New Design Updates + Bugfixes 7/23

Riley D. said: Another day dawns on the Interface Initiative, bringing with it results of our hard work based on your feedback. Today's Priorities On the forum, jump to the most recent unread post when you are visiting the post. On the forum, add some sort of "quick jump" navigation to go back home. The updates and fixes are well appreciated.  As a forum junkie, I have to say these are my current favorites.  Thanks

Please change it back. No-one likes this awful looking update.

Riley D. said: Another day dawns on the Interface Initiative, bringing with it results of our hard work based on your feedback. Bug Fixes Pressing the Return key will now select the default option for the new select input Roll Queries. This only works on the first drop down query that pops up. Paste this into chat and you can hit enter on the first one, but not the second. ?{Hexed Target|No, 0|Yes, 1} ?{Attack Type|Standard, 1d20|w/Advantage, 2d20kh1|w/Disadvantage, 2d20kl1}

Kristi said: Please change it back. No-one likes this awful looking update. I think many have their gripes about the update. But the fact of the matter is that it's staying. Best we can do is offer constructive feedback and try to guide the development in a direction that works for more of us. Also, from the OP: We welcome civil, constructive feedback on the above changes in this thread Edit: I don't remember seeing a dev response on&nbsp; a crucial point Gold brought up earlier so I'm posting it here both as a means to throw my support for it and to keep it in the most recent thread. I don't care so much about the LFG terminology. But there's a genuine concern over scaring/confusing people by making it seem like some games are paid, some are not. Here's the post in full: Gold said: I've always been very interested in linguistics, so things like vocabulary, phrasing, and terminology really stand out to me. In the LFG... which has been curiously renamed "Find A Group" in the drop-down. <a href="https://app.roll20.net/lfg/search/" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/lfg/search/</a> Click the link above (which still retains the URL name "LFG"). Notice how PRO users' games are labeled PRO, and Plus users' LFG listings are labeled Plus? My confusion is where Non-Subscriber Accounts are labeled "FREE" on their LFG search result game listing titles. Consequently half the games in LFG are "Free" and half are not "Free". What is a game that is not labeled Free? It almost implies that a Non-Free must be a paid game, because it does not say Free when so many others do. Makes a "Pro" game appear that it might be a game that charges money to play. The acronym LFG is better and familiar, so I would like to suggest restoring the name "Looking For Group" in the drop-down windowpane and overall terminology of the site. If we must have shorter phrase to fit the column in the drop-down, try "Find Group" or "Find Game" so we can say "Hey try the FG system" if LFG must be deprecated. Since "Free" is a confusing word choice because it implies Pro & Plus hosted games may be asking for money to play the game, and makes the Free listings appear to be not asking for money to play, I suggest that the words "FREE", PRO, and PLUS, be hidden in the LFG search result listings. Retain the Yellow highlight bar on the side for Pro user listings.&nbsp; Of course LFG Pages will still continue to specify which kind of Account the creator has, when someone visits the actual LFG Page for that game. I am 100% talking about removing those labels only in the LFG Search Results listings, not on the LFG Page of the game.

Yay, another update post! I think after finishing your listed priorities and fixing the two main bugs at the moment (the timezone one and the aforementioned dropdown queries), everything is more-or-less functional for me, and the rest would be pretty flourishes. Which I will list anyway. :P 1. Changing the dropdown header links so that the internal menu links aren't all the way to the left (already mentioned in the other update thread) 2. Putting a link somewhere to actually subscribe within said internal menu links As far as I can tell, I'd have to click on ["Account Name"][My Account] and look on the right side, and then I'm jumped to the pretty "look at all the stuff you can get if you subscribe!". I don't recommend making it a gigantic button and plastering it all over the place, but making it a little easier for people to find a way to support roll20 wouldn't be remiss either.&nbsp;I'd say either under the "Account" header or perhaps "Community" or "Marketplace", but Community/Marketplace might present a poor message. 3. Putting a bit more color flair in the background instead of just a pale gray tint. Only white/gray is a little bit bland. Also, depending on the screen brightness, you can't necessarily tell it's gray (it's not on my end, so I still kind of get the "omg white blindness" syndrome, sorry). I'd go so far as to perhaps color-code the "areas" of the site (like Home being gray, Community being pink/blue, Find a Group being green, Marketplace as Red, etc) Considering that the gray background will pretty much only be seen on the desktop, I'd go so far as to even use (tinted/pale) background images, which I believe were also mentioned in the previous thread. That would allow you to emulate the tabletop experience with background map images, tokens, etc. The center white will remain for readability; the gray gutter can be prettified.&nbsp; 4. Aw, no gigantic WELCOME BACK ADVENTURER text anymore? After two days I kind of miss the Brian Blessed hello. Perhaps not in gigantic 8.0em &lt;h1&gt; font, but as a header it was nice to have that human element.&nbsp;

Forum navigation is drastically worse. You can't get to another forum without clicking the drop down, selecting Forums alllllll the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over to the left, and then scrolling down to find the forum you want to go to next.&nbsp;Pagination is great, but we need a way to go straight to the last page from the thread list instead of having to do it inside the thread itself. Honestly... this is much worse than before and it probably would have been a better idea to just skin an existing forum package like Vanilla or something instead of trying to do it from scratch.

HoneyBadger said: Forum navigation is drastically worse. You can't get to another forum without clicking the drop down, selecting Forums alllllll the waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over to the left, and then scrolling down to find the forum you want to go to next.&nbsp;Pagination is great, but we need a way to go straight to the last page from the thread list instead of having to do it inside the thread itself. Honestly... this is much worse than before and it probably would have been a better idea to just skin an existing forum package like Vanilla or something instead of trying to do it from scratch. There's a suggestion for that in the suggestions thread.

I noticed that if you goto your followed posts, when there is a New post, the New is not the same as it is in the standard forums. In the standard forms, New is a nice dark black and pops out really well. In the followed posts, New is a much more muted grey and sometimes hard to distinguish. standard forum posts followed posts, i.e. <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/myfollows" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/myfollows</a>

I notice that some of the stat block templates have changed, (specifically pathfinder ones - pf_block for example). Is this all part of the same update or is there somewhere else where I can file a bug report about this?

Riley D. said: We just pushed out a whole bunch of new fixes, including new forum navigation options, fixing a few bugs, etc. I updated the top post. Thanks! Above and beyond to respond to our requests quickly and effectively. Thank you so much! H

Ooh. The drop down on the forum breadcrumbs is a good idea that I haven't seen before.

Riley D. said: We just pushed out a whole bunch of new fixes, including new forum navigation options, fixing a few bugs, etc. I updated the top post. Thanks! The dropdown menu on breadcrumbs has width set to 100%. This causes it to clip the forum names. Changing it to width: auto; or removing the width attribute entirely allows the menu to expand to the left properly. Edit: This is on Chrome/Windows 8.1

Thank you for sending us to the newest unread on the forums!

Pretty much all the issues I had with functionality and design have now been fixed. I think some of the design elements could eventually be improved (example, the list of your username, type of account and hours played on the left could probably be designed better than plain text) but are probably not a top priority. Glad to see the responsivness here.

This came up in the last thread, but I kinda want to see how people would feel about this. As an alternative to the current drop-down menus, perhaps most of the stuff in the menus could be moved to a side-bar? The Games link could go straight to my games, LFG and the Player Directory (which IMHO belongs more in community than in games) could get their old spot in the top bar back, Community could be split into direct links to the forums and to the wiki, and Marketplace could go straight to the marketplace.&nbsp; Create a Game, the blog, everything in tools, and maybe the different search categories in the marketplace (the different genres, tokens, tiles, maps, and modules) could all be moved to a sidebar.&nbsp; I know you guys wanted to avoid the redundancies from the old layout, but maybe put My Games and LFG in the sidebar as well, and having the sidebar move up and down to stay onscreen as the user scrolls through the page. Most of my points from here and here still hold true, as even with the fixes, the layout has poor visual hierarchy, with important things that should be front and center and in the user's face, like Looking for Group, are small, hard to notice, and relatively out of the way (white text on a pink button on a white background.&nbsp; Really?) while things like the twitter feed are larger than they need to be.

On the forum, jump to the most recent unread post when you are visiting the post. I'm not sure if the above means what I am about to suggest, but maybe it is half-way there. Currently, when in a forum, there is no way to go to the last page of a topic directly, or to a specific page of a topic directly. Once you're in the thread/topic, you can navigate pages fine, but not before you're in the thread. I didn't think this would be a huge deal when pagination was introduced, but since I found myself clicking way more, I thought I'd mention it.&nbsp; Are there any plans to add this?

Riley D. said: Hudders said: I notice that some of the stat block templates have changed, (specifically pathfinder ones - pf_block for example). Is this all part of the same update or is there somewhere else where I can file a bug report about this? No, that wouldn't have anything to do with the overall site update, that would be a sheet update. Which sheet is it? You'll want to check out the Character Sheets Forum:&nbsp; <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/category/277980" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/category/277980</a> This has been fixed. &nbsp;Nothing to do with the site update.

The home page still isn't displaying localised times, in case you thought this was fixed. It would be much nicer if the titles of games displayed more text before the ellipses. The Recent Blog Posts section also looks pretty ugly with the varying heights of text.