I was pretty goddamed cute, I’ll have you know. :mad:
Scrolling down the page, I thought you said ‘furry Norsemen’!
You think that your post was nice and that Dex’s post was snotty?
That is just odd.
Well thanks for your opinion. When I need to know if snark is brief and moderately cute enough to pass censure I will surely come back to you.
Okay. You’ve grabbed onto the small invalid part, rather than the main point.
Main point:
Oakminster castigated the OP for daring to offer suggestions because he had only been on the board for four months. That is hostile and completely invalid.
Siam Sam included one intellectually irrelevant word. He did not contend that the OP did not have a legitimate right to offer suggestions, but rather implied that he disagreed with the OP’s judgements.
I see a major difference there.
I, for one, prefer white on white. It makes for far less clutter and noise, while also breathing in an air of sophistication other boards have yet to aspire to. Indeed, black text on a light background is the avatars of the written word.
Pssst! For those of you following along at home, what he really said above was…
I didn’t hate the look of the other board, but i still prefer the way that the Dope is laid out.
I definitely agree with Johnny L.A. that the banner is too large. With modern, widescreen computer monitors, the screen real estate in shortest supply is vertical space, and i hate websites that dramatically reduce the amount of usable space (and require more scrolling) by having a huge banner.
Also, other boards tend to have a larger number of different forums than the SDMB, and when you have more forums it can make sense to split them into sub-groups. But here, that sort of thing isn’t really necessary. I like the fairly clean, simple look of the Main page.
Hay! My post was blackened by the Blackist!
Better blackisted than blacklisted.
SDMB is one of the cleanest message boards I’ve seen. The OP’s link is a much more generic noisy board. No thanks.
There’s many ways the SDMB layout could be improved (especially in the way it formats to larger resolutions), but that’s definitely not the way to change it.
If there’s an aesthetic this place should aim for, it’s academic journal / alt weekly. Not glossy tabloid.
He scolded you as a member, not as a mod. Your analogy was faulty - the OP made no changes to the decor, he merely commented on the decor and offered up pictures of his neighbor’s house that has dayglo colors and the couch in the kitchen.
And frankly, your tone to the OP was snotty. Not “rules violation” snotty, but still snotty.
My comment to the OP: I’m not seeing what is so impressive about that site. The color scheme is too busy, the status bars clutter up the page, the pages are set at a wide default width, which means sideways scrolling on my laptop, nevermind a mobile device.
I like the SDMB the way it is. Sure, the header could possibly be revamped to take up less vertical space, but that’s not really that bad. It is plain and unadorned, but I’m okay with that.
After reading all the responses to my original post, I would like to make two more comments and here they are:
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I understand why TubaDiva was made a moderator or admistrator. IMO, she certainly deserves to hold that position. Her post was just about the perfect way to disagree with someone. You can’t tell what is actually behind her comment. She could hate that look and she might think I am a complete doofus. But she worded her response in the perfect way so as to offend no one. I wonder if she has a list of “stock replies”. Anyway, her reply was just perfect.
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It was never my intention to rearrange any furniture or to offend anyone. I don’t know how I could have worded my OP to suggest there was a site with a very different look and people might be interested in taking a look at it.
One of the things I love about the net is that I can get lots of new ideas and I can pick and choose among the ones I would like to adopt.
In any case, if you like the way this forum looks and want nothing to do with any new look, I can certainly understand that and I wish you all only the best.
Toodles.
Here’s a 1990s message board, literally: Joe's Old Lures Message Board
Simple, but no unique identity.
Because of limitations with the templating system, it’s challenging to make any vBulletin-based message board look visually appealing, yet maintain a unique identity. The simpler a design is, the more generic it becomes. The more complicated a design, the more cluttered it gets.
A challenge for the SDMB, where its users see the site as being more “adult” and “academic” than other message boards, is striking a balance between simplicity, which users might prefer but which would eliminate any kind of unique identity, versus something more complicated, which would be seen as distracting.
SDMB users are also quite conservative; not necessarily politically, but when it comes to the look and feel of the site. Cite: any “why doesn’t the SDMB have avatars?” thread. When I upgraded my message board from vBulletin 3.8.* to 4.1.*, tweaking the appearance in the process, some users left and never returned, citing their discomfort with the new look and feel. If the SDMB did the same, there’s the risk of an even greater backlash.
The SDMB could provide alternative user-selected styles. Given the reaction of the anti-avatar crowd in the past, many of who were opposed to them even with the option of turning their display off, I think many would be opposed to the idea of selectable styles; they want everybody to have the same board experience as they do. The bearded ones will offer their usual responses to any new options: “It’ll change the flow of conversation and the character of the prose in some way I can’t describe, but probably for the worse.”
We’re likely going to be stuck with indigo, light gray and white, and probably vB 3.7.3, for the foreseeable future. There will only be a change when vB 3.7.3 no longer works with any supported version of MySQL and PHP.
Um, let’s consider a few state of the art websites.
Huffpo
Salon
Slate
Gawker
All are garish and clunky. And TPM is damn slow.
Websites with a more classic look and feel include the SDMB and Slashdot. I gotta say I opt for the latter. For one thing they tend to load faster, server issues notwithstanding. BBC and CNN are a little better, but their design is also a little older. If management decides to redo things, I hope they keep the board lean and mean.
ETA: I understand there is a problem with VBulletin boards rendering to iPhones. But more bells and whistles presumably wouldn’t help.
The site works, it’s easy to read, it’s not hard on the eyes. Any change would be lateral at best, a nosedive more likely.
@ elmwood (better then quoting, right;)) most of the sites I was talking about are very similar in set up and have are very identifiable. They just look a whole lot better. I won’t link or name these sites, because they also cater to an adult audience (in a bit stricter sense) and are not in English. My preference for these looks could be cultural, because the one English language site I read looks very similar to SDMB…or even a bit shabbier. Who knows? I must also confess that about half the sites I go to allow avatars, and I don’t notice them at all. The different ways you can thank posters, or show you like what they did, is far more interesting.
In the end it just feels like this layout was chosen in '95, while other forum look like they picked a layout in 2010 (according to me and what I’ve seen).
No, it isn’t. I have ti then go hunting for the post to figure out the context of your response. We don’t have a 120 character limit, so there’s no reason not to quote enough to establish the context.
Lighten up. :rolleyes:
You think tom’s post was harsh?
Lighten up.