Usability problems

[dopefish]

Haven't been to these forums in a long time but missed the quality of photos and critique here. Like the new format but have a couple of suggestions:

The login doesn't work in Mozilla Firebird .7. It goes to a blank page with a hidden form - I have to view source on the page and grab the url, paste and get logged in.

The system for read/unread and visited links is troublesome and inconsistent. There are a ton of threads I know I haven't read that are regular font. Plus, I prefer the back button (mouse gestures) instead of using crumb trails and the like. The bold does not go away when you use back, you have to reload the page. Aside from that, I don't understand why the colors for visited/not visited links are so similar? Can anyone really tell the difference between #000000 and #000030? Using more distinguishable colors would make browsing the forums MUCH easier and more reliable regardless of the bold functionality.

I know forums like this are usually run by folks who aren't getting paid, so know I appreciate those efforts and mean this as constructive critique.

[Photo-John]

What operating system are you using? Honestly, we do almost all of our testing on IE now because that's what almost everyone uses. And that's the browser that vBulletin was designed for. However, I just tried the login with Netscape 6.1 and it behaved somewhat as you described. Give me some more information and I'll see what I can do. And thanks for letting me know about the problem. I definitely want you to be able to log in.

As for the visited/not visited links problem, I checked that, too. There are some issues with the visited links not working as well in the new forums software. They just don't work the same way. However, I changed the stylesheets to match the rest of the site, yesterday. Those stylesheet changes aren't showing up in Netscape.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. To some extent you probably just need to to get used to the new forums. There are some things that don't work as well, like the visited links. But overall I think you'l find they're much better. Just give them a chance and I think you'll get used to the differences.

[Michael Fanelli]

The login doesn't work in Mozilla Firebird .7. It goes to a blank page with a hidden form - I have to view source on the page and grab the url, paste and get logged in.

Firebird is still a beta and has rendering problems in spite of using the gecko engine. It's not meant as a substitute for Mozilla yet.