The font size may or may not have been slightly reduced (hard to tell), but it still looks like Safe Mode to me (or a child’s early reader). Plus, the original format had the quoted font the same size as the rest of the post (and not in italics). Quotes are still one major font size smaller. As well, it’s still jarring that the so-called “preview” shows the post as it would have looked in the old format, except for the italicized quote, but once posted, the main body of the post displays with enormous fonts.
On my monitor, the “normal” font size – that is, the size under the old format, and the smaller size now within quotes and within lists, looks like the size displayed in Word for 12-point Times New Roman (I realize it’s a different sans-serif font, but just talking about size). This to me is a normal reading font size. The present font size in the body of the text resembles how Word displays Times New Roman 14-point – i.e., everything anyone posts looks like a screaming headline! It makes the whole site look cheap and amateurish. The old format was so much nicer in that respect (and in every other!) – the preview actually showed you what the post was going to look like, quotes were the same size as the rest of the post, and the whole thing didn’t look like a screaming headline!
ETA-- and the white-on-white page numbers are a usability nightmare! On a positive note, the gray bars are an improvement over the dark blue.
As I said in one of the threads, figuring out how to work things in this new format makes me feel like Sawyer in Lost when he was locked in the Polar Bear Cage and had to figure out how to get a fish biscuit. I think TPTB are concerned that brain functioning in this older demographic (i.e., us) is failing and needs exercise to keep it sharp. We should thank them, if we can remember how one does such a thing.
I suppose I am glad that it’s not just me. I was hoping that at least the lime green highlight was gone in exchange for all of the white on white, but no.
I never got the lime-green highlight on any device, but then, this site now apparently has different variations for different people, all of them worse than what we had before. Thanks to CurtC for the white-on-white workaround. But I have to ask: do I sound like a grouch when I ask how it’s an “improvement” to have a new interface that almost everybody hates and that requires freaking workarounds just to be able to use, and is even less usable on some mobile devices than the original one? (For instance because the silly “go-to-top” arrow becomes a larger drop-down box on my tablet – a feature that obscures part of the page while providing no useful functionality.)
Maybe we should do a poll to see how many want a return to the old format, at least for now. I suspect the majority do, including many mobile users. Or best of all, if possible, the old format as a user-selectable option.
It’s more than possible, it’s a built-in vB function. It takes less than 10 mouseclicks to activate it.
I’m surprised that with all the fiddling around they were doing to get rid of some of the more obnoxious color options (and breaking more stuff in the process) they didn’t just turn it on.
But perhaps we’ll find out at some point what the resistance is to letting their customers choose the format which is easiest to read for them.
I only recently discovered that I was using Edge, that Edge is not IE, and how to get to IE. Hey, the icon is the same “e”, just with a minor color variation.
There has always been a reply button at the top of the threads - that is a standard vB feature, not something generated by this skin. It is rather more prominent.
That is how sigs have always worked. Your sig in a sig file is a callout to the server every time it is used, not a static bit of text added to the post.
If we have to have a bar between posts, I agree that the grey is better than the dark blue. I know that I look for the blue bar as an indicator of “last post on the page” and seeing it between posts kept jarring that perception. At least now the blue is back to bookending the top and bottom of the page.
Thanks also for having the Signature default set back to OFF (although I see now that it is still on).
Thanks, Ed, for letting us know how things are going.
I’m not sure if the skin creator knows he horked up some of the “features”, because they aren’t active on his board. I noted that spoiler tags didn’t work at all over there, not just broken in quotes, and he’s not using multi-quote.
I figured it out - I had some elements of the page blocked using Adblock, for some reason, on the computer I observed this on - and one of those elements is the bit where the post date now resides.