I'm just going to start a thread for this because there have been several questions in multiple threads and I wanted to address them all. We've released our new forums this morning after about a 12-14 hour downtime to convert everything over. It's a significant change and I'm really excited about it. New Features There are plenty of new features now available. Some of the most important are alerts, tagging, full mobile responsiveness, avatars and post likes. I will try to post some tutorials for those who have questions about them. As you go along, you'll find a lot of things that could boost the experience. Just as an example, you can now highlight text of anyone's post and be given an option to quote just that in a reply. Things That Are Missing You will find some things missing that will be restored. Search will be back up (hopefully) within a few days. Thread tags will return. Many have asked about the "Dark Theme". That too will return, as are plans to bring back Texans and Astros styles for those forums. My goal is to gather feedback on the current theme and make changes to it before providing alternates. Feel free to let me know what you think works for you and what doesn't. You can no longer use HTML in your posts, but that shouldn't be a problem. All kinds of media will auto-embed by simply posting a link to it. Twitter and YouTube are perfect examples. You no longer need to post the embed code. There is a lot I'm still in the process of doing and Rockets Media Day is tomorrow, but hopefully I can hammer out everything you need in the next few weeks before the 2016-17 Rockets season starts.
Clutch, HUGE congrats on "re-launching" the forum. I know it was a TON of work. I honestly did not expect it before the season so this is a real treat. Once again, ClutchFans delivers!
@Clutch , just a style suggestion for the current "white theme." It feels like there isn't enough visual separation between posts. You could add more post contrast by making the Message (.messageList .message) background-color #f5f5f5 and the message border border: #ccc. That allows the padding to be white and offer a better visual break. Take a look at it in Chrome Developer to test it out.
This is will definitely bring CF into the modern era. Great work! Also, great to hear the dark side will be back. As a minor aside, the new emojis suck. Some of the better "old" emojis are missing. In particular, the "confused question marks" looking emoji was one of the best emojis I've seen anywhere. Can we get that back?
small wish list item -- a link to the main page from the forums. Now that we have a Home button for returning to bbs index page from anywhere in the forums, sure would love to have a way to jump to www.clutchfans.net from the forums. Maybe by clicking the ClutchFans logo at the top, so we can jump from bbs to main page and back easily within a single browser tab.
Clutch, When I get tagged I'm not getting any notification for it. Seems others are. Not sure why. I haven't changed any settings and every box is checked on my alert preferences.
Thanks for hauling ass, Clutch and Clutch Crew! Some things I noticed: - I would like the bar dividing the sig and the posts to be a little bit bolder so that my aging eyes can see the difference on my ipad. - On my ipad air, there's a lag when typing inside the reply that causes words to get autocorrected by my ipad piece by piece. The word "autocorrectted" would end up typed as "auto core erection" or something like that....
Thanks, Clutch! Don't think there is already a way to do this; is it possible to review a thread's posts sorted by top-rated posts in the thread?
Before my criticisms, first, we appreciate all of the hard work that goes into the site. Always been my favorite BBS by far. There are some things I like here - the font is nicer - but there is so much wasted real estate now, especially vertically. Having to scroll much more vertically now is a disappointment - is there a preference for this I'm missing? Before anyone scoffs at this trivial notion, I enjoy eating lunch while reading the BBS, and having messy fingers means you want to minimize keyboard/mouse interaction. As many users enter only one or two lines of content, I will now see only three to five comments at a time per page instead of a dozen or so. If I could disable all of the avatars, that might solve the problem. I personally think the lack of avatars was actually a plus for this site, and now I fear we will see all sorts of distracting juvenile avatars which will detract from having a more serious conversation on the BBS forums where intelligent conversation would be ideal. I can see the value of the avatars on forum(s) where we talk about gorditas, those are more based on casual conversation & having fun, and less on serious thought, so I would be OK with annoying avatars there.
First - thanks clutch, love the new feature set, and it was a mountain of data to merge, I am sure, so congrats. Re: Color scheme - I find the current version too white (and not in a Trump rally sort of way) but rather the contrast is not enough to notice where the boxes are etc, and I miss a little of the Rockets Red theme - might be fun to play with the Red and Mustard - but I will leave that up to stylists. So, overall LOVE the new format - want some contrast in colors to help navigate better. Thanks. DD
I find it to be actually much less scrolling vertically. The user profile stuff at the left of a post is the same horizontal width as before. So the text box should be the same, too. But I see your point about one-liner replies being vertically larger due to avatar size. I assume you have signatures turned off, too. Ppl with signatures on won't find the Avatars added vert height to one-liner posts. But the big win is how Quoted text has max size now with "click to expand." You'll find that really helps. Also, big images can no longer take over a page. Another huge win is Mobile View. You have much more horizontal room to read, which should help with vert scrolling....as user profile stuff is no longer on the left in Mobile view. Also, check out the upper right. There is post-by-post scrolling, and quick top/bottom scrolling. Check out the double up/down and single up/down arrows.
Am on a trip and can only see the mobile version right now. Seems like you did an awesome job, I love this design and everything seems to be much more responsive and intuitive.