New comment framing is a train wreck

Apparently someone implemented a change to the comments in articles where the upvote, reply, and flag links are hidden until you hover over the comment. Why? No clue. It doesn't make anything better, but it does make things a hell of a lot worse. Why? Because now when you highlight a comment the box expands a little shifting the alignment of other comments.

This is a horrible user experience. When you're idly scrolling down with your mouse in the field of play the boxes jump around disrupting your ability to read things.

Comment box dimensions should not be changing just by moving your mouse around the page!

@Thanatos2k: Its on the forums too. Who in the hell designed this?

In addition, where the page numbers on the forums? Was it a design choice or a bug? Please take a look into this thanks.

Also on the forums now I can’t see who posted in a topic last and at what time so now I can’t easily tell if I’ve read all the posts in a thread or not. It’s terrible.

I’m on an iPad using the Safari web browser by the way.

The dates when posts are created are missing too. Please don't jack these forums up like they were a few years ago.

The two big issues for me are:

1) not being able to see at a glance how many pages the topic has. Sure, I could follow along to the total replies field for each individual thread, but having page numbers right under the thread title gave that information at a glance. It just felt much more comfortable and instant.

2) bolding. I'm using light theme and it seems like any topics I've already read are treated as lower priority - they look greyed-out, where they're actually the ones I'm looking for. It's not completely unreadable but it's an eyestrain.

I know everyone gets used to changes after a while, in the same way your eyes adapt to darkness after a couple of minutes, but it feels like these two are steps backwards which might genuinely put new users off a bit.

*edit* There's one other thing - the most visible information at the moment is the name of the board I'm posting on. It's in bold red, under every thread title on a board. I'm probably missing something about the way other users use the forums, but that's redundant information for me, as I'm already posting on that board.

GS. Just roll back the CSS version to a week ago and start again.

Test locally or in a limited beta sample and get feedback before deploying to the live server, jeez.

jeez guys. why have you replaced the html tables that displayed the tables of forum posts (correct use of tables!) with a div soup flexbox layout?? the author, last post, views and posts columns don't need to be that wide on desktop. why would you alter the layout like that? makes no sense.

and i'm not even going to start on that hover to reveal forum post control crime against ux. it's terrible on desktop and mobile. seriously guys, roll those changes back pronto and we'll just pretend it never happened

edit: seriously wtf is all that space at the bottom of the post?! who approved this layout lol? shambles

Every change is for the worse

Site has become unusable now, I hate to state the obvious here but: holy hell... this is quite the mess.

I HATE LOOKING AT GREY POSTS it messes with my eyes let us go back to the regular black posts please

So sorry, this is a bug. Thank you so much for letting us know, we will update this thread once we have it fixed.

great news it's going to be fixed but, come on mate, we all know this isn't a bug lol. there's too much stuff been changed for that. this is a poorly considered UI rollout.

i'm not in any way suggesting it's your fault by the way but please feedback to your dev teams that, if they're going to be tinkering with the forum, to focus on existing problems - the heavy load times, that adblock prevents embedded youtube videos from loading, the mobile view that's missing so many of the desktop features, the forum search feature that's practically useless etc. with this they've "fixed" a problem that never existed and considerably degraded the forum's usability in the process

Seriously. I'm a programmer. The only way this is a "bug" is if you did zero testing whatsoever on these UI changes before you rolled them out. If so, your development process is broken beyond belief. If you did testing, you'd notice immediately how horrible this is.

Just roll this nonsense back and go back to the drawing board.

Yeah if this shit ain't fixed I'm gone. I've held on as this place circled the drain for the last decade, but I'm not going to ruin my eyes over some misplaced sense of loyalty.

The way the posts jump around as I move my mouse up and down the page (due to the Quote, Reply etc. buttons behind hidden), the font, the color...

...ain't gonna happen.

and now all the avatars are missing with adblock turned on. seriously this is embarrassing folks. your QA team are stealing a living.

@angerawr can we have an update please? i agree with @br0kenrabbit

Hi All - the formatting should be fixed now. Please let us know if you run into any more problems!

thanks for the update mate and for listening to the community. it's made the world of difference browsing the forums

Except now, you can't tell a read thread from an unread thread. :-\

Our avatars have also shrunk.

and the number of pages in a thread have gone from beneath the thread title.

ah well, i'll take that i can now browse the forums for longer than a minute without rage quitting as a win. hopefully the rest will come back with time

Yeah. It's really bad when using it on mobile/tablet as well. Unappealing as anything.