One peeve I've noted just from trying to respond to this: the "Reply to Thread" button takes you to the Quick Reply box, and I'd rather it take me to the advanced screen. Since it's at the bottom of the page anyway, it would be easier to just scroll down to use Quick Reply and send you to the advanced reply screen if you hit the "Reply to Thread" button.
I must say...all these iPhone-style buttons look sharp and everything, but the upgrade has made it hell to access this place with an iPhone (which I do quite often through Safari because it used to be so easy to navigate that I didn't really need a forum viewer like Tapatalk to read things and click around).
It helped when the post-click color was red instead of grey. That way, it was easier to tell which link I'd clicked than "wait...which tiny grey thing is it?"
Now, the nice drop-down "Quick Jump?" menu at the bottom is now completely borked for me. I guess it's in some kind of script the iPhone can't do, but the drop-down scrollable menu was a lot better. I used to be able to open up a list of scrolling options to go through, but now it doesn't even recognize it as a scrolling drop-down menu. It only displays the first few forums for me and won't let me scroll through the menu at all now on my phone, which is no good. That was the easiest way to go from Off Topic to TG to Post Your Car to F1 or whatever without having to go all the way back to the main page (and consequently, the easiest way to kill time while waiting for crap).
I miss the quick jump/navigation box being the very last thing at the bottom of the page instead of up with the Quick Reply box. It looks like it's part of the reply box now, which could be a bit confusing to n00bs who don't know that'll take them out of a thread and away to somewhere else.
Another issue with the new Quick Jump (now I guess it's "Quick Navigation") box: there's no "go" button next to it. That "go" served a couple important purposes. First, say I'm in Funny Pictures and want to go to OT. The quick jump box is already on OT, so I'd click "Go" next to it to go there. Secondly, sometimes I'd be on a browser that's kinda ghetto (...at school, arrrgh) and it wouldn't automatically jump to a different forum after I'd clicked on it, so I had to hit "go" next to the box to make it open the other forum's page. This is probably why they did the goofy script menu with actual links to click on instead of a scrolling drop-down menu of options, but it just doesn't work as well (IMHO).
Text sizes seem a bit smaller and more difficult to read. I miss the lines dividing the sticky posts from the regular ones being red, too--they were much easier to see that way. The bottoms of pages seem super-cluttered, too, with three big boxes stacked under the "Quick Reply" one. Didn't two of these used to be next to each other and take up less space? Like the "Permissions" box was next to one of the others instead of under it? If those boxes were laid out in a more compact layout, it might alleviate the cluttered feel a bit.
I second ahpadt's suggestion of "make it look as much like the old forums as you can!" I understand that it's impossible to get it looking exactly the same, but the last color scheme was warm and inviting. Dark themes are nice sometimes, but they should probably be an option instead of a default, lest we get pegged as "that emo car forum." The iPhone-style icons are cute, but they seem rather generic and having these big graphic boxes next to every thread looks cluttered, IMHO. If they came with the vb4 theme, we'll probably get tired on them soon anyway. I don't even remember having big icons next to every thread because it was so easy to tell the bold (unread) threads from the regular (read) ones. I'd get rid of them altogether or replace them with much smaller graphics.
As for the main page, I miss the gears...maybe update those graphics to fit more with vb4 but bring back something that's unique to this forum? I'm not sold on the main page's sidebox, but don't mind it, either.
As for image resizing...I miss the yellow box script. When much of your forum time is spent on iPhones or sketchy redneck routers that were probably duct taped together and beaten into sorta working with a hammer, lightboxes and other fancy script thingies are the bane of your existence. Simplicity =
. The old yellow "resized image" boxes were simple and they worked.
Pardon the long post, but I figured you might want feedback re: how the site looks and works under less-than-ideal circumstances!
