Ah yeah, both of these were true!
Zeronoise is alright, but the posts have way too much space. The “Air” feels closer to the old default look and I much prefer it.
zeronoise is a huge improvement for me! i still feel the overall information hierarchy of the sidebar / top navigation is not that great but that may just be me being slightly alienated by Discourse itself (i grew up on phpbb forums, haha)
(okay but seriously, I’m super for having a forked theme as a default that we can submit PRs for, I would contribute a ton to that)
((oh god I haven’t updated this in half a year, I still really need to fix Canny- they broke so much upstream the past few months))
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I think i should have fixed this now? Works fine in dev tools at least.
I can’t replicate this little thing popping up at all so i can’t really fix it. Which theme are you on? 
Fixed.
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This feeling, I know it…
I think we had to do a lot of fixes with some custom components so this may be less tenable now (but not impossible??), but uhmmmm @Sai what do you think
We’ll take a look
I think just manually overriding with the custom component as we are doing it now should be sufficient. If we fork the theme we’ll have to constantly maintain and update it when new things come out, rn it does this automatically and we just might to have to do a little bit of styling to it here and there.
Hmmm… I think my big concern for an open theme is code review. Style review and w/e I’m not too worried about, but there’s a chance of someone doing some nasty stuff.
I can see us asking community members to review and manage that, but it’s a time investment for them, and also for us to set up. Someone needs to review the commits, make sure nothing nasty is going on, and push a button to make it live. Before all of that, someone has to set all that up and vet some community members.
I’m glad to hear out volunteers but for the moment I don’t think I wanna rush into an open source theme? If that makes sense?
Let’s let this forum cook a minute first then we can chat about it again later
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.
I hear you, and as a fellow old forum user, I understand exactly the kind of feedback you’re giving and the look that you’re looking for. I would recoil if SA swapped over to this theme, for example.
However, we simply don’t have the resources to completely rebuild Discourse from scratch so that it looks a bit more dense and compact. Even if we let the community do it – which I am open to – I’m just not sure the benefit outweighs the effort required from all parties.
The current product Discourse provides is designed with usability for all types and demographics in mind, so I trust their UX testing and expertise over my own preference.
I dunno, i’ve done a lot of research on ui design, gestalt principles, including dense similar subjects for many years. A lot of that is violated by sites like these, which seem to fit more into the modern trend of corporate minimalism, which is a style trend that they all corroborate rather than a user-friendly trend based on established science – it’s like they just chose to neglect the decades of research prior by huge organizations and psychologists. One of the big rules of UX design is specifically not to change too dramatically from standard expectation, because it influences how people will try to navigate a space. It might be better on mobile, but for desktop it has very “fish out of water” nature to it.
It’s not horrible, but it could affect how lucrative the forums become, if people find themselves getting lost a lot, or exhausted by how much everything seems to blend and bleed together without sufficient boxed-in related elements and visual separation, or due to excessive monotony.
(Big one for me is how all the posts just kinda stream together into one long ribbon due to the lack of a hard barrier between each person’s post reply, if you blink while scrolling you might miss a gap; quote blocks visually separate more than anything else does…)
Just look at the General Discussion category for example, and the threads beneath it - it’s an exhausting spam of identical-looking blocks of text - titles don’t stand out enough, tags are buried between it and the regular text and aligned the same without any separation or indentation (bold text doesn’t stand out as much in white text on dark bg as it does in black text on light bg)…
It’s just soup, especially in dark mode. It won’t help discoverability of threads.
It gets a little better the longer i stare at it, but that means an acclimatization is needed. Zeronoise is much better for thread scrolling (also has some colour coding and other visual separations), but you have to know you can swap to it.
found a visual bug with zeronoise, column headers have no background and overlap text when scrolling (gif):
(ps: inability to put additional spaces / newlines in posts without the use of the line separators is rather annoying, makes it difficult to cleanly break up a post into topical groupings or separate replies)
Fixed, had a typo in the color variable, thank you!
Also reduced space between posts a bit.
I was also wondering if there would be a chat integration (that doesn’t rely on discord) I know discourse has a chat integration they released a year and half ago, although I’m not sure sure how active it would be since like 1% of the active userbase uses these forums. For example there would be one for creators to quickly ask for help with their projects and anyone can see whats new on the sidebar.
To me, this forum should have been easy to use and to explore, the “artwork” tag in the creator hub should be more welcoming to me when I post some art related topics.
Also if I flagged my topics or my topics are flagged as off topic by others, they should be immediately removed! Now I see that to me action is taken to remove all of my topics when I want to start over again.
Two thoughts:
one. does artwork as a tag exist because it was added by admins, or was it just typed in one day by a user like a hashtag?
Two: if you’re going to start deleting and then creating even more topics, that’s going to make users here even less receptive to reading posts from you.
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My thoughts on this reply:
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1: I am not going to overload the forum, that is not what my autistic brain has learned.
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2: I decided to remove all of my topics when they flagged by others user and by myself, all because most of my posts are off topic due to the complexity of the categories.
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3: I do create alot of artwork posts, having such tags in this creator hub would be ok to me.
And finally,
- 4: I don’t want to fight with anybody, but I am autisticly rather more frustrated about the things that I try to post with good intentions, but my posts got flagged as off topic which has turned me almost into a sore quiter ( a person who gives up and quits) on this forum.
Dealing with Scam Commissions
Since paying more attention to this forum I’ve so far seen 2 posts (both reported, 1 still up as of this post) that are clearly scams trying to steal money from people looking for avatar/world commissions.
These scams are sadly common on Discord and unsurprising that they have made their way here. Worse still as this forum becomes more popular these posts are likely to increase in frequency.
Personally I see a few potential fixes:
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Remove the Commission Section: This is the most extreme fix but in theory it would make it far easier to police if not filter out these kind of threads automatically but would make this forum less useful overall as well as deny valid commission posts.
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Gatekeep the Commission Section: Only approved people could make threads with those tags but obviously this means VRChat now has to manually approve everyone, a potentially time consuming process.
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Increase moderation on the Commission Section: Basically have moderators that are more active in checking in on those tags specifically but again like the gatekeeping solution this requires more active work on VRChat’s part.
None of these are perfect but it has to be better than letting these posts flood the forums and potentially scam people out of their money.
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We’re probably going to close off the commission section to new posts, its moderation requirements and risk is too high for the benefit we gain. :S
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