«

[PIGSgrame]

What I wonder is: What was wrong with old Abandonia? Was the relaunch really necessary? Within a few days, a nice-looking, well-working page has been turned into an almost unuseable one. I also liked the old design much better, it was clean, well organized and easy to get used to. The new design (which is meant to be "simply elegant", I think) just looks unfinished and unprofessional (and be assured that I don't consider a design which is overloaded by Flash and animated GIFs "professional"). I fail to see any advantages of the new Abandonia, and all I notice is that everything works worse than before (game search is not working, forum is cut-off at the bottom of the page and must be "unframed" to be able to use it, forum has far less options - I hate it when I can only have 10 posts on a page, I also don't want to be subscribed for a thread I post into with no way to disable it).

Originally Posted by dosraider

At least the site is fast, the forum is fast, and I don't have to download a whole bucket of Java shit to use it.

That is true. But so was it before the relaunch, so this is hardly a favour of the new layout. Additionally, I actually don't remember that much boards which made me download "a whole bucket of Java shit"...

Originally Posted by dosraider

Several people are working on it to improve it, to find solutions for the problems.
There are other sites where none would even care to maintain it.

Right, there are Millions of non-working sites where no one cares to maintain them. But this does not explain why an already well-working, active community portal was rewritten, just to be buggy (up to being unuseable) and in urgent need of improvement.

Please don't geht me wrong: I do appreciate the work that is put into this portal and has been for years. But frankly speaking, I cannot say much more than that in my eyes, the relaunch has completely failed so far (or, in other words: I think it was not worth the hard work which has undoubtably been put into it).
If you care for my opinion: Please bring back the old Abandonia page, where everything was nearly perfect.

[dosraider]

Originally Posted by PIGSgrame

Additionally, I actually don't remember that much boards which made me download "a whole bucket of Java shit"...

Now let's see, there was ign, gamespot, gamepro, -amongst others-, those are the sites where I dismissing myself (yes I could do so there) and stopped visiting because they had to modernise and do agressive advertising, animated pages, and so on.
Not that they will miss me, my place is already taken in, but also it seems I don't miss them.
I simply refuse to accept the 'you must install' this and that crap plugin and the according updates.

And you know what? The longer I use this new board the more possibilities I discover.

It also seems that many of the problems are related to all that crap the youth seems to like so much, all the non-standard plugins and so on. Give that a thought.

So yeah, personnal opinion of mine:
Congrats, they still stand.

[Eagle of Fire]

Then I guess it won't bother you when I'll simply stop visiting the site. Except when I'll need to download something of course.

[JudgeDeadd]

What I wonder is: What was wrong with old Abandonia? Was the relaunch really necessary? Within a few days, a nice-looking, well-working page has been turned into an almost unuseable one.

You have just voiced my thoughts.

Please bring back the old Abandonia page, where everything was nearly perfect.

Don't be silly. Once a website's layout goes to digital heck, it never comes back. That's one of the universal laws of cosmos.

While we're at it, I don't remember any "Java shit" on the old Abandonia...

[Scatty]

No, I don't think there was any Java on the previous layout. Despite that this new layout is severely worse then the previous one (and that's where I actually didn't like the previous layout after the very early, welcoming blue one) I'll still visit Abandonia forums.
I suppose the site will improve anyway, after few months, but that probably depends on how dedicated the actual members of the site itself will be to work on it, because I doubt that, whoever these "students" are, they are that interested in improving Abandonia.

[Lulu_Jane]

Perhaps a modicum of patience might be the gracious thing to have.

Cosmetic changes can be done in time and are, after all, only cosmetic, once the bugs are ironed out things will be better, and just as lovely I'm sure. It's an ambitious change.

Eagle Of Fire, have faith - we'd miss you if you left

[The Fifth Horseman]

If you care for my opinion: Please bring back the old Abandonia page, where everything was nearly perfect.

Unfortunately, cannot be done.

When the upgrade was first mentioned I thought it was just going to be a couple small tweaks/aditions to what was aleady there, not a complete replacement.

And honestly I too liked the old layout more.

[Dave]

Originally Posted by Eagle of Fire

Then I guess it won't bother you when I'll simply stop visiting the site. Except when I'll need to download something of course.

It's the 4th time that I read this, are you threatening us Eagle?
You are free to do what you want.

[nedela]

drupal has a lot of benefits and possibilities, but it's quite rigid and needs extensive testing from various computers and circumstances. then it needs a lot of tweaking to make it work propperly - like for example forums.

stranglely enough default settings in themes are not really that good.

But i guess updating and such should be simplified a lot for those that do it.

and the whole idea is that you login to site and that login is connected to forums. so when you click on forum login it should really turn you to the site login instead. but a lot of steps need to be made to make it work like that.

and yes - testing should be done more thoroughly. on IE (still the most used browser), Firefox and Opera at least. certain things are not really that hard to miss. like the "dedicated to classic dosgames" text on higher resoluton, the news text jumping to bottom of page in IE when the right side is wider.

then you have issues where admin sees the site is different that user. imagine that. i wouldn't believe it if i didnt' see it with my own eyes... so it really needs to be tested a lot, under many different variations of site.

also were commercials planned to be in between the text? if so why? makes it hard to ready and just makes commercials annoying instead of interesting to look at.

[Scatty]

The advertisements like in the previous layout, at the top above the forum, were pretty good - didn't bother much while they offered sometimes quite a laugh too (free groin kick ).
These ones are just nerving indeed, but I guess it's just one of many, many improvements over the forum to come.