If you click your user icon in the top right of the screen, you get a list of threads you’re watching. There used to be a toolbar at the top of it to switch between watched threads, messages, and a couple other things I never clicked on.
Apparently they’ve added a new dopey feature that I’ll never click on with a heart icon. But now there’s so many icons that apparently it no longer fits as a toolbar on the top, so they changed it to be a sidebar on the right. This leaves less room to display the thread titles, which is the meaningful information on that menu. That makes this change objectively worse.
Is there a way I can customize it to put the sidebar back on top? If not, then in reddit parlance: “Thanks, I hate it.”
But in the process, they also fixed the notifications in the Vincent theme. It’s been almost unusable for the last two and a half months. So that’s a huge improvement. But, FWIW, my initial impression of the icons getting moved is ‘meh’. It’s not like I used them all that much and they’re still in essentially the same place, so I’m not going to have to go looking for them. Of course, that’s just me. If you use them enough that you can click on them just with muscle memory, I imagine it’s going to be a whole lot more annoying for the next week or so until you get used to it.
(Having said that, maybe I’ll hate it too, but I’ve only interacted with it a few times so far).
ETA, I want to emphasize, at least for those of us on Vincent, the notification colors being fixed is such a huge improvement, it’s likely to overshadow any negative impacts from the icons getting moved.
In mine, the windows key type button (“Other notifications”) was showing
that i had 1 unread notification … but if i go to my profile page, select the
notifications tab and select show unread only there’s nothing there.
Clicking the “Dismiss” button cleared it… so now i’ll probably never know !
The word Verschlimmbesserung springs to mind …
Are you saying that the colors could not have been fixed without moving the icons? That’s the only interpretation I can come up with that makes your post relevant.
I find it annoying as now for a flagged message I get both the little red dot in the upper right corner of the hamburger menu and the new red flag over my user icon. The prior setup was less obtrusive.
Not at all. I’m just saying that IF it was a both or none thing, I’d happily go for both. Fixing the notifications is such an enormous improvement that it would have taken something big to overshadow it. For the last six weeks, the board has been genuinely difficult to use.
Having said that, so far, I have no issue with the icons moving. It doesn’t look like anything I can’t get used to with a few minutes of playing with it and maybe an ATMB/Feedback thread covering any oddities. But, then, I didn’t use them all that often in the first place.
I remember the bell, the arrow, the letter, the bookmark and the person. The heart is definitely new, and I don’t recognize that four square thing so that might be new as well.
Well, this is weird…
I assumed it was a theme problem, so i changed mine from Discourse-classic
to Straight Dope Light, and sure enough, the heart reappeared. Then i changed
back to Discourse-classic ('cos i like it), and … the heart is back !!
Crazy times indeed.
So, I find that blocking the buttons is pretty easy. I could put it in my extension, or you could just use your adblocker.
But moving the remaining buttons back on top is more complicated. I can get them up there pretty easily, but the actual notifications don’t want to move down, and so wind up covering up the buttons. The theme uses flexbox in its CSS, and I find that makes it complicated to position things.
I just put my finger on the only thing that bugs me about the icons down the right side. The icons are directly below the button. It’s minor, but it means I often end up clicking one of them and then have to click back to bell.
If it was slid over to the right, it’s possible I wouldn’t have even noticed the change right away.
I’m not sure there’s a whole lot else you could do with that space. Other than the position of them, the only thing that bothers me, and it’s really, really minor is that the highlighted icon has a bright white box around it. In Vincent (or any dark theme) it really should be considerably more muted. The unread threads in that list have a blue background that, IMO, would be more appropriate.
But, again, really minor, and even if it bugged me more, I’m still thrilled I can actually read those titles again.
It’s different. But now that I know what the little icons mean (I really prefer words) it seems fine to me. Seeing more of the complete title of each thread is a definite win.
FWIW I use the “Straight Dope Light” theme and I find the highlighting very easy to see & use.
My original complaint in the OP is that I see less of the complete title of each thread. It’s narrower now that it shares space with the column of icons that used to be a row across the top.
The titles could be bigger. Consider the screenshot you posted where it shows the title of this thread. The first line of this thread title in your screenshot is:
EllisDee User icon toolbar now (worse as) a
That would indeed be great. That would be more like how it used to be on my phone when the icons were a toolbar across the top.
Now, thanks to it becoming a sidebar, on my phone the first line of this thread in my list shows only:
2 Replies User icon toolbar now
In other words, it’s much shorter because of the sidebar. That’s my complaint and why I posted the OP.
Let’s see if I can figure out how to post a screenshot here…
