The sidebar is definitely way more helpful for navigation, and makes use of some of that empty space for sure.
I still have to wonder how nice these are going to be to use for more active an nuanced topical discussions overall by all manner of people. It still has that “arbitrary text floating in space” type of structure, and would still be easy for people to not be entirely sure where they are. I remember browsing the Kazamatsuri forums for some VN discussion some years back, and they were on discourse even back then, but i found them just as awkward to navigate and easy to lose track of where you are on the site. None of the officially available themes solve the core design flaws.
As i sort of went over in my somewhat antagonistic image criticizing the design philosophy of discourse’s systems;
A bit of spit and polish to change it’s clothing i don’t think will be enough.
There are a lot of things that are just needlesly contrary to how peoples’ brains are conditioned to interpret websites… for example:
or even worse on zeronoise
this just looks like i’m on a website called “Forum Feedback”, not that i’m in a thread called forum feedback. While most people will figure it out, it’s counterintuitive, so it causes hesitation and makes people have to think and fight with the UI, making it bad UX. Good UX UI you don’t have to think about, navigating and interpreting it is natural and quick. Need to remember to think about it from an external casual not very inclined person that might be coming here looking for help on something, not people who’ve adapted to it’s oddities.
The idea of having openly contributable theme repo seems like a great idea, but it’d benefit from stripping stuff down and starting from the basics. Looking at most still active forums, they have decades of refinement of what works and what doesn’t (ofc you can exclude stuff like signature clutter), and they are all similar and familiar to most people (ex spacebattles forums, windows forums, tom’s hardware); it really should be given credence.