Like many others, I am not a fan of the new forum changes. A list of things I’d like to improve to make the forum better and a more enjoyable experience for myself and others is below. They are ordered from most important to least important (for me).
<li>I’m currently using a 1600x900 resolution on my laptop. I’ll use an even wider resolution on desktops. When using a higher resolution computer, the forum content occupies less than half the width of my laptop screen (not including side menu as “content”. This is very annoying. If you switch the width to percentage instead of a fixed number of pixels, it would use the vast majority of the width. Ideally, I’d also like to remove or an option to remove the new panels on the side. A compromise might be a configurable display through the user CP that lets the user select what they’d like in the side menu, or no side menu at all.</li>
<li>The new search is far less useful than the old one. For example, I might want to look up an old post of mine. With the old search, I’d search for posts by Data10 in a specific forum with a certain key word and sort by date. With the new search, I have fewer options and would have much more trouble finding the post.</li>
<li>I’m not sure if this still occurs, but one of the most awful experiences on the old forum was to spend a long time writing a post, click submit, then lose the post with a message “The server is too busy at the moment. Try again later.” I see that the new forum saves drafts, so this may have improved the issues.</li>
<li>A good portion of users, including myself, manually type out vBulletin code, such as quotes. It would be nice to have a quote button and other standard vBulletin code features in the posting menu, such as making this post an ordered list, support for attachments, links, code, fonts, italics/bold, etc.</li>
<li>There are many times I’d like to edit beyond the 20 minute window. I also operate a vBulletin forum. On my forum, I have different levels for different posters, based on the number of posts, post quality, and other things. As the posters increase in level, they gain additional forum privileges including things like longer edit windows, ability to delete your posts/threads, etc.</li>
<li>The old forum made it easy to identify threads that I’ve posted in by marking them differently. My threads are no longer marked with the new forum.</li>
<li>I am not a fan of the color scheme, with so much white and no separation between tables, or things like separation of stickied threads from regular threads.</li>
<li>I prefer the old column format, which listed more detail about last post and did not mention post start date. I also prefer the old style of naming buttons like control panel or PMs, instead of just using icons.</li>
<li>Others have reported minor bugs, such as deleting PMs.</li>
<li>In the new post screen, the menus are centered incorrectly, most notably the top menu. </li>
Edit – I see that the edit window appears to be increased to 1 hour. This is a good improvement on #5. I also see that the edited button is no longer named (#8), so I found it more awkward than it should have been to edit this post.