I do think some issues could be solved with a new theme, but I don't know enough about board themes to make one. The page headers everywhere take up a lot of space. It's odd, because they did on the old forum too, but it didn't bother me for some reason. I'd like a theme that is more compact, so you can see more topics on a page. The pointless "Logged" icon is wasting space in each message. A lot of places have unnecessary margins.
The top section can be shrunk somewhat by clicking the "-" at the top right, if that helps.
The "Logged" doesn't waste any space. To the left of that is where the note shows up indicating a post has been edited.
There are a few places that could be compacted a bit, but it's a pretty minor issue I think.
Oh, my biggest issue now is the Search. I'd like to search for all posts by a user in the last 15 days, but Search requires a keyword. And you can't use "the" or "a", or search for all posts without asparagus. I tried searching for Dwarf, but it seemed like there should be more. It was slower than the old search, and the results were bloated. I just need a list of topics and post #, like before.
To view the last posts of a person, go to their profile and you'll see a link to do that.
The search can potentially be a bit slow, most often if you search for something nobody else has searched for yet, or if you search for something which shows up in most posts. This should smooth out a bit over time.
An oddity with the SMF search is that the top search box will only search within the particular board you're in. If you want to search the entire forum, you need to go back to the index and do it or instead click the little magnifying glass icon to go to the advanced search form.
Also, the search supports more advanced methods like searching for phrases by surrounding them with ", or excluding results with certain words by sticking a - in front of them. Pretty much the same as you can do with Google or other advanced search engines.
Also, I really dislike the smilies, they have a white "aura" that was obviously meant so they would blend well with a white background. It's really annoying.
If you'd like, I can donate a pack of smilies I made myself, though most of them have the downside of being animated. (they blend perfectly with any background though.)
Example of one: 
Yeah, I've said it before, the default smileys for SMF are pretty crappy (even ignoring the "halo" effect on dark backgrounds). I'm actually a bit fond of the old default phpBB2 smileys, which also show up well on any background.
I'd definitely like to see the default SMF smileys swapped out for better ones.
I don't suppose anybody knows why this forum takes two or three minutes to load for me, do they? The old ones loaded right off. I seem to have similar troubles with other SMF forums.
Does that for me, too. Don't know about other SMF forums.
My ISP is pretty crappy, so that might be it.
Two to three minutes? Ouch. So it's when you go to
the index? Only the first time, or every time?
I've been running on my old 650mhz laptop for the past few days with both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 and haven't noticed any slowdowns like that. Firefox 3 is definitely better, though.
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Topic: Welcome to the New Forum (Read 60015 times)