I've tested it in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari for Mac with no issues. Are you using IE?
@Jtring said:
I like it. The past date/time over in the sidebar really really needs to be lighter shade of gray though. Moving it to a lighter gray background made a difficult low contrast situation even worse.
@leftquark said:
Avatars are gone but the names of the "created by" and "last replied" are still shown.
Thank you thank you thank you!!! Unfortunately this move didn't make the page any less vertically fat (my scroll finger gets really tired) but at least it's not so distracting! Thanks again!!!
@leftquark said:
I've moved the profile information for the poster to the left of the post; previously it was above the post. This makes it more like the old dGrin and easier to read posts without having to visually skip over the profile information. If I broke anything, please let me know and I'll tweak the customization.
Better--there was a lot of wasted space there, especially since the avatars are so small. There's still a bug in the profile which causes the rank (Big Grins, Major Grins, etc.) to show twice for many--but not all--people. This is also true in the user profile page as well. Oh, and while you're in there, the location also shows up twice in the profiles page for many people.
I discovered something about emojis today that I wanted to share. There are many more available than show up in the dropdown box of the editor. You can see what's available by typing a colon and then any letter. A popup will show the emojis that match and you can choose it from there. They're not as much fun as our old ones, but we're working on that.
I've tested it in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari for Mac with no issues. Are you using IE?
@Jtring said:
I like it. The past date/time over in the sidebar really really needs to be lighter shade of gray though. Moving it to a lighter gray background made a difficult low contrast situation even worse.
It was always that way, but fixed
yeah unfortunately all the work pc's are locked to IE...yuck. It is still doing it today as well.
@Richard said:
... There's still a bug in the profile which causes the rank (Big Grins, Major Grins, etc.) to show twice for many--but not all--people. This is also true in the user profile page as well. Oh, and while you're in there, the location also shows up twice in the profiles page for many people.
Is it rank twice or some sort of saying and rank? Where I have "Major Grins" and "Major Grins", Hikin' Mike has "Walkin like a Penguin!" and "Major Grins". That first entry, I thought, was some sort of saying that could be entered and edited by the user on the old DG. It would be nice to edit it again on the new DG.
@Jtring said:
I like it. The past date/time over in the sidebar really really needs to be lighter shade of gray though. Moving it to a lighter gray background made a difficult low contrast situation even worse.
@Richard said:
... There's still a bug in the profile which causes the rank (Big Grins, Major Grins, etc.) to show twice for many--but not all--people. This is also true in the user profile page as well. Oh, and while you're in there, the location also shows up twice in the profiles page for many people.
Is it rank twice or some sort of saying and rank? Where I have "Major Grins" and "Major Grins", Hikin' Mike has "Walkin like a Penguin!" and "Major Grins". That first entry, I thought, was some sort of saying that could be entered and edited by the user on the old DG. It would be nice to edit it again on the new DG.
It's both at the moment--it's a tagline and rank if you used to have a tagline on the old software. If you didn't, it's your rank at the time of migration and your current rank. For most of us, these two are the same. If you joined after the migration, it's only the rank. I hope we can find a way to restore the tagline editing on Vanilla.
Question 1: On the main page and categories I see the beautiful photos from the past glorious challenges. I'm wondering however if they shouldn't be clickable... not too many know about what was in the past at Dgrin and don't understand those images...
Question 2: Don't you think it would be nice to have the same layout when we enter into the "Categories" with photos listed on the right site - not from the past but with the "most recent" posts?
This will encourage visitors to click and see more. After All, this is a photography site, not a text based site...
Question 1: On the main page and categories I see the beautiful photos from the past glorious challenges. I'm wondering however if they shouldn't be clickable... not too many know about what was in the past at Dgrin and don't understand those images...
Question 2: Don't you think it would be nice to have the same layout when we enter into the "Categories" with photos listed on the right site - not from the past but with the "most recent" posts?
This will encourage visitors to click and see more. After All, this is a photography site, not a text based site...
I really want to get some new glorious challenges going so we can update those images with recent ones. Stay tuned there, then I'd definitely like them to be clickable!
Question 1: On the main page and categories I see the beautiful photos from the past glorious challenges. I'm wondering however if they shouldn't be clickable... not too many know about what was in the past at Dgrin and don't understand those images...
Question 2: Don't you think it would be nice to have the same layout when we enter into the "Categories" with photos listed on the right site - not from the past but with the "most recent" posts?
This will encourage visitors to click and see more. After All, this is a photography site, not a text based site...
I really want to get some new glorious challenges going so we can update those images with recent ones. Stay tuned there, then I'd definitely like them to be clickable!
Thank you Ben, that would be GREAT!!!
However, in the meantime... I personally think that those so fantastic photos from the past challenges really deserve recognition.
How about the second question about the most recent posts - I'm not an expert in php, but I have all my sites (except smugmug, of course) in WP and that feature of listing the most recent posts on the sidebar is not only very nice, but very useful too
Another post on font and background colors. I know the topic's been worked over quite a bit, but maybe a look back can add something constructive ...
In doing the research for the missing Video Support Forum, I ended up looking at some cached Dgrin images. I think it is worth revisiting the color scheme there since I and other have noted that the new Dgrin's pure white text (#ffffff) on an dark gray background (#1c1d1f) seems stark, making large blocks of text hard to read. The old Dgrin toned down the contrast: (#d9d9d9) text against a (#303235) background. The example below shows what it looked like. This seems more readable than what we now have. The indented handling of the unordered list in the example helps. In looking at the two, I personally find the old font a little easier to read than the more spread out new one, too. (Do note the content of the example is long overtaken by events.)
Any chance we'll see a light background theme? I really find the black background and white text hard on my eyes. And in the forum/thread listing, the gray on black in the left area is very hard. Yes, I'm over 50... :-) I always switch to a light background theme on whatever forum I'm on. If not, no problem. I'm not a regular poster here and can move on.
@WoodButch4 said:
Any chance we'll see a light background theme? I really find the black background and white text hard on my eyes.
+1 for a lighter background.
So far the changes since going to Vanilla have been nice, but a lighter background would be a huge improvement, especially for those of us with older eyes.
@Jester243 I've passed this on to one of our engineers but he's been busy finishing something off before the holidays and should hopefully switch gears to take a peak on fixing dgrin in IE soon. Stay tuned.
@Jester243 I've passed this on to one of our engineers but he's been busy finishing something off before the holidays and should hopefully switch gears to take a peak on fixing dgrin in IE soon. Stay tuned.
thank you for passing that along, we are unfortunately hostages to IE at work. I appreciate the effort on your end, keep up the good work.
Just dropped in to find some info about a Smugmug update. Thought I found the wrong forum at first. While trying not to bash the switch to Vanilla (yeah, change is difficult something and we have to adapt - I get it), I'll just say the old forum was far better and more professional looking than this iteration. Hours of reading the old dgrin were great. The new one? A few minutes in and I'm ready to move on. Hopefully future themes/CSS tweaking will help as things evolve.
Without nitpicking the overall layout of the forum, my big complaint is the font and general appearance of the messages. I feel like I've been forced to wear my great-grandparent's coke-bottle reading glasses that bloat, smear, and distort the text. Being truthful here, not negative. Maybe the "Gotham" font just doesn't work for me or on my machines, but this is the only forum I've seen that looks like this (windows machines - chrome, firefox, IE, edge all like identical to me).
Tweaking the CSS helped. I found "Arial" 12px is acceptable, 14px is good (oddly "Arial" doesn't look huge and bloated compared to Gotham at 14px). Reducing font-weight to 100 keeps things white and crisp without looking like someone bold-faced all the text. Just using "zoom" helps but really doesn't yield acceptable results.
Does Vanilla offer a way for us to change the font and font sizes ourselves through our profile? Is it available as a plugin/hack for the forum? Something like that would help. I'm sure a lot of members here think the fonts as-is are just peachy...but the current configuration just doesn't work for me.
Here's what the two variation look like on my end, just FYI:
@aerialphoto said:
Without nitpicking the overall layout of the forum, my big complaint is the font and general appearance of the messages. I feel like I've been forced to wear my great-grandparent's coke-bottle reading glasses that bloat, smear, and distort the text. Being truthful here, not negative. Maybe the "Gotham" font just doesn't work for me or on my machines, but this is the only forum I've seen that looks like this (windows machines - chrome, firefox, IE, edge all like identical to me).
Tweaking the CSS helped. I found "Arial" 12px is acceptable, 14px is good (oddly "Arial" doesn't look huge and bloated compared to Gotham at 14px). Reducing font-weight to 100 keeps things white and crisp without looking like someone bold-faced all the text. Just using "zoom" helps but really doesn't yield acceptable results.
Just to show the we are all different, I have to say that I find the Arial example that you posted above impossible to comfortably read.
I would still like to see a black text against white background version of the software though.
@aerialphoto said:
Without nitpicking the overall layout of the forum, my big complaint is the font and general appearance of the messages. I feel like I've been forced to wear my great-grandparent's coke-bottle reading glasses that bloat, smear, and distort the text. Being truthful here, not negative. Maybe the "Gotham" font just doesn't work for me or on my machines, but this is the only forum I've seen that looks like this (windows machines - chrome, firefox, IE, edge all like identical to me).
Tweaking the CSS helped. I found "Arial" 12px is acceptable, 14px is good (oddly "Arial" doesn't look huge and bloated compared to Gotham at 14px). Reducing font-weight to 100 keeps things white and crisp without looking like someone bold-faced all the text. Just using "zoom" helps but really doesn't yield acceptable results.
Just to show the we are all different, I have to say that I find the Arial example that you posted above impossible to comfortably read.
I would still like to see a black text against white background version of the software though.
Indeed, the only way to make a majority of the people happy are choices. I, like Denise, do not like the Arial, but I find stark white backgrounds and black text very difficult to look at for any length of time.
I never made the old forum black on white. So having this one also white on black is not a big deal. The only criticism I can think of is that I liked being able to edit a post at any time. If that is not still the case, it might be a minor problem for me. (Although I'm on one forum where the limit on editing is 5 minutes)
I do think the Pinned post and new post notices and the winky dinks at the bottom of the post are awfully bright and I am not sure what all of the little symbols are for.
“"..an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." G.K. Chesterton”
@grandmaR said:
I never made the old forum black on white. So having this one also white on black is not a big deal. The only criticism I can think of is that I liked being able to edit a post at any time. If that is not still the case, it might be a minor problem for me. (Although I'm on one forum where the limit on editing is 5 minutes)
I do think the Pinned post and new post notices and the winky dinks at the bottom of the post are awfully bright and I am not sure what all of the little symbols are for.
@grandmaR said:
The only criticism I can think of is that I liked being able to edit a post at any time. If that is not still the case, it might be a minor problem for me. (Although I'm on one forum where the limit on editing is 5 minutes)
We changed editing back to "Forever" - so you should be able to edit any post you've made.
The "create new post" window at the bottom almost hurts my eyes because it's so bright, #fff, pure white.
It's like a spotlight in the middle of a large dark area. Way too much contrast.
@sapphire73 said:
Looks like I may have a new problem, due to fewer characters being allowed in one post?
I just went back to edit the Dgrin Mini-Challenges: Looking Back thread, adding the latest theme (238: Holiday Spirit) and deleting the # signs to remove [unintentional] hyperlinks. When I tried to save my edits, I got the error message: " Body is 394 characters too long." I have only added a few words. So has the character limit been shortened? If so, can it be increased to what it was before?
Thanks.
I had left that on the default. I just bumped it up 50%, from 8k to 12k.
Just tried to update the Dgrin Mini-Challenges: Looking Back to add Pegelli's theme (239: Your Best of 2016) and got a similar error message as before: "Body is 492 characters too long." Not sure why that is happening again since you bumped the limit and I only added a few words. Anything you can suggest to allow me to post the update? I can change the way this is information is communicated but won't have time for a few weeks. Thanks!
I never had a problem reading the old Forum, but there is something about the font and color on this one that make it very uncomfortable for me to read. The rest of the layout and changes don't bother me, but this font (or the color??) is awful. Almost instant headache.
Comments
@Jester243: what browser and OS are you using?
I've tested it in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari for Mac with no issues. Are you using IE?
It was always that way, but fixed
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Thank you thank you thank you!!! Unfortunately this move didn't make the page any less vertically fat (my scroll finger gets really tired) but at least it's not so distracting! Thanks again!!!
Better--there was a lot of wasted space there, especially since the avatars are so small. There's still a bug in the profile which causes the rank (Big Grins, Major Grins, etc.) to show twice for many--but not all--people. This is also true in the user profile page as well. Oh, and while you're in there, the location also shows up twice in the profiles page for many people.
I discovered something about emojis today that I wanted to share. There are many more available than show up in the dropdown box of the editor. You can see what's available by typing a colon and then any letter. A popup will show the emojis that match and you can choose it from there. They're not as much fun as our old ones, but we're working on that.
I'm now dizzy
because I went through the entire alphabet checking out all of the emojis! 
Thanks for the tip Richard!
yeah unfortunately all the work pc's are locked to IE...yuck. It is still doing it today as well.
www.cathausphotography.com
:agree - There is no icon for this...
but I'm dizzy 
too going through all the icons 
The ones before where so much nicer though...
TravelwaysPhotos.com ...... Facebook
VegasGreatAttractions.com
Travelways.com
Is it rank twice or some sort of saying and rank? Where I have "Major Grins" and "Major Grins", Hikin' Mike has "Walkin like a Penguin!" and "Major Grins". That first entry, I thought, was some sort of saying that could be entered and edited by the user on the old DG. It would be nice to edit it again on the new DG.
Thank you. Every day the eyes get dimmer ...
It's both at the moment--it's a tagline and rank if you used to have a tagline on the old software. If you didn't, it's your rank at the time of migration and your current rank. For most of us, these two are the same. If you joined after the migration, it's only the rank. I hope we can find a way to restore the tagline editing on Vanilla.
2 Questions please:
Question 1: On the main page and categories I see the beautiful photos from the past glorious challenges. I'm wondering however if they shouldn't be clickable... not too many know about what was in the past at Dgrin and don't understand those images...
Question 2: Don't you think it would be nice to have the same layout when we enter into the "Categories" with photos listed on the right site - not from the past but with the "most recent" posts?
TravelwaysPhotos.com ...... Facebook
VegasGreatAttractions.com
Travelways.com
I really want to get some new glorious challenges going so we can update those images with recent ones. Stay tuned there, then I'd definitely like them to be clickable!
Thank you Ben, that would be GREAT!!!
However, in the meantime... I personally think that those so fantastic photos from the past challenges really deserve recognition.
How about the second question about the most recent posts - I'm not an expert in php, but I have all my sites (except smugmug, of course) in WP and that feature of listing the most recent posts on the sidebar is not only very nice, but very useful too
TravelwaysPhotos.com ...... Facebook
VegasGreatAttractions.com
Travelways.com
@Jester243: Do you know which version of IE you're using?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
version 11.0.9600.18230
www.cathausphotography.com
Another post on font and background colors. I know the topic's been worked over quite a bit, but maybe a look back can add something constructive ...
In doing the research for the missing Video Support Forum, I ended up looking at some cached Dgrin images. I think it is worth revisiting the color scheme there since I and other have noted that the new Dgrin's pure white text (#ffffff) on an dark gray background (#1c1d1f) seems stark, making large blocks of text hard to read. The old Dgrin toned down the contrast: (#d9d9d9) text against a (#303235) background. The example below shows what it looked like. This seems more readable than what we now have. The indented handling of the unordered list in the example helps. In looking at the two, I personally find the old font a little easier to read than the more spread out new one, too. (Do note the content of the example is long overtaken by events.)
Any chance we'll see a light background theme? I really find the black background and white text hard on my eyes. And in the forum/thread listing, the gray on black in the left area is very hard. Yes, I'm over 50... :-) I always switch to a light background theme on whatever forum I'm on. If not, no problem. I'm not a regular poster here and can move on.
@leftquark so no hope on a fix?
www.cathausphotography.com
+1 for a lighter background.
So far the changes since going to Vanilla have been nice, but a lighter background would be a huge improvement, especially for those of us with older eyes.
Website
@Jester243 I've passed this on to one of our engineers but he's been busy finishing something off before the holidays and should hopefully switch gears to take a peak on fixing dgrin in IE soon. Stay tuned.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
thank you for passing that along, we are unfortunately hostages to IE at work. I appreciate the effort on your end, keep up the good work.
www.cathausphotography.com
Just dropped in to find some info about a Smugmug update. Thought I found the wrong forum at first. While trying not to bash the switch to Vanilla (yeah, change is difficult something and we have to adapt - I get it), I'll just say the old forum was far better and more professional looking than this iteration. Hours of reading the old dgrin were great. The new one? A few minutes in and I'm ready to move on. Hopefully future themes/CSS tweaking will help as things evolve.
Without nitpicking the overall layout of the forum, my big complaint is the font and general appearance of the messages. I feel like I've been forced to wear my great-grandparent's coke-bottle reading glasses that bloat, smear, and distort the text. Being truthful here, not negative. Maybe the "Gotham" font just doesn't work for me or on my machines, but this is the only forum I've seen that looks like this (windows machines - chrome, firefox, IE, edge all like identical to me).
Tweaking the CSS helped. I found "Arial" 12px is acceptable, 14px is good (oddly "Arial" doesn't look huge and bloated compared to Gotham at 14px). Reducing font-weight to 100 keeps things white and crisp without looking like someone bold-faced all the text. Just using "zoom" helps but really doesn't yield acceptable results.
Does Vanilla offer a way for us to change the font and font sizes ourselves through our profile? Is it available as a plugin/hack for the forum? Something like that would help. I'm sure a lot of members here think the fonts as-is are just peachy...but the current configuration just doesn't work for me.
Here's what the two variation look like on my end, just FYI:
Stock "Vanilla":
Arial, 14px:
Just to show the we are all different, I have to say that I find the Arial example that you posted above impossible to comfortably read.
I would still like to see a black text against white background version of the software though.
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Indeed, the only way to make a majority of the people happy are choices. I, like Denise, do not like the Arial, but I find stark white backgrounds and black text very difficult to look at for any length of time.
I never made the old forum black on white. So having this one also white on black is not a big deal. The only criticism I can think of is that I liked being able to edit a post at any time. If that is not still the case, it might be a minor problem for me. (Although I'm on one forum where the limit on editing is 5 minutes)
I do think the Pinned post and new post notices and the winky dinks at the bottom of the post are awfully bright and I am not sure what all of the little symbols are for.
Me either. I prefer the black background as well.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
We changed editing back to "Forever" - so you should be able to edit any post you've made.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
The "create new post" window at the bottom almost hurts my eyes because it's so bright, #fff, pure white.
It's like a spotlight in the middle of a large dark area. Way too much contrast.
My Website index | My Blog
Just tried to update the Dgrin Mini-Challenges: Looking Back to add Pegelli's theme (239: Your Best of 2016) and got a similar error message as before: "Body is 492 characters too long." Not sure why that is happening again since you bumped the limit and I only added a few words. Anything you can suggest to allow me to post the update? I can change the way this is information is communicated but won't have time for a few weeks. Thanks!
My SmugMug Galleries
I never had a problem reading the old Forum, but there is something about the font and color on this one that make it very uncomfortable for me to read. The rest of the layout and changes don't bother me, but this font (or the color??) is awful. Almost instant headache.