Well, as you've noticed, we had a major upgrade last night. It's something we've been working on behind the scenes for a couple of months. This new version of vbulletin has a ton of new features, including (soon) ability for members to maintain individual blogs, a new content manager where our articles and sticky notices will eventually go, and other stuff as well. There will still be some changes to the look-and-feel of the site over the next weeks, including a proper makeover of the header, and probably some tweaks and adjustments. Among the fixes that the upgrade should resolve is problems with new member post moderation and new member registration. We should soon also have support for avatars and some other personalization features. As this version of vbulletin was a from-the-ground-up rebuild of the software, it is still a little bit buggy even though it is almost a year since its release. We made the decision that it was stable enough to upgrade to, but I'd appreciate it if, as our members identify bugs or problems, they list them in the "report bugs" thread I've started. As always, any comments, thoughts, criticisms, and suggestions are appreciated. Please feel free to PM me, or any of the degreeinfo moderation team. Thanks very much for your continued support!
In my opinion, the text font colors are are harder to read, presumably due to less contrast with the background color. Increasing and decreasing the brightness doesn't seem to help on my laptop screen. Overall, I like the new graphics though.
The new forum is indeed harder to read. You can use Firebug, to change the site contrast or font weight easily fast. Overall, the new interface is very nice. Good job!!!
I didn't see this when I posted my thread but this is a great upgrade. It looks like a new car...lol My only complaint is with the font size. It's too small and I'm having to strain to read...this may have something to do with the color contrast as well. great job so far though!
Will this version correct the bug that makes me have to log back in whenever I take more than a few seconds to type a post?
This is done in the admin panel. The admin controls this regardless of what version. I know, because I have been running forums, vBulletin, PHPBB, Phorums platforms since 1999.
This problem was fixed if you click "remember me" when you are signing in. Now, it looks like it may be unnecessary, since the Quick Reply function works better than it used to.
I have a feature request: The ability to give "thumbs up" or approvals of some kind to individual posts with these approvals being aggregated and displayed below the user's name in every post. I've seen this in a number of forums. It gives people new to the forum and others some idea of who gives quality responses without having to rely on post count. It also inspires people to write quality posts in hopes of getting approval from the community. It creates a positive feedback loop that benefits everyone.
Selecting "remember me" only functions for logging in automatically whenever you visit degree info. I think what Dr. Pina meant is the fact that the site automatically logs a user off if what they write takes time to complete. If you want to type a longer response, when you hit the post quickly button, it shows you've been logged off which means you have to log back in. very inconveniencing to say the least. I think this could be corrected by increasing the session time that is allotted an inactive users. The time it takes between browser refresh, which is the session time should fix this issue. Try it.
No, I meant what I said. If you clicked "remember me" it wouldn't automatically log you off if it took you too much time to complete your reply. Since I have my browser set to delete all cookies when I close it, this was never an inconvenience to me.
Somehow I noticed that I visit the forum less often than before the layout change. In my opinion the posting overview ( Distance Learning Discussions ) was before a lot easier to navigate before. The posting titles are to small and to bright, while by and large irrelevant information (posted by/ timestamp) is written in dark letters. My eye seems to jump always at the more readable information (e.g. the darker font), thus I have to force myself against this movement. My suggestion would be to make the headlines in bold and the darkest blue findable plus a bit taller. Especially for the stickies: Blue letters on a blue background seem to be more than a "bit" counter productive in regards to readability/usability.
