it is smarter and a cleaner look

Currently "separate boxes" is the intentional look.

I've lightened the grey bar's background a BIT (you may have to hit REFRESH), however while it's not supposed to be intrusive (you should have seen it when I had it with a colored background - now that was intrusive) it's also not supposed to completely disappear... its meant to complement the blue user line on the tops of posts.

Yes, that definitely helps a bit.

Maybe darkening the blue user box on the top would help as well? Just seems like there should be more emphasis on that.

One other suggestion:

I find it much easier to read the "replies/views" as they are on the current page (written straight out, with greater emphasis on replies" than in chart form.

I've decided to try out the chart method for now. Although that's an easy thing to change either way.

I'm assuming that the Reply mechanism isn't there because we can't reply on that version, but I'd like to see it.

Thank you for adding page navigation at the top of the page! "Jump to Last Post" is also a great addition. I just realized how often that's the one I want to see.

Speaking of pages, the sample Custom Installers Forum says there are 546 pages. I've always wondered how I could get to, say, page 200 if I were looking for something I couldn't quite remember, but I might be able to narrow down if I could browse more or less by date. Is there a way to enter a page number and go there? Or a date?

One of the things I prefer here at RC over other forum software is more posts per page here. Looking at thread 16446, about camera pigtails, if I place the top of post 2 at the top of the page, the old software gives me 2, 3 ,4 ,5, and most of 6. The new version gives me 2, 3, 4, and 5. On that basis, I prefer the old version: there’s more stuff per monitor page.

Thanks for keeping things at 20 posts per page. It’s helpful to be able to go to particular pages of a thread when I’m looking for things.

Can I assume if there’s a box labeled “RC Mail” that I can actually send RC mail to that person? Is the box missing if they have disabled it? As it stands now, that link is in the profile and you’re told whether it will work, so there are no false clicks. If it won't give me a successful result, it should say so before I click on it. See the next paragraph for why I think "disappointing false clicks" are a thing to avoid.

This site is so good that you've probably been there, but have you seen, on www.websitesthatsuck.com, their list of things that will kill a website? Their motto is "learn good website design by looking at bad website design," but they've gone beyond making us laugh to having a free list of more than a hundred things to include or exclude.

It's a great site for gaining insight about why we don't like some other sites, and asking yourself some of the questions there could help improve things even more. I love that I see ZERO problems with remotecental. That list might help you decide things you're on the fence about.

I have zero idea how difficult this would be to do, but it would be nice if RC expanded to fill the width of pixels on the display. This would be some setting set to variable, determined in the computer. It looks to me like the site is built as an 800 x 600 site, but if it expanded out, we'd get even more posts per page.

At the other end of the spectrum, is there a way to force the occasional photo that's too wide for the page to fit into the page? Every once in a while someone posts a photo that makes us have to scroll left and right for the entire page...again, a reason to keep individual pages, so if someone submits one such photo, the entire thread does not become a pain in the ass?

Thank you for keeping the targets large. One thing I don't like about another couple of sites is how tiny the active clickable area is on most page links.

Could you also put this thread into the Custom Installers Forum, or perhaps have its own category before Custom Installation World? I just checked from the home page, and this doesn't appear except in Intermission. We shouldn't have to find it only after we decide to fart around for a while and go to Intermission! I don't know what's more "On Topic" than "How The Site Works And Whether You'll Hate Me In The Morning (Webmaster-Wise, That Is)."

Edit:

Well, I'm in intermission, so I looked around. I found this under the oatmeal Casper:

I suppose it doesn't much matter how many posts you put per page, but I like twenty and I could adjust to 15. 10 would mean too many page changes and it literally would make me less interested in the site. Damn, how picky am I? But that's how I feel. Surprising but true.

You can only post/reply in the top test forum. The rest are just for "looking".

Yes, the presence of the "RC Mail" box on someone's post reflects whether they're enabled reception or not.

The new "Advanced" editor will make it easier to resize photo links.

The site is currently designed for 1024x768 monitors as a minimum, which still make up about 1/3 of the audience. Currently I prefer to avoid "non-fixed-width" as that makes for extremely wide paragraphs that are hard to read when maximized on higher resolution monitors. I spent a while on major sites determining what width I wanted, whether to go "free form", etc, and it seems ~1024 fixed is still the norm.

There's currently no way to go to a "specific" page (well, sure, just change the page number in the URL from 2 or 3 to 200), but that's an iffy way to find something anyways, since it COULD have been replied to since then.

Daniel, is there possibility in a future upgrade to add an indicator that tells if one has posted to a thread? Perhaps a dot over the color triangles next to the thread title, so you can look down a forum page tell what threads you have participated in?

Maybe in the future, but not right now... although there IS a new feature to help you track what you've participated in, regardless of forum.

That's a great idea!

I second edmund's idea, too. He submits so many helpful answers that I'm sure it's hard for him to remember just which threads he's taken part in. I would find it useful for the occasional thread with a name that just has no indication what it's about, the ones with titles like "Have you seen this?" or, and I think there are several, but not for years, simply "Help."

Integration of something like that into the thread list is a bit troublesome, as I would have to either keep a separate list of every thread that every user has replied to, or do a rather intensive search of every post under a thread just when you view the list of threads. (For the latter method, right now the first page of the Intermission forum would request the system to look though nearly 57,000 posts each time someone viewed it - and they haven't even read any posts yet.)

I've already added a completely new (and system friendly) feature that will give you easy access to the last threads you have started or replied to... guess no one has found it yet! :-)

Maybe next time... a number of the new features I've added are things that I had previously never figured out how to do efficiently, but then one day just figured it out.

Simply testing the old forum system:

I added some CSS tags to the forum signature that should clear out certain "open" style changes... there's an "ultimate" solution to the problem that involves putting it in its own table, but unless that kind of thing becomes an issue I prefer the current coding.

My account + my posts

Another suggestion:

In the box for "joined" and "posts," maybe the words "joined" and "posts" could either be lightened (as they are now) or bolded? Something to differentiate them a bit?