[DISCONTINUED] New design of the forum - grey on white / wish list #3 / bug reports

Jan on 14 May 2015
Latest activity Reply by Adam Danz on 25 Feb 2020

NOTE: this discussion is continued at MATLAB Answers Wish-list #6 (and bug reports)
I've opened MATLAB Answers this morning and found the new design.
The field for typing the "Body" does not consider the font settings of my browser anymore, such that my preference of sans-serif fonts is ignored. In addition the text color is a medium gray, which is hard to read for me due to the too light contrast.
Blank lines in the code let two separate code boxes appear. This makes almost all code, I've posted in the forum, invalid. It has been discussed repeatedly, that blank lines in the code confuse the indentation of the display in the forum and that this is a really bad idea. But instead of improving this, it is made severely worse now.
The new design contains even more white space, such that standard questions cannot be answered without extensive vertical scrolling. It is a very bad drawback, that I cannot see the question while I type the answer.
There is still no suggestion to use a proper code formatting, such that I have to spend 20% of my forum time typing corresponding comments as before.
But I'm coming back to the most important problem for me: It is a physical problem for me to read the low contrast grey on white text. Does anybody know a tweak or CSS trick to increase the readability?
TMW, please take into account that this new design is physically hard to read for people without young and 100% perfect eyes. This is very annoying for me.
Splitting code blocks at white lines is simply a bug. I cannot imagine why this error has not been detected before the new design has been published. The argument, that TMW is extremely conservative with changes in the forum to ensure a stability does not convince me anymore.
[EDITED] The box around the thread, the preview box, the boxes for preformatted text and code have a grey background now. So some text is even medium grey on light grey.
I'd be glad if the designers refocus on the purpose of the forum. Whatever this purpose might be, the optical reception of the characters is fundamental.
Adam Danz
Adam Danz on 25 Feb 2020
For easy navigation and for the historians,
Anyone with edit privileges should feel free to update this whenever needed.
dpb
dpb on 16 Oct 2015
I don't see that w/ Firefox 41.xy (and haven't previously prior to updating). The backgrounds are all white; wonder if there's a preferences setting causing local color instead....
Chad Greene
Chad Greene on 15 Oct 2015
The design of this forum just keeps getting worse. Seems to be slower than ever, harder to navigate, harder to see new questions, still impossible to know why some days your reputation points go up, still plagued with superfluous boxes within boxes within boxes, still incredibly low density of information. There's a difference between updating and upgrading.
Chen Lin
Chen Lin on 21 Oct 2015
Thanks for all the great feedback. I’m the new Community Product Marketing Manager, and appreciate your insight into new features and designs. We have a similar discussion about new landing page at Wishlist-4, where I shed more light on the “why” behind the new landing page.. Thanks again for your thoughts.
per isakson
per isakson on 16 Oct 2015
@Kelly - I've made my own Answers home page link (a Chrome bookmark), http://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/?term=, which takes me directly to the old home page.
Now I need to hide the Home tab of Answers so that I don't click it by mistake.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 15 Aug 2015
I edited the link last night to point it to www.mathworks.com
You should be able to locate the posting by doing a search on tag:wishlist
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 15 Aug 2015
Yeah, I don't know what happened either. Now Walter's link is answerable/commentable whereas yesterday it wasn't. Maybe the Mathworks saw our posts and fixed it.
dpb
dpb on 15 Aug 2015
@IA - not sure what happened between now and then; yesterday even if I went back to main page and used link to the main question to navigate to the new thread I got the "no answer" version; I had already tried that before posting the complaint. Today that direction succeeds while this link above from Walter is still to a broken page. Who knows what's going on???
Unlike Walter who describes various workarounds he takes, I just quit and go on...
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 15 Aug 2015
Ah yes. I am routinely logged into both. I switched to the UK server years ago during a time when the UK server was stable but the USA one was not. A couple of months ago when I tried the US server again I found it slower than the UK server.
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 14 Aug 2015
Actually if you use this link instead of the one Walter gave, it works and you can add comments or answers. http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/233928-matlab-answers-wish-list-4-and-bug-reports#answer_189368?
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 14 Aug 2015
I agree with dpb. There's no way to add an answer or a comment on that page. I don't know why. Thinking it might be because it's the UK server, I brought up the question on the US server and it has the same issue - no way to respond. Walter might have to post a new question with that information since that one is all fubar.
dpb
dpb on 14 Aug 2015
It shows up on this page but not on the new question page any longer...I've no idea why but they changed to some format Firefox apparently doesn't understand any longer...
There's the original question, the two answers and an empty (wasted) comment box since there's no comments for each but no way whatsoever to respond on that page.