So much empty space...

[Interferon]

This is really excessive.

It looks even worse if your forum background is set to white.

Edited September 12, 2020 by Interferon

[Adriano Faria]

That space (below forum name and beside follow button) is used for the forum description. Happens that you haven’t one. 

Edited September 12, 2020 by Adriano Faria

[Yamamura]

I totally agree. The default skin in 4.5 is absolutely terrible. Huge elements, padding, empty space, thin and faded text, low contrast, and more. It's no surprise why more and more people are choosing to use XenForo, Discord, etc., over IPB. I don't know who made the new skin, but it feels like a beginner freelancer from Dribble made it.

8 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

That space (below forum name and beside follow button) is used for the forum description. Happens that you haven’t one. 

But why did they need to move the follow button one line down? If the follow button was positioned on the same line as the title, as before, there would be no useless empty space.

One more example:

It takes up a lot of space, but none of it is needed there.

1. You just entered a topic and want to reply right away? Not!
2. You just entered a topic and want to create a new topic right away? Of course not! 
3. Who cares who is the author of the topic and when it was created? Nobody! For example, I have active topics on my forum that are already 12 years old. Why should I constantly show who is the author of these topics if they have not visited the forum for 10 years and everyone has already forgotten about them?? Nobody cares who is the author of the topic. This information is completely meaningless and useless.

One more example:

Am I exactly in a place for people to communicate? Because on my screen I see only a white space and a couple of lines of text. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Edited September 12, 2020 by Takohashi

[Malwarebytes Forums]

Actually, we care very much who the author is and in some forums if you're not part of Staff or the Author your post will be moved, or deleted. So yes, we do care very much and had a plugin for it before but now that it is supported natively we no longer use the plugin.

 

[LoPoSt]

@Takohashi I completely agree with you that there is indeed a lot of free space. The articles also contain a lot

Edited September 12, 2020 by LoPoSt

[Morrigan]

@LoPoSt The "free space" that you speak of has stuff that shows up in it. The top box that you indicate is where the description goes when/if you have one for the category/section. The place that you want to move the "how many articles in this category" to is where the pagination shows up when you have more than 1 page of items in them.

@Interferon The box you are indicating to is where the description goes (as I noted in the above paragraph). This is something that you can edit in your own theme if you don't intend to put descriptions on your forums.

It may "seem" like dead space but a lot of that dead space is because you don't have content. The specific things you want changed can be done on the theme level for your site specifically.

[kmk]

Creating event... 

[Interferon]

I understand the design is made up of rows, and some of the stuff like "follow this content" is probably a global row that gets added across all types of content. And then you have to have a "responsive" design thanks to Google's mandates, which makes it more complicated. So I understand it can never be "perfect".

Still, I think for the most commonly viewed parts of the forum, having three inches of white space below the forum title, something needs to be done about that.

The only reason I am pointing this out is because we are moving away from our heavily customized skin in order to make updates easier, and because the default IPB skin is now good enough that I feel it's okay to use. (We just replaced the header and footer with out own.)

Ideally, this is what it should look like:

Edited September 13, 2020 by Interferon

[Morrigan]

You do realize that IPS's theme here is a custom theme of their default theme right @Interferon????

[Interferon]

1 hour ago, Morrigan said:

You do realize that IPS's theme here is a custom theme of their default theme right @Interferon????

No, but the default theme exhibits the same issue.

[Yamamura]

16 hours ago, Morrigan said:

@LoPoSt The "free space" that you speak of has stuff that shows up in it. The top box that you indicate is where the description goes when/if you have one for the category/section.

No! The follow button is on a separate line, taking up a huge white space!

[christopher-w]

15 hours ago, Interferon said:

No, but the default theme exhibits the same issue.

I think you should view the out of box experience as a starting point for your own personal preferences. We’ve not even launched yet and already have 12 nested scss includes, covering everything from button placement to injecting section  descriptions (selector:after etc ) when for example, core doesn’t offer the facility to add them in ACP  

We’ve also replaced the native menu system with our own custom implementation resembling the sliding menu in FB groups.

We are now working on cleaning up the native mobile experience. 

With a little perseverance you can create a very tight, functional and dare I say it, class leading experience.  

 

On 9/12/2020 at 1:50 PM, Takohashi said:

It's no surprise why more and more people are choosing to use XenForo, Discord, etc.

It would be a surprise if anybody who needed Invision’s multi app coverage chose either Discord or XF. They are chalk and cheese. 

Edited September 13, 2020 by christopher-w
Clarification

[Morgin]

1 hour ago, christopher-w said:

We’ve not even launched yet and already have 12 nested scss includes, covering everything from button placement to injecting section  descriptions (selector:after etc ) when for example, core doesn’t offer the facility to add them in ACP  

We’ve also replaced the native menu system with our own custom implementation resembling the sliding menu in FB groups.

We are now working on cleaning up the native mobile experience. 

If you ever want to share any of this back (appreciating for strategic reasons you may not want to) it would be welcomed by many. Love seeing the small adjustments others make. 

[christopher-w]

11 hours ago, Morgin said:

If you ever want to share any of this back (appreciating for strategic reasons you may not want to) it would be welcomed by many. Love seeing the small adjustments others make. 

We plan on launching this across 3 to 4 separate platforms, each sharing the same parent brand identity, the first of which, altCars is almost ready. Once that is live I will probably post a link in the showcase thread.  Much of what we've done is about presentation, navigation, sorting and filtering, plus external link display via iFramely.  Just a series of little things, none of which amount to much on their own.

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by christopher-w
Clarification

[opentype]

On 9/12/2020 at 10:15 PM, LoPoSt said:

Now do that screenshot again on a live site with …

• complete data
  • like the missing category description
  • pagination, which appears in that empty space when there are more records
  • all user buttons active
  • all moderator options active
• and a smaller screen right before the phone-view kicks in

You will see that the space is there for a reason. It’s there for stuff to “grow into” when the screen isn’t as large as yours. 
And on much smaller screens things get either hidden or moved below the more important content. It’s actually well-though-out. If the stuff was moved the way you asked for, it would all fall apart when the missing options mentioned above would actually appear and the screen size would get smaller. 

Edited September 14, 2020 by opentype

[Yamamura]

2 hours ago, opentype said:

Now do that screenshot again on a live site with …

I can take a screenshot of forum 4.4 where everything was fine.

3 hours ago, opentype said:

• complete data
  • like the missing category description
  • pagination, which appears in that empty space when there are more records
  • all user buttons active
  • all moderator options active
• and a smaller screen right before the phone-view kicks in

3 hours ago, opentype said:

It’s actually well-though-out.

Lol!

Why did they move the follow button to a separate line, which takes up a HUGE white space??? Previously, this button was in the title bar and did not take up extra space. Read "Web Design For Dummies" before commenting here.

[Morgin]

4 hours ago, christopher-w said:

We plan on launching this across 3 to 4 separate platforms, each sharing the same parent brand identity, the first of which, altCars is almost ready. Once that is live I will probably post a link in the showcase thread.  Much of what we've done is about presentation, navigation, sorting and filtering, plus external link display via iFramely.  Just a series of little things, none of which amount to much on their own.

 

Thanks @christopher-w. I've much appreciated your input here over the last few years so would love to see what you've cooked up. Will watch for that post!

[opentype]

2 minutes ago, Takohashi said:

Lol!

Yes, it’s my assessment that this layout is well-thought-out. (The one I commented, which was from Pages)
I work as professional web designer for more than 20 years and I customize these Pages templates all the time—inspecting every little detail, checking the flow of content in many situations and at every CSS breakpoint. 
Of course if you can’t have an open discussion and need to laugh at people just because they say something you don’t agree with, this discussion ends right here. If all you guys can do is judge a web layout in one desktop view, you know very little of web design and have a lot to learn, but with reactions like the one I quoted you are apparently not willing to. I am out. 

[Yamamura]

9 minutes ago, opentype said:

Yes, it’s my assessment that this layout is well-thought-out.

Once again. It is enough to compare screenshot 4.4 and 4.5. The main content (list of topics / posts) should be displayed as high as possible on the page. This was the case in 4.4. Now, I open a forum and half of the screen is taken up by useless elements and empty space.

14 minutes ago, opentype said:

I work as professional web designer for more than 20 years and blah blah blah

20 years wasted. So sad... 😭

[Quotes]

 Takohashi, even sadder I have been doing this for over 25 years 😂

Whatever the reasons, I do not appreciate having the topic list on my forum home page relegated to the bottom of the page so close to the fold.

I contacted Invision support before I discovered this topic but they said it's not something they can help me with.

Which is a shame because I think if you are going to reserve so much space at the top of a page you should at least have some kind of control over it, such as repositioning or disabling.

Is there a converter for Ikonboard? I might go back to using that if this is the way things are going.

 

[christopher-w]

42 minutes ago, Quotes said:

 Takohashi, even sadder I have been doing this for over 25 years 😂

About the same for me - I sold my first Internet business to a US bank in 1998, and my second just under ten years later. But let's not talk about the third in 2008/9- that didn't fly so high.  🙄 

44 minutes ago, Quotes said:

Which is a shame because I think if you are going to reserve so much space at the top of a page you should at least have some kind of control over it, such as repositioning or disabling.

You can lift the hood obviously and bring it more into line with what you want, but the issue is having to do things over given the possibility of breaking changes. 

Either way, I  agree generally with what's been said about whitespace. In my opinion there's far too much of it and if something isn't being shown, due to permission trimming or lack of content, don't leave a space for it.

2 hours ago, Morgin said:

Thanks @christopher-w. I've much appreciated your input here over the last few years so would love to see what you've cooked up. Will watch for that post!

I'll PM you a couple of screen grabs if you like. Bear in mind much of the text content is still Cupcake Ipsum. 

[Jordan Miller]

On 9/12/2020 at 5:50 AM, Takohashi said:

I totally agree. The default skin in 4.5 is absolutely terrible. Huge elements, padding, empty space, thin and faded text, low contrast, and more. It's no surprise why more and more people are choosing to use XenForo, Discord, etc., over IPB. I don't know who made the new skin, but it feels like a beginner freelancer from Dribble made it.

But why did they need to move the follow button one line down? If the follow button was positioned on the same line as the title, as before, there would be no useless empty space.

One more example:

It takes up a lot of space, but none of it is needed there.

1. You just entered a topic and want to reply right away? Not!
2. You just entered a topic and want to create a new topic right away? Of course not! 
3. Who cares who is the author of the topic and when it was created? Nobody! For example, I have active topics on my forum that are already 12 years old. Why should I constantly show who is the author of these topics if they have not visited the forum for 10 years and everyone has already forgotten about them?? Nobody cares who is the author of the topic. This information is completely meaningless and useless.

One more example:

Am I exactly in a place for people to communicate? Because on my screen I see only a white space and a couple of lines of text. 🤦🏻‍♂️

This post is... not the vibe.

There's a way to offer suggestions and offer constructive criticism versus call something "absolutely terrible" that people spent a lot of time and energy on. 

[Meddysong]

1 minute ago, breatheheavy said:

This post is... not the vibe.

There's a way to offer suggestions and offer constructive criticism versus call something "absolutely terrible" that people spent a lot of time and energy on. 

You probably want to stay away from his later posts in this topic. He doesn't get any better.

[Joel R]

5 hours ago, christopher-w said:

Cupcake Ipsum

That's the best kind of ipsum.  Looking forward to your showcase!  

[Yamamura]

9 hours ago, Quotes said:

 Takohashi, even sadder I have been doing this for over 25 years 😂

Whatever the reasons, I do not appreciate having the topic list on my forum home page relegated to the bottom of the page so close to the fold.

I contacted Invision support before I discovered this topic but they said it's not something they can help me with.

Which is a shame because I think if you are going to reserve so much space at the top of a page you should at least have some kind of control over it, such as repositioning or disabling.

Is there a converter for Ikonboard? I might go back to using that if this is the way things are going.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about 👍🏻

8 hours ago, breatheheavy said:

versus call something "absolutely terrible"

I wrote about this and showed it on screenshots many times before the release of 4.5. I hope that at least after this discussion, the developers will pay attention to the problem of huge empty space, which worries not only me.