Hmmm… The new phpBB forum looks great! I love the sleek interface and look. But the forum is a bit too overwhelming: it would help if the side bars and top would be slightly enlargened and the background would either not be entirely white or filled more with things.

Honestly… as someone who has created and operated about a dozen forums of various categories, the recent phpBB security issues have driven me to convert my active ones to SMF as well as use SMF for all future projects. There are some nasty flaws in phpBB3 that I wasn’t a fan of… was there a reason for choosing phpBB3? SMF conversion was a breeze by the way. Just a thought!

Excelent ! All the large image formatting issues from the first test are gone !
Good Job !!!

I still cant log in !

Good work, and Paul’s style looks great.

A couple of minor points:
* Would it be possible to migrate the profiles data – particularly user location, profile picture and signature from simple:press ?
* Can the number of links in a signature and the total number of characters in a signature be raised from the current limits of 5 links and 255 characters as my simple:press signature doesn’t fit in phpBB with the defaults. This can be changed in ACP->Signature Settings–>General Settings. 10 links and 512 characters would be sufficient.
* Could the MOD Unknown Bliss recommended be installed? – you can find it at http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=2146633 which adds functionality for social networking buttons (next to PM, Jabber, WLM etc).

The picture view is horrible.
see : http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2398&p=68807#p68807

if you use the link of the picture directly, you see it in the correct proportions…

Otherwise it seems pretty good.

One request. I find the red font gives me a headache. Can we have toned down style available too?

I should add to Eben’s post above that the new forum style should offer some clues as to what the rest of the website will look like when we integrate the changes that are coming there, too. O happy day!

Viewing the forum on my mobile device (Iphone4) is awful. Everything is oversized, it’s just about readable in portrait mode but trying to view in landscape mode is impossible, the txt is huge and it’s not resizable. WordPress and beta 1 are fine, not sure what got broken for viewing via a mobile device

Don’t like the latest forum, especially the white back ground

Really simple thing: the page title currently says yourdomain.com – Index page
But you probably already knew that.

One small point that could be added to the end of the list. The pre-supplied smilles just don’t seem to sit correctly. See my post in Thermal Tape, the smilly is stuck in the air.

Am I missing something, or are there really no avatars displayed next to the names of the poster? I don’t see any avatars at all.

Is there a way to reformat the search results to be more efficient with screen space? I have a reasonable sized desktop screen (1680×1050 pixels) but I only see 2 or 3 results per page, requiring a lot of scrolling. Most of it is just blank empty space between lines. I think “Author, Time/Date, Forum, Topic, Replies, Views,” info could all fit on one line (if that is all really necessary in a search result…) Right now it takes up six separate lines.

The forum section headers are HUGE, they stand out more than anything else on the site, use much space and actually distract a lot… please make them smaller.

Just one more. There is no difference between admin, moderator and member. Everyone is red and no title.

I used to have the ability to adjust the text size and the display flowed to fit within the display width in the original PHPBB beta. I don’t see any option for that now. At least I can zoom the page (please do NOT break that), but, that’s not a satisfactory alternative to text size control.

I know it’s all the rage to have lots of white space with tiny typefaces in publishing design these days, but, that’s coming from artistic types who design large magazine-sized format pages with style-oriented content on paper, not technical content on limited-sized screens, particularly mobile platforms. Please at least provide an option to turn off the foofy expansive white space views, and control over text size.

On an iPhone/iPad and Android phone, the top News/Forum/About… menu is stacked along the right edge of the display (although left justified), pushing the rest of the page below the bottom of the display, other than the Raspberry Pi logo and site title, which remained in the upper left on the Android screen (it’s on the left below the menu on the right on the iPhone/iPad).

Searching is only possible in either Raspberry Pi or Projects and Collaboration sections – can we get search across the entire site?

It appears we still need to pad search terms smaller than three characters with wildcards, and the limit in term length is 14 characters. Why not just auto-pad and auto-truncate too long/short terms?

Now I can search for USB without padding it, but, it’s too common a term! Make up your mind! ;) Seriously, at least return a limited number of results (easy to do in SQL), with the option to continue searching backward in time if one really needs to do that.

Search terms come up highlighted in light gray characters on a white background – can they instead by background highlighted in something like medium (not too light) yellow (the way manually-highlighted text would appear in print)? Even better would be user control over all text attributes. Not sure what scripts Liz is talking about for changing background colors, but, they won’t work on mobile devices, AFAIK.

I’m not sure how to test it, but, it appears that not all pertinent results are being returned based on some fairly unique search terms, my Pi-finity! game name, in particular. I soon figured out I can’t include the “-” or “!” in the search term for obvious reserved characters reasons, but, even so, I only received three results for a query for “finity”, and there should be many, many more.

URLs are showing up within raw HTML for anchor links (e.g. … and block quotes (e.g.,

) in search results. It appears some additional filtering/formatting for these, in particular, is needed.

I would not go public with this until you’ve done a full-court press with as many simultaneous users as possible, certainly no fewer than the typical daily peak, even if the baseline PHPBB software has been able to handle it for other sites/fora. At a bare minimum, have some automated tools generate simulated posts from as many different IP addresses around the Net as possible. You really want to test it on your hardware with our users – just the voice of unexpectedly bad past experiences yapping here out in the Wilderness ;)

More to Come, but, I figured the above would keep you busy enough until my next post :)

Wow it runs at lightspeed compared to the old one.

Howdy (???????????????????????????????????).
What kind of message is that sending out.
(Period rather than question mark in both above instances as this is a rhetorical response.)
FWIW Yup, it’s fast here, pardner.
I’ll chek it out on my Padd l8tr.

I really do like Twitter Bootstrap.

Could the line above posts in viewtopic be a bit darker(easier to see) so that it’s easier to see when one post ends and another begins.

There’s no search link on the main index of the forum, which is really inconvenient.

As someone who used to maintain a phpBB forum, it’s best to go with another solution, either MyBB or SMF.

Plus, the skin is too light and there’s no delineation between posts.

I’ve tried searching for the term ‘USB’ and got the following:

Information: The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: usb.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

Please let 3-letter words be searchable!

Alas I’m going to have a hard time with the new forum style. I know phpBB has many advantages compared to the current forum, but the style in the new forum is jarring. The text is too large there is far to much white space and it’s basically unusable on a mobile device. I usually use my iPhone to read your forum.

In way of contrast, have a look at http://www.tonymacx86.com/index.php. It also uses phpBB but the design has a clean, clear, appealing style… there is no excessive white space and it works beautifully on an iPhone.

Sorry to be a downer… but I mean this to be constructive feedback.

I guess that since you limit the width of the forum, the date/time information spans over three lines (red box). Problem I see is that every post’s line get’s unnecessary high. (green box)
I would try to optimize it as seen in the (blue box)…

Also, for us with a higher resolution of 1024*768, it’s quite annoying that the site doesn’t scale it’s width…

http://i.imgur.com/G3uge.png

Could you add tapatalk functionality please, easy to add in and makes it very easy for iphone and android users to use the forum.
http://www.tapatalk.com/

On Internet Explorer 8 the left hand side of the text is missing unless you maximise the width of the explorer window (text not spacing correctly within window). Please make this forum backwards compatible as IE 8 is still in use in schools and global companies.

No. That is plain awful. Red on white? Too much white space. Default phpBB layout as per the original trial is much better.

Sorry.

Hello,
only report a single incident.

If we put the google translator to work, (like me)
line “forum FAQ LOGIN REGISTER” is put into
the first line of screen leaving the logo below and is not seen the text “RASPBERRY PI”.

Nor is it anything serious happens if you can not fix.

thank you very much

PS: Watching from Chrome.

Using Android ICS on a Motorola Xoom, the page layout has problems.

In portrait view, the top bar pushes the menu bar to the right of the screen in a single column, leaving a large empty area on the screen and forcing the page content down.

In landscape view, the top bar menu renders horizontally, but when the page portion is zoomed, the top bar renders incorrectly shifting to the right. When zoomed, the top bar can not be scrolled left to access menu choices.

Headline text is too large and the page gives an overall impression of too much white space. The apparent gap from post to post is almost as large as the post.

Though the layout is problematic, overall the performance improvements are a real plus.

I think it would look allot better if the topics titles and extra info (on the topic list on each forum) would be limited to one line (and not three as now).
If you can’t squeeze it to one line you should consider to reduce the extra info font to be much smaller size second line thus reducing the height of this line.

This would make the topic list more compact thus easier to navigate and to find information.

The same should be applied to the main page of the forum.

Part of this vertical spacing issue I find the new phpBB allot nicer than the old one,
I really like the clean white look.

Overall I love what you guys and gal’s doing,
Cheers from Israel !!!

Tiny issuette; The post icons don’t seem to appear when selected?

Waiting for phpBB to run on my Raspi! ;-) :-)

Doesn’t render right for me. IE8 on XP. Looks far worse than the first beta (which was a phpBB out of the box format, clean and easy to navigate) – why change that?

Red on white is painful. Liked the layout the way it was before.

While I appreciate all work done on the forum / new theme, I have to say that this design is simply ATROCIOUS.

MY EYES ARE STILL IN PAIN.

As already mentioned by people here: way to many white spaces (there is absolutely no need to have three rows per topic), red on while looks just bad. As a result, threads / posts list is visually melting into one unreadable mess. The thing is looking totally wrong on mobile devies as well.

I think you should use default phpBB theme (from the fist beta) and just tweak color scheme slightly.

My two cents – I feel that there should be more seperation between posts, as it is quite difficult as to where one post ends and another post starts. Also, I think it would be much better for readability if the usernames/profiles were on the left side of posts rather than on the right. And a light grey around the website would also be nice (much like it is now). But it is looking good, definately much better!

I’d have to reluctantly agree with the comments about distinguishing between posts and even between the header/footer and the posts.

The bigger feature that appears to be missing (or badly hidden) is RSS feed support. Having new posts appear direct in my mail reader makes it much more efficient to keep track of new messages and keep reading it while at work without having to constantly click the back button to get round pages of new messages at the end of threads.

Like the fact that there is a login option on the main page. One small suggestion, maybe after login it auto redirects you the page you were on? Just trivial I know, but save a small amount of hassle?

[list] is working, [list=] isn’t.

I think I also need to agree with the comments about the post seperation, it’s just not defined enough.

General comment about the style – there is TOO much white space everywhere – everyone runs ‘shortscreen’ laptops these days (and I meant that – widescreen is a misnomer as no-ones screens are any wider or have more x pixels than before) which means you don’t get many rows of text (or posts) per screen full – therefore IMHO its imperative you reduced to a bare minimum the amount of white space between lines and between spaces and around the headers for the forum.

I’m using Windows 7 64bit. In IE 9 the viewtopic page renders correctly:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y267/bonelifer/phpBB/ie-right-uhm.jpg

In Firefox 12 the mini profile info ends up below it’s post instead of to the right:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y267/bonelifer/phpBB/firefox-wrong.jpg

You’ve done a really nice job with the forum, especially with the style. Well done.

Unknown Bliss
phpBB Website Team Member

Sorry to be negative, but why is the forum sooo white? It’s just a wall of text with occasional red headings. There is very little to visually denote the end of one post, and the start of the next – they literally run into each other. A well designed forum style will “block” off the heading of each new post so you can quickly scroll through and instantly know where each post begins and ends. You simply can’t do that with this beta2 forum – it’s horrible, and a major pain to try and read.

Please please please reconsider this style by adding blocks of contrasting colour (darker, eg. grey) and rules (horizontal lines) that could be used to “box” each post.

The top navigation bar is also “broken” in Webkit mobile browsers – instead of it wrapping or being sized appropriately, you get large text at the top of the page as follows:
”
News
Forum
About

FAQ
Download
Quick Start
Wiki
™ Info
”

followed by the rest of the site that in most respects (other than the poor colour choice and lack of contrasting blocks/vertical rules/horizontal rules) seems to work well on a mobile device, although the thread title when reading a thread is massive.

Generally I like the new forum, but it seems to be missing something. I can’t find the RSS All feed button – this is the feature I use most on the current forum since it’s one stop shopping for all new content!

Some Feedback:
1. Too much white space. Translates to lots more scrolling on a small screen. More generally, screen “real estate” is valuable and a more compact layout can convey more information! Background color can be used to separate elements.
2. Understated, pastel colors are far easier on eyes. Ideally color should convey extra information.
3. Search does not seem to work. There is no search button for searching through all the forums — some posts can go in multiple categories.
4. Due to much whitespace using this on an iphone is painful. It would be neat if there was a way to use the `desktop’ view of the site (just like what some newspapers do that default to the mobile view if you connect from a mobile device). On devices like iphone/android you can zoom out and in to your area of interest so a desktop version of a site is better — the same thing will be true with the Raspi when someone interfaces a touchscreen! The button to switch to a desktop view should be at the top, not the bottom.
Thanks

Personally, I think the them and the glaring RED color that dominates is terrible. A commercial forum like Invision Power Board or XenForo would be more secure and have better support. Version 4.x of vbulletin has been nothing bot problems.

Just my 2 cents worth.

I see that it has been updated slightly, and it is starting to look better and more organised. I agree with what others are saying that the post links shouldn’t take up three rows, and would be much better if the layout was more compact. Keep up the good work!

The new forum looks nice but, as others have said, the color scheme could be tweaked a bit. A little more contrast would greatly improve readability and make it less tiresome to the eyes.

the phpbb copyright is no where to be seen?

OK great, I was wondering why there seemed to be two different forums going on. I’m assuming our current handles/data will transfer too?

the banner at the top takes up 1/3 of the page on my nokia n95

Need any more help with testing on the new forum? I keep popping onto the new forum but the test posts have vanished so don’t want to add any more unless I break some syncing :)

Needs to have “Mark forums read” on the index. Should be fine in the footer.

It’s been a few days already since: “We’ll move the forums tomorrow”. When is the move going to happen? What is holding you back?

That looks better!

Nav works in IE8 now.
Grey/Black text is much easier on the eye.
Smilies in line
Feels much more solid!

Thumbs up here.

Since there haven’t been a lot of posts lately wasn’t able to tell if it’s there in the style, but really should have the “First unread post” in the viewtopic body at the top.

you going for round 3 right now or going all the way, its all gone a bit weird….?

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