing, I dunno. I like having a plain main page where it lists all the categories with descriptions, like most forums over the years have. The main page having the latest posts is kinda nice, but that could just as easily be put on a normal main page, or be it’s own page. The dropdown box to switch categories seems a bit odd to me, all I have to go off of is a short name, which means if I want to know more about a category, I have to go to it and read a few posts to see what it’s truly about. There also doesn’t seem to be a good guide post, or if there is, I couldn’t find it.

When browsing topics, I don’t like the infinite scrolling. It adds a script, and makes going to older posts inconvenient. I’d have to scroll a bunch or craft a search query rather than go to a quickly loading page 10 without as many scripts and find post xyz from (insert date here). The same is true with posts on topics, clicking near the bottom of the scroller can take me multiple pages from the bottom on big posts, and the scroller seems slightly off when it comes to the posts on the screen. I can be viewing the last post on a small topic and have a bunch of space below the scroller. Old school pages just seem to be better, and don’t use scripts that slow loading times.

When making posts, a script is used, and the most room I get is about filling up half the viewable area of my browser, meanwhile many forums allow me to make it as big as I want or as small as I want. The preview when typing is nice, but preview buttons serve the same purpose. A better live preview would be markdown/bbcode having a live preview in the typing box (like on Discord), or it could just be below the post and allow me to resize the post box however I want.

I wanted to put my complaints into a post, even though it probably won’t accomplish anything. I’m expecting this will either be a dead post, a battlefield, or locked, but I just wanted to put my complaints somewhere where maybe someone would read them. Maybe someone will point out anything I overlooked or help me understand it better, or maybe even get a theme or option created that has a older style layout.

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Hello welcome to the forum, sorry you’re having trouble

I’ll have a talk with the forum admins to see if we can see what the original problem was with the account merge, might take a few days though

It’s unlikely we’ll be changing the forum back to the old school style but the forum is constantly being improved upon, maybe there’s an API plugin for an older theme, not sure how the site works on the technical aspects

If you have any questions feel free to tag me with an @ GigaBusterEXE
Or to direct message

It’s 3am here so if I got time I’ll more thoroughly examine your complaints on the UI, tomorrow, maybe I’ll have some tips

If you see a user with a shield by their username that means they’re a mod

Aside from some minor tweaks, this is how the forum has looked for the majority of the last ten years. I’m not sure I was even around for the old school style, and I’ve been around awhile… The old main page was a bit different but still had latest posts on it under the categories listed as it does now.

First time I’ve seen a post against the way the forum is laid out in general. Most people seem to adjust to the Discourse layout and maybe have a few questions about some functions, but not feel the whole site needs reworking.

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I think we switched to infinite scrolling some point during discourse, it was old school during all of RTW and some of TS, can’t remember when exactly it started

I’m kinda old school when it comes to design, I like practicality, ease of use, and efficiency, which most old software has gotten down pretty great. Modern software wants to tear that all down and replace it with minimalism, or at the very least ugly flat design, while having terrible code that makes the compute power saved by using flat design moot.

Once I get used to the way something works, it’s hard for me to move something else. The design just seems worse to me compared to the many other forum softwares that exist, it seems different for the sake of being different, which isn’t a good way to do things. Maybe I’ll like it if I get used to it, but I dunno.

I thought Wendell intended to let win raid, and all the community there stay separate with their own forum, trying to break as little as possible, while moving it over to a current gen software?

I hoped no-one from that community felt any pressure to join the existing L1T community?

It seemed the idea was to preserve the excellence of what there was, rather and merging that side with this, diluting both?

I get what you mean about how discourse works differently to the software they had used, but did W at least explain why it had to convert to a current software from the old?

I’m glad you joined the Blue side OP, but hope you did not feel pressured to do so?
Or is it the general feeling on the “white pages” that they must join the “blue side” because I didn’t think that was intended.

never even new this was a thing :smiley:
thanks for the heads up.

To the right of the drop down menu is a “Categories” button which shows the main and sub categories with a combined list of latest posts on the right, making it ever so slightly more informative than the drop down menu. It would be nice if that page listed the most recent post in each sub category with a date or amount of time since the last post. I would certainly bookmark that and use it as my main entry to the site, but I’d imagine it would be a non-trivial amount of work to implement.

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For the layout.

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You can absolutely do all of this. The post/reply/new topic box that comes from the bottom of the screen is completely resizable by dragging the top bar up and down. You can also hide the preview section with the arrows on the bottom right. You can also make it completely full screen with the arrows on the top right. And it remembers your setting through the forum.

Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here.

Funny. When I say the EXACT same thing, for years, everyone tells me to shut up.

You? Oh yeah we’ll look at it tomorrow

The new user experience now isn’t even as good as when I strated this account to troll kdood. Watch, I’m gunna get muted.

Height AND width

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You okay there bub?

No I’m pissed off some rasdom asked the exact same shit as I did and they actually got a response,

We’ll see you in another 5 years

This is na alt bub I used it for like a month and forgot about it

S2G unless you’re the upper crust in this place nothing fucking happens

Thats a typical evolution of software related control.
Not so much user control but resource control.
By making menus and sub menues controlled by software you minimize the number of dedicated control functions.

Ask anyone who has ever switched between a hardware controlled device to a softwware controlled
Example: my oscilloscopes,

My bench model has 20 knobs and switches
It benifit is its extremely sensitive.

My portable is software controlled and has 9 buttons and has a lot more capabilities
Its downside is its minimum range sensitivity is nowheres near as good as the bench model

Do i like things software controlled?
Not much because its a convoluted process and a long path compared to just setting 2 or 3 switches to the proper range.
Let alone an annoying process to get used to.

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It just seems to me that the two are kinda similar, and the Win-Raid side is kinda dead, at least with the posts I’m interested in. I also thought that since it’s the same subdomain and software that there would be one account for both sites, but this was wrong.

I checked out this forum mostly because of the giveaway, forgot about it for a week, then went back to look around and see what all was here.

Thanks, I’m not sure how I missed that part, I was fiddling with themes to see if any of them changed the layout, and didn’t think to check that.

Also not sure if this is a me issue, forum issue, or intended, but a lot of the themes use like Times New Roman or whatever as if there is a remote font that isn’t there.

Well, I quickly played around with the arrows while making this post, and I can’t seem to get it to fill more than half the window in width, unless I’m missing something.

I get where you’re coming from, but at least they’re looking into it now. Maybe different staff and newer members are why I’m getting the response I am. I somewhat expected to get a response like what you previously got.

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I literally only discovered the win-raid part of the site yesterday (because Lenovo is hellbent on making their laptop bios as limited as possible). I had no idea it was there.

Might consider putting a link on the main site or something.

I gotcha. KewlDad mentioned width in one of his replies to me and admittedly I didn’t think of the width adjustment. So yea, even though it’s not something I personally would use, I agree that you should be able to adjust the width. Pretty silly that you can’t.

Yeah these are the only 4 variations I can make happen. A little annoying but I kind of get a certain reasoning, typing full screen is not how it is displayed in the forum so why edit in that format, better to have the editing format match the posted format so you can well… format it visibly correctly. So in that sense it makes sense to me to have it the way it is, but yeah stuff gets brought up to the discourse dev team every now and then from the efforts to improve it here and they seem to really not like others messing with their baby.

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