"How much time did you invest in helping the community lately?"

They – never – consulted the users of Elysiun about the change they were going to make.

IMO They should never have transferred to VBulletin! Elysiun was a great forum! This is crap and I'm not using it anymore!!

That's not to say you can't criticise, but at least be constructive.

Having said that, I also have more difficulties reading the new pages. I would prefer a more visible distinction between the various elements on the page (individual posts, but also the toolbar below the graphical header). I guess you need to guide the eye a bit more and pull it toward relevant elements?

Of course, it's far easier to crack an egg than to lay one (crappy translation of Dutch proverb ;-)

The forum design looks like design for design's sake so now, for example, we have links that just look like bold text. This may well render some older posts almost usless as it will be difficult to tell text that was bolded for emphasis from text links. Newcomers will be forgiven for not catching on immediately.

The same goes for the decision not to visually separate individual posts. I doubt there is a compelling functional reason for choosing to make posts meld together.

Personally I don't recall a design contest but I do recall Timothy making a statement that the new forum would be white, back when the blenderartists (vBulletin) forum was launched. A lot of discussion ensued then but it seems little notice was taken of the comments or opinions. There was even a smiley competition and Sago produced a huge selection of professional-looking, original emoticons – yet we've been left with the vBulletin defaults. We were alos pormised footer navigation, including a forum jump but we've been given an entirely useless "similar threads" function instead. Some of those threads are four years old, locked (hopefully) and not remotely related to the topic being viewed.

Yes there's a split between like and dislike and this is usual in any design discussion (you have people from 13 to 50+ using the forum – you're not going to get unanimous support). However, even most of those who "like" it have expressed reservations about the lack of delineation. Most important though are concerns about functional changes, like the loss of post-counts and the hiding of links.

That said, I mostly don't mind the changes and Timothy is clearly no idiot since he's been running elysiun and blenderartists successfully for years. We can only hope some important changes will be made fairly promptly when he returns.

What surprises me is that so many people have comments about the design, yet when we held a design contest a while ago the entries weren't that good. If you think you can do better, you had your chance!

Roel

But, I do have a few gripes.

I feel the header is to big, it takes up half my display. And I feel theres alot of space being wasted with it. Especialy around the text.

Because the forum is not centered, I think it causes a few other problems for people use to forums being centred. I don't know what but it feel un-comfortable.

The colour scheme is fine for me, not too bad and looks elligant.

The advert printed at the top of every 2nd post is very annoying and causes me sometimes to completely skip it.

When someone post large images, a scrollbar appears at the bottom of the post, and it wastes usuable space on the left.

All in all it is pretty good, but I just feel it wastes to much important, usable space.

With everything there is going to be a few teething problems, so I'm confident you'll solve the bigger problems.
The rest of them are most likely I'm not use to it. ;)

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=71343